Lies and the City

New York City is great again, but MAGA can’t handle the truth

I had a civilized evening Tuesday. I did a public event at the CUNY Graduate Center, interviewing Zach Carter, author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. Video of the event, which seemed to go well, should be available in a few days.

Then some of us took Zach out for dinner near the GC, which is just across the street from the Empire State Building. The conversation was great, and we lingered until almost 11, after which several of us walked over to the subway and took it home. And you know what happened?

Nothing. There were plenty of people out on the streets, which felt perfectly safe; so did the subway, which efficiently delivered us to our destinations.

It felt like a mental vacation from the grim political news, and if you’ll forgive me I’ll extend that vacation a bit by telling a mostly happy story about life in New York. FYI: I’ll be traveling tomorrow and probably won’t be able to post Friday.

But of course pointing out that life in New York is OK is itself political, because trash talk about our big cities, New York in particular, is a constant theme in MAGA rhetoric. According to Donald Trump, people in New York are afraid to go outside, because they can’t cross the street without getting mugged or raped. Just last Friday Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, called the NYC subway a “shithole,” which nobody wants to ride. Spoiler: It isn’t.

The truth is that New York, which really was a dangerous place a few decades ago, is now incredibly safe. The city’s weekly crime report provides some historical comparisons:

You may say, never mind statistics, it feels dangerous. But actually it doesn’t — not to those who actually live there. The perception that New York is an urban hellscape comes from people who never visit the city, or at most spend a few days around tourist traps like Times Square, which is kind of a hellscape — it’s full of people dressed up as Disney characters, not to mention mimes.

Yes, there were highly publicized cases of violence in the subway last year, but subway crime appears to have dropped off a lot this year, and remember, millions of people take the subway each week, so the chance that a rider will actually experience or witness violent crime is very low.

So why the trash talk? It’s political, of course. For Trump, who has made hostility to immigrants a central part of his brand, it’s important to portray someplace like New York, with its huge immigrant population, as a crime-ridden dystopia, because admitting the benign truth would also mean implicitly admitting that most immigrants, documented or not, are quite law-abiding.

And then there’s what prompted Sean Duffy’s shithole remark: Trump’s ongoing attempt to kill New York’s new congestion fee. As I wrote 6 weeks ago, the biggest reason Trump hates congestion pricing is probably because it embodies the idea that sometimes people should be asked to change their behavior for the common good. And since that’s what his rage seems to be about, the efforts to kill congestion pricing will become even more frantic now that it’s turning out to be a huge success story.

Because that’s what’s happening. As Sam Deutsch documents, congestion pricing is actually looking like a “policy miracle.” It’s sort of a real-life example of a tax doing what Trump falsely claims taxes on imports (tariffs) will do: produce win-win-win results, with hardly any losers. Traffic is down, so much so that many of those still driving into the city are finding that the extra $9 fee is more than offset by the benefits of faster commutes. Public transit ridership is way up:

Source: Better Cities

The charge is also generating a lot of revenue, which can be used to improve public transit further.

And dire predictions that the charge would greatly damage business — turning Midtown Manhattan, in particular, into a ghost town — have been completely wrong. On Tuesday night, midtown was humming.

Actually, the only thing I think Trumpists would find unappealing about the congestion charge, if it had been their policy, is that it doesn’t seem to punish anyone. Tariffs are supposed to inflict pain on foreigners; as I just noted, people who commute into New York, even if they are still driving in, appear to have gained more from reduced traffic than they’re paying in fees.

Anyway, New York is looking pretty good right now. Housing is still unaffordable; the failure to build enough housing, not an imaginary crime wave, is the city’s biggest problem. But dire predictions during the pandemic that New York would never recover have been proved completely wrong.

Of course, if the Trump administration leads America into political and economic disaster, which it seems determined to do, New York will suffer along with the rest of the country. But as I said, I’m trying to take a bit of a mental vacation, so let’s celebrate the things that here, in what I still consider the center of the world, have been going right.

MUSICAL CODA

Of course