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October 12, 2023
Blue-State Benefits: How Federal Grants Fail to Consider Population Shift
Abstract The federal government annually awards hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to states. In this report, I examine funding for the largest federal grant programs for 2020–22, focusing…
October 4, 2023
Variety Is the Spice
At first glance, Mayor Eric Adams’s extensive new citywide rezoning plan, meant to encourage new housing, may seem like more of the problematic same. It emphasizes, for instance, the construction of yet…
September 28, 2023
How To Halt New York’s Ubiquitous Illegal Pot Blight
The state Office of Cannabis Control has not demonstrated any capacity to control illegal pot distribution — more than 8,000 unlicensed “dispensaries” are thought to be operating in the city….
September 26, 2023
Voter Suppression, New York Style
New York governor Kathy Hochul is preening about her Democratic Party’s commitment to democracy, in the form of legislation she just signed authorizing mail-in voting. Republicans are suing to stop…
September 18, 2023
“Player Piano” (Revisited) in the Age of AI
If one judges futuristic novels of the past narrowly in terms of whether they got their predictions right, Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant first novel, Player Piano, was not perfect. Upstate New York…
September 8, 2023
Is Vote Dilution Necessarily Bad?
There really is no obvious way to defend the congressional district map drawn by the Alabama state legislature—and struck down by a federal court for unconstitutionally diluting the African-American vote…
September 6, 2023
Why Staten Island seceding from NYC makes sense — for multiple reasons
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis is right that Staten Island is not likely to succeed in seceding from the city of New York. The borough needs the approval of both the City Council and…
August 24, 2023
Want To End Apartment Warehousing? Ease Up On Rent-Control Laws
New York City’s Independent Budget Office this week reported that some 13,000 rent-regulated apartments in the city have been vacant for more than two years — fueling the charge that owners…
August 23, 2023
Solve Two Crises At Once: Put Migrants In NYCHA
As New York City gives over soccer fields and recreation centers to housing for a wave of migrants, and Gov. Hochul feuds with Mayor Adams, one public housing resident on…
August 13, 2023
The Bill to Repair NYCHA Projects Doubles—but Pols Won’t Fix the System
We knew Big Apple public housing is in dangerously bad shape—but it turns out it’s twice as bad as we thought. New York City Housing Authority officials just revealed the $40…