In N.Y. Mayoral Race, Even Republican Runs Against Billionaires
Plus, David Brooks on Democrats as “party of the status quo”
The Republican candidate for mayor of New York, Curtis Sliwa—one of three people on the planet, along with Mayor Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo, who could prevent the Israel-hating socialist Zohran Mamdani from taking over the city—is campaigning Wednesday afternoon in the Times Square subway station.
It’s a block from New York Times headquarters and in the middle of what used to be the media capital of the world, and the event is on Sliwa’s public schedule. Yet there are no other reporters there—not from New York’s all-news cable television outlets, not from any of the nonprofit local newsrooms, not from the remaining print or online dailies, not from the local public radio affiliates. Just me, a former New Yorker visiting from Boston, on a subway platform on an 89-degree day with the hot-air output from the subway car air-conditioners making it even hotter.
And no other reporters show up. So for an hour, in-between passing subway riders and prospective voters who paused for a selfie with the candidate in his Guardian Angel red beret or wished him well, I have what amounts to an exclusive interview with Sliwa.
The day before I’d had a visit to the headquarters of the Success Academy charter school network, so my first question to Sliwa was about K-12 education policy. What threat would a Mayor Mamdani pose to charter school growth? Sliwa reminds me that the United Federation of Teachers, the powerful teachers union that has been largely hostile to charters, recently endorsed Mamdani. Sliwa says as mayor, he’d try to keep all kinds of schools—traditional public, charter, parochial, and private schools—viable.
How’d he deal with the “affordability” issue that Mamadani was emphasizing with apparent success? He replies by talking mainly about housing, saying that he’d add supply by making available 6,000 apartments in public housing projects that he said are now vacant owing to corruption and incompetence in managing the waitlist for public housing. He also said he’d meet with landlords to try to open up rent-stabilized apartments that the landlords are now keeping vacant instead of renting. After Covid-era changes making evictions more difficult, he said landlords tired of deadbeats and squatters now figure, “I’d rather take a loss than deal with a nightmare tenant.”
What he opposes, he says, is “build, build, build…the only one that benefits is the developers.” I ask what’s wrong with developers making money, isn’t that what America is all about?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Editors to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.