The State of New York City

Taking stock in 2024

I am an American, New York born, and I’ve spent my working life writing and reporting from this city. I am a New York City partisan and a New York City critic. It might surprise you to know I can imagine myself living elsewhere, even if I haven’t, save for my college years at Stony Brook University in Suffolk County.

New York City discourse has quieted a bit of late which is probably a testament to its comeback from the depths of the pandemic. People who don’t live in New York and watch a lot of television or YouTube clips imagine a 1970s-style hellscape, and if they do manage to come to the city and walk around a few select quarters—Penn Station, the ends of certain subway lines—they’ll find scenes to confirm their worst suspicions. There are, without question, more homeless people on the street and in subway cars in 2024 than there were in 2019. There are more people wandering around who are visibly mentally ill. The outer borough neighborhood where I live, Bay Ridge, rarely had homeless people until the last few years. They routinely sleep, quietly, at the ends of the R train.

If you match New York against most American cities today, you’ll find it’s not such a distressing place. The homeless problem really is worse on the West Coast. New York lacks tent cities or any equivalent of the Tenderloin or Skid Row. Residents and tourists walk the streets at all hours of the day and night. A train car can be packed at 1 a.m. Spend enough time in other parts of the country and you’ll see what dead streets look like. In the outer boroughs, where small businesses survived the pandemic better than the commuter-dependent establishments of Midtown and Downtown, there are few ways to tell the difference between 2019 and 2024, beyond the prevalence of outdoor seating at restaurants. If you live in New York, there are still an ordinate amount of things to do, and that’s the great advantage of being here. New York remains a great cultural hub and a font of remarkable diversity. It is many cities stitched into one. It is, more than anything else, too big to fail. New York will be the preeminent American city, and one of the great world cities, until you and I are dead. Crime, too, is rather low by American standards. Murder rates remain elevated from 2019 but fell off last year and sit not far off historic lows. Rapes, robberies, and grand larcenies did tick upward, and shoplifting is a problem. Still, New York is nowhere near among the nation’s most violent cities. It is not Chicago or Philadelphia.

What, then, ails the city today? I see three major, intertwined challenges.

I write often on Mayor Eric Adams, but I’m going to ignore him for now because all of these challenges predate him. I’m also not focusing on the migrant crisis because the influx will inevitably slow and those who remain, with enough work opportunities, will be seamlessly integrated into the city.

Homelessness

The ills of big, desirable American cities have now, in the post-pandemic era, migrated everywhere. New York has a homelessness problem, but so does Phoenix. Stubbornly high rent is a problem in Nashville and Boston, too. New York’s right-to-shelter law and prevalence of free homeless shelters—along with its city-within-a-city public housing authority—prevents an East Coast Skid Row from coming into being. As visible as the homeless might be in New York, they’re diffuse and sheltered enough to not take over entire neighborhoods.

But the homelessness problem, decades in the making, cannot be solved with more shelters. When New York, in the 1960s and 1970s, was a much poorer city, it had many challenges—crime, drugs, the collapse of a tax base. Street homelessness was not one of them. Read an old novel or watch an old movie about New York, and you’ll notice something that no longer exists today: the SRO. Single-room occupancy housing was a staple of the city for more than a century. If you were poor or just needed a place to lay your head for a few weeks, you could easily find a room at an SRO hotel, YMCA, or “flophouse.” SRO’s were popular with young people and those newly-arrived to the city. Rent could be paid nightly, weekly, or monthly, and bathrooms were usually shared. The SRO’s were far from ideal—many were in lousy shape and some could be dens of vice—but they beat the alternative of sleeping in the street. For older single adults without families, they were a genuine lifeline, and the ease of securing a rental (no credit checks, no need for a security deposit) prevented outright housing discrimination on the basis of race or income.

Beginning in the 1980s, New York, along with many other cities, systemically destroyed its SRO stock. Residents didn’t like living near SRO’s and found sympathetic politicians to lobby against them, pointing to the crime or drugs that might have been present. Real estate developers and hoteliers saw an opportunity to convert the SRO’s into condominiums and high-end hotels. Others could demolish them altogether and build something valuable on precious Manhattan real estate. As New York, in the years after the fiscal crisis, became a more attractive investment opportunity, SRO’s rapidly fell out of favor. Their construction had been banned in New York and no politician, Democrat or Republican, was fighting for a revival.

The simplest way to combat homelessness in New York today would be the rapid construction of SRO’s. There’s no reason single-room apartments can’t be built again—either as dormitory-style housing, like at colleges, or with their own kitchens and bathrooms—in the five boroughs. One model could be the capsule hotels of Japan, which are exceedingly cheap yet attractive, clean, and safe. The good news is that both Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams favor building more and liberalizing zoning laws. The bad news is that any real construction program is many years away.

The Mentally Ill

Some, but not all, homeless are mentally ill. The mentally ill, though, are far more likely to be homeless than those who don’t have any particular mental health challenges. Spend a few days in New York and you see someone wandering the streets who is mentally ill. Hochul has slowly increased the number of psychiatric beds in New York State and Adams has tried, through police action, to force those off the streets who appear to be a danger to themselves or others. The Adams approach hasn’t made much of a difference so far.

The roots of this crisis date back to the last century, when federal and state governments closed thousands of psychiatric hospitals and asylums. The deinstitutionalization movement was well-meaning but ultimately disastrous. Reformers hoped closing these facilities, where some were committed against their will and abuse was not uncommon, would lead to better outcomes for the mentally ill. The idea was straightforward enough: replace enormous, impersonal asylums with smaller facilities closer to where patients lived, and supplement care with new psychiatric drugs and individualized attention from doctors.

But the social safety net and healthcare system was never strengthened enough to replace the old psychiatric hospitals. The actual result of deinstitutionalization was skyrocketing homelessness and incarceration rates. Released from facilities, the mentally ill had few safe places to live and many inevitably came into contact with the criminal justice system. What makes city jails like Rikers so hellish is the number of people there who clearly never had access to adequate mental health treatment. The lack of affordable, comprehensive healthcare coverage in this country is a long-running embarrassment and the problem is compounded by the paucity of facilities that can safely and indefinitely house the mentally ill.

New York desperately needs more psychiatric beds. The asylums of yesteryear should have been reformed, not shuttered. Humane housing can be coupled with medical treatment to help the mentally ill get off the streets of New York and out of jail cells. In the coming years, New York will need a major construction boom for new psychiatric facilities.

Inadequate Mass Transit

I am sympathetic to the pilot program that now make certain bus lines free in New York. Transit wonks tend to hate the idea, but I think saving the poor and working class money on their commutes is good for a city that is otherwise deeply unequal. I also wish the progressive Democrats who fought for the program would think much bigger. Making small segments of an inadequate transportation system free of charge is simply not enough to dramatically change the lives of most New Yorkers, especially those who struggle to get to work.

An expansion and reimagining of the transportation system is ultimately required.

When I traveled to Japan last year, I felt acutely all that New York lacked. The metros of Tokyo and Osaka and the Shinkansen, the high-speed rail system, left me in awe. Imagine traveling between New York and Philadelphia in 30 minutes. Or making what should be a simple, direct subway trip between Maspeth and Astoria. Or riding the subway to College Point and Fresh Meadows. Or taking the R train to Staten Island, the 4 from Utica Avenue to Floyd Bennett Field, the 7 train out to New Jersey…

The tragedy of New York, and America, has been the tremendous decline of state and federal capacity to build public infrastructure. Most of New York’s 472-station subway system was finished before 1930. Proposed subway line extensions from that era have still not been built. Fiscal challenges and the MTA’s profound inefficiencies are to blame, along with a lack of coordination between federal and local actors. Transportation projects in New York routinely rack up far larger budgets than equivalent projects in other countries. It took decades to add three Q train stops on the Upper East Side. The next phase of the Second Avenue Subway, to East Harlem, won’t take as long, but Hochul’s proposed east-west extension across Harlem is likely a decade or more away.

To her credit, Hochul cares far more about mass transit in New York City than her disgraced predecessor, Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo obsessed most over car-centric projects and the remodeling of LaGuardia Airport. The first phase of the Second Avenue Subway was opened under his watch; however, the system itself was crumbling from a lack of state investment. Cuomo could have been the governor who made the Interborough Express—a Brooklyn-Queens rail line along existing tracks that would connect neighborhoods like Jackson Heights, East New York, and Midwood—a reality during his 11 years as governor. Instead, he entirely ignored the proposal, which had been floated for at least 30 years. Hochul fully backed the Interborough Express and the hope is the passenger line will be operational 10 years from now.

This timeline is still too slow. New York is trapped with an antiquated subway system built primarily for commutes into and out of Manhattan. Traveling among the outer boroughs remains a terrible challenge. I own a car in New York because going from Bay Ridge to Marine Park would take me an hour and a half by public transit instead of 20 minutes on the parkway. I want a public transit system that truly forces everyone out of their automobiles. That is what being in Tokyo is like. Cars still fill the roads but the need for one is mostly nonexistent. Walking through Japan last year, I felt like I was visiting a new century. New York, and America, was mired in a sclerotic and much gloomier past.