Our Advice to Voters in a Vexing Race for New York Mayor

Opinion|Our Advice to Voters in a Vexing Race for New York Mayor

Many longtime New Yorkers have had a sinking feeling at some point in the past decade. They have worried that their city was heading back to the bad old days of the 1970s and ’80s.

Subway trips can have a chaotic or even menacing quality. Nearly half of bus riders board without paying their fares. The number of felony assaults has jumped more than 40 percent over the past decade. The city’s fourth graders, after significantly outperforming their peers in other large cities during the early 2000s, have fallen back in math and reading. Housing has become even less affordable, and homelessness has risen. In the most basic measure of the city’s appeal, the population remains well below its pre-Covid peak.

We believe that New York is the world’s most dynamic and important city, thanks to its energy, diversity, creativity, prosperity and history. And though some of the complaints about the city today are overstated, we are also worried. The quality of life has deteriorated over the past decade. On some issues, like crime rates, the city has recovered modestly over the past few years, and it remains in far better shape than it was 50 years ago. Still, New Yorkers deserve better than the status quo.

Against this background, the city has begun voting for mayor, in the Democratic primary. Early voting started Saturday, with Primary Day coming next week, on Tuesday, June 24. The general election will be in November.

New York needs a mayor who understands why the past decade has been disappointing. Crucial to that understanding is an acknowledgment that a certain version of progressive city management has failed, in New York and elsewhere. This version emerged in the latter stages of Barack Obama’s presidency, when some Democrats decided that he had been too cautious and adopted a bolder liberalism. At the municipal level, this liberalism was skeptical of if not hostile to law enforcement. It argued that schools needed more money and less evaluation. It blamed greedy landlords for high rents, instead of emphasizing the crucial role of housing supply.

Bill de Blasio, whose eight-year tenure as New York’s mayor began in 2014, came from this wing of the Democratic Party. And he had some successes, including his expansion of preschool and his curtailment of widespread stop-and-frisk policing. Overall, though, he bears significant responsibility for the city’s problems. He did not take disorder seriously enough, and he set back the city’s K-12 school system. His main legacy is to have contributed to the city’s recent decline.