Even a socialist like Mamdani can improve New York heres how

Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently made an observation that ought to command widespread agreement.“Quality of life has come to be seen as somehow a right-wing concern,” he said.The same goes for efficiency and rooting out waste.His point was that the left shouldn’t surrender these concerns to its opponents.“If politics cannot deliver on the block where you live,” asks Mamdani, “why would you trust it to deliver anywhere in your city?”It’s a good question — and a fair standard by which to judge his administration.He has his work cut out for him.Rents keep setting records.

Child care runs tens of thousands of dollars a year.The schools spend more than $42,000 per pupil, yet about a third of students are chronically absent.Murders and shootings have fallen to record lows, but felony assaults remain roughly 44% above 2019 levels.Subway homicides are, on average, more than three times higher than they were between 1997 and 2019.Mamdani didn’t create these problems.

They built up over years, across administrations, through decisions made in both City Hall and Albany.But if quality of life transcends ideology, so should the fixes.In a new Manhattan Institute paper, we offer 50 practical ones.Start with Mamdani’s signature issue: housing affordability.An estimated 57,000 rent-regulated apartments sit vacant, many because state law prevents rents from rising enough to cover the cost of renovating them.The city should work with Albany to let rents on those units rise enough to make rehabilitation feasible, returning roughly two years’ worth of new construction to the market without requiring public subsidies.On schools, the Department of Education should hold principals accountable for chronic absenteeism.DOE should require school staff to intervene as soon as a child falls behind, before small learning gaps become permanent ones.Watchdogs also shouldn’t have to wait a year for chronic-absenteeism figures.Connecticut and Rhode Island update their absen...