The Gotham Conservative

Left-wing mayoral candidates and a newly launched "housing justice" group are promising a multiyear rent freeze on the city's nearly 1 million rent-regulated units. That's more than half the rental apartments in Gotham. It's a cynical political strategy: Pander to a block of single-issue voters almost too large to resist -- and capture the mayoralty. Actually implementing that freeze would turn the entire city into a slum, with dilapidated, abandoned buildings and thousands of occupants forced to live in squalor because their apartments are no longer maintained. It could happen. In New York City, occupants of rent-stabilized apartments -- about 1.7 million people living in about 980,000 units -- outnumber residents of unregulated apartments. If these rent regulation beneficiaries are mobilized as single-issue voters, they can swing an election. Barely a million people voted in the 2021 mayoral primary, and just over 1.1 million in the general. Leftist c...

" Drop Dead City " falls into a category of documentary I think of as wonkish but gripping. Produced and directed by Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn, the film is about the financial cataclysm that hit New York City in 1975, when the powers that be figured out that the city was $6 billion in debt. There was no money to pay anyone: firefighters, cops, teachers, sanitation workers. The city walked right up to the edge of bankruptcy. (That's not an overstatement.) Had New York City been anything but New York City — had it been a business, a family, or even another city — it likely would have declared bankruptcy. But after a prolonged logistical-ideological war about what to do, the city was deemed too big to fail (even though it had failed, and to a shocking degree). The film's title refers to the infamous New York Daily News headline that ran on Oct. 30, 1975 ("Ford to City: Drop Dead"). President Gerald R. Ford never actually said those words, but th...

Incumbent Council Member Shahana Hanif (center) faces challengers Maya Kornberg and Nickie Kane in a closely watched Democratic primary ahead of the June 24 election. Provided by campaigns/X With four weeks to go until New York City's primary election on June 24 — and early voting set for June 14 through June 22 — candidates are entering the final stretch of campaigning. One of the most closely watched contests is the Democratic City Council race in District 39, which covers parts of Kensington, Borough Park, Windsor Terrace, Park Slope, Gowanus, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill and the Columbia Waterfront. Three candidates are competing in the Democratic primary: incumbent Council Member Shahana Hanif, progressive challenger Maya Kornberg, and Nickie Kane, a community advocate and grassroots organizer. Shahana Hanif Shahana Hanif. Incumbent City Council Member Elected in 2021, the Brooklyn-born and -raised incumbent has prioritized affordable...

New York City became the first city in the country to allow supervised drug use sites where people can use illegal drugs without threat of arrest, under the watch of trained staff, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday.  Two sites that already function as needle exchange clinics — in Washington Heights and in East Harlem — opened as so-called Overdose Prevention Centers on Tuesday.  That day, at least five people overdosed while using drugs under supervision in the two clinics, according to published news reports. A spokesperson for the city's health department declined to confirm the exact number of overdoses. In a news conference Wednesday, de Blasio framed the overdoses, which were reversed and resulted in no deaths, as proof of concept for the sites.  "Five people who could well have overdosed someplace else with, no medical support, and we well know we could have lost one, two or all five of those people," he said.  The initiative comes as overdose deat...

Mayor Eric Adams' administration plans to stop giving prepaid debit cards to migrant families in New York City, ending a pilot program conservative critics have fiercely attacked. The program, which city officials have touted as an innovative cost-cutting measure, will conclude at the end of the year, City Hall spokesperson William Fowler said. Since late March, the city has provided prepaid debit cards totaling $3.2 million to some 2,600 migrant families living in hotels so that they can buy food and baby supplies. The participants make up just a fraction of the roughly 60,000 migrants currently residing in city-run shelters. The financial technology company Mobility Capital Finance, or MoCaFi, was hired last year under a no-bid, emergency contract to run the program for a one-year term. It receives about $400,000 under the agreement. City Comptroller Brad Lander has since revoked the mayor's ability to easily enter into emergency deals for migrant services. City H...

Vice President Kamala Harris won the popular vote in New York over former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential race , and with it,  the state's 28 electoral votes , CBS News projects. CBS News also projects  Trump won the race on the national level and will become the 47th President of the United States.  CBS New York is tracking the results in each New York county, and you can see how your area voted below. In New York, Trump trailed Harris by more than 900,000 votes – a smaller margin of victory than Biden had over Trump in 2020. According to the CBS News Data Team, Democrats have been losing ground in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens since 2016. While Harris may have beat Trump in New York City, she did it with a 37-point margin of victory, compared to Biden's 53-point margin in 2020 and Hillary Clinton's 62-point margin in 2016. "Latinos voted in larger number for President Trump, not only nationally but in New...

The implications of MAGA radio host Frank Morano's dominating win last month for a seat on New York City's woke city council could extend far beyond mere city politics if conservatives are willing to learn the lessons. That's because the election system under which he won - ranked choice voting (RCV) - has long been pilloried by Republicans as some sort of evil leftist plot, when the reality could be quite the opposite. Morano isn't just a conservative, he's probably one of the most conservative members of New York City's council elected in at least a generation. Sure, he had name recognition as WABC's overnight talk radio host. He ran in Staten Island, a relatively conservative district by New York City standards. Still, Democrats have shown themselves to be more than capable of winning special elections in the past in red-leaning areas, especially ones where multiple conservative candidates divide the vote and Democrats back a 'moderate' and...

The surest way to trigger the collapse of New York City is to elect an antisemitic mayor. Throughout history, rising antisemitism is a bellwether of societal ruin: When attacks on Jews are tolerated or encouraged, the dissolution of everyone's rights and the abandonment of basic freedoms follow. See the Spanish Inquisition, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union for examples. It could happen here. Electing a mayor who is hostile to Jews and who turns a blind eye to antisemitic crime would drive out huge numbers of city residents — including some of its most successful — erode the real estate market, hollow out cultural institutions, and lead to moral implosion. Everyone who can leave, Jews and non-Jews alike, would flee. Being Jewish in NYC is already getting uncomfortable. We see swastikas scrawled on walls and desks in some public schools, students elsewhere casually referring to high performers in math as "the Jew table," a Queens community garden posting a ba...

A federal judge on Tuesday seized control of New York City's notorious jail complex on Rikers Island, which will now be run by an official who reports directly to the court. In a 77-page ruling, Judge Laura Taylor Swain wrote that she found the conduct of the city over the last nine years "leaves no doubt that continued insistence on compliance with the court's orders by persons answerable principally to political authorities would lead only to confrontation and delay." She also wrote "that the current management structure and staffing are insufficient to turn the tide within a reasonable period; that defendants have consistently fallen short of the requisite compliance with court orders for years, at times under circumstances that suggest bad faith; and that enormous resources -- that the city devotes to a system that is at the same time overstaffed and underserved -- are not being deployed effectively." A views of the New York City jails o...

The surest way to trigger the collapse of New York City is to elect an antisemitic mayor. Throughout history, rising antisemitism is a bellwether of societal ruin: When attacks on Jews are tolerated or encouraged, the dissolution of everyone's rights and the abandonment of basic freedoms follow. See the Spanish Inquisition, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union for examples. It could happen here. Electing a Jew-hating mayor who turns a blind eye to antisemitic crime will drive out huge numbers of city residents -- including some of its wealthiest -- erode the real estate market, hollow out cultural institutions and lead to moral implosion. Everyone who can leave, Jews and non-Jews alike, will flee. Being Jewish in NYC is already getting uncomfortable. We see swastikas scrawled on walls and desks in some public schools, students elsewhere casually referring to high performers in math as "the Jew table," a Queens community garden posting a ban on Zionists, a 13...

The game of southern Brooklyn musical chairs that kicked off with the retirement of former Assembly Member Helene Weinstein will finally conclude this week. On Tuesday, voters headed to the polls to vote in a special election for state Senate District 22. Although the largely Orthodox Jewish community in the district overwhelmingly supported President Donald Trump the past two years, Democrats are still confident they will continue representing the district.  The race is to replace now-New York City Council Member Simcha Felder in the state Senate. Felder left his legislative seat after winning the race to replace now-Assembly Member Kalman Yeger, who replaced Weinstein in the Assembly after hitting his City Council term limit. Felder's old state Senate seat is the final one that needs to be filled as lawmakers in southern Brooklyn swap and trade seats. Lawmakers practically created the seat for Felder in 2012 during redistricting. At the time, it was the 17th state Senat...

In 1805, New York made a deal. State officials granted taxpayer funds and a corporate charter to a private organization known as the Free School Society, which agreed in return to provide a free education to poor children in New York City. Over the next decades, the society became a precursor to modern-day charter school networks that are prominent across California and the nation. Other 19th century school organizations took notice, including religious ones. From 1825 until 1841, New York officials received similar requests for funding from Baptist, Jewish, Lutheran, Catholic, Presbyterian and Quaker schools. All were denied. What happened next is remarkable. Not only did none of the religious schools win a lawsuit arguing that the denial of funding violated their constitutional right to free exercise of religion, but none even brought suit. And similar episodes unfolded around the country, in states such as California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Illinois. To many people, t...

New York City and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Monday asked a judge to block the Trump administration from eliminating the city's congestion pricing program. Lawyers for the city's transportation department and the MTA requested the judge issue an order to block Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's plans to kill the program and his threat to withhold federal government approvals for other projects and potentially billions in funding. New York State also asked for a preliminary injunction to block the federal government from blocking the program. TRUMP ADMIN MOVES TO BLOCK NYC CONGESTION TOLL PROGRAM Lawyers for the city's transportation department and the MTA asked a judge to issue an order to block Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's plans to kill the program. (Getty Images) The program was launched in January, using electronic license plate readers and charging most drivers a $9 toll during peak periods to ent...

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Democratic Brooklyn Councilwoman Susan Zhuang has secured the Conservative Party's line on November's general election ballot after the party's candidate dropped out and gave her the nomination, records reviewed by the Daily News reveal. Zhuang, a conservative Democrat who has since being elected in 2023 allied herself with the Council's Republicans and largely voted with them, did not herself collect petition signatures to secure the right-wing third party's nomination, records show. Rather, Nick Badolato, a Brooklyn Conservative Party operative , collected signatures to run on the party's line against Zhuang. Badolato gathered enough signatures to qualify for the ballot line, but formally declined the Conservative Party's nomination on April 3, records show. That resulted in the party's executive committee convening last Tuesday to give Zhuang its ballot line on the Nov. 4 general election ballot — meaning she'll effectively run for ...

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. The last time we saw him, we saw all of him. Our subject is Anthony Weiner, whose surname was a burden long before it became a curse—so fused with his disgrace that you can't say it without triggering an avalanche of cringe. Weiner, who was caught texting pictures of his penis, first denied it, then admitted it, then resigned from Congress, then ran for mayor of New York City, at which point he sexted again under the alias Carlos Danger, was caught again, lost the election, sexted a photo with his young son in the background, sexted a minor, and forfeited a laptop with emails from his estranged wife that caused the FBI to reopen its Hillary Clinton email investigation, greasing the way for Donald Trump's 2016 victory and hastening the possible end of the republic and democracy as we know it. But for Weiner, even that wasn't enough. Almost 14 years after he accidentally...