Category: New York

Last night: “Mamdani repeatedly accuses Israel of genocide in NYC mayoral debate”

Also last night: Mayor Mamdani picks FDR as his “favorite modern-day president”.

This is a curious choice given that FDR was an enthusiastic proponent of killing as many Japanese and German civilians as technology allowed, e.g., 100,000 in just one night in Tokyo in March 1945, in order to force Japan and Germany into unconditional surrender (both nations repeatedly expressed willingness to negotiate mutually acceptable peace treaties, but the U.S. rejected the idea in favor of killing more Japanese and Germans). I can’t think of any American president who has been responsible for killing more civilians than FDR directed to be killed. If the Israelis followed FDR’s example, they would have shelled and bombed the Gazans, without texting/phoning warnings in advance, until the Gazans decided to surrender. Instead of sending food, water, and other supplies to the Gazans, the Israelis would have implemented something like Operation Starvation, the U.S. operation intended to prevent food from reaching Japan via ship (begun under FDR and continued under President Truman).

FDR is also a curious choice because he’s responsible for putting Japanese Americans into concentration camps during WWII (blessed by the Supreme Court) out of mere suspicion that they might try to work against the U.S. government’s program of killing as many Japanese soldiers and civilians as quickly as possible. Zohran Mamdani explicitly says that he wants to fight against the federal government (example below). If Trump followed FDR’s example, Zohran Mamdani would be interned for the duration of the federal effort to arrest and deport undocumented migrants with criminal records (“New Yorkers”, in Mayor Mamdani’s parlance).

(Omar Fateh, the next mayor of Minneapolis, would also be interned because he has also pledged to work against the federal government’s goals.)

Maybe FDR is celebrated by Mamdani because he gave Americans free cash? Ida May Fuller, for example, got paid nearly 1000X what she’d contributed to Social Security. Who wouldn’t love that?

Mayor Mamdani attacked Cuomo for his failure to visit mosques. I wonder what would have happened if Cuomo had talked about visiting Al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn where some of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers met. See “Brooklyn Mosque Becomes Terror Icon, but Federal Case Is Unclear” (NYT, 2003):

Al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn, a six-story converted factory trimmed in orange and gold, has been many things to many people during its life: a mystery, a noisy neighbor, a source of suspicion, and, for thousands of Muslims who live or work along Atlantic Avenue, the main street of Arab Brooklyn, a place of worship.

Last week, the mosque became, not for the first time, a symbol of terror. A federal affidavit unsealed on Tuesday describes links between the mosque, several Brooklyn businessmen and a cleric in Yemen who, prosecutors say, claims to have funneled more than $20 million to Al Qaeda. ”They did their fund-raising right here in our own backyard,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

But while Al Farooq has been the spiritual home of some infamous men — including, briefly, the blind Egyptian sheik eventually convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the man who killed Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990 — the role of the mosque and its members in supporting more recent terrorist activity remains unclear.

(New Yorkers responded to the 1993 jihad, which killed 6, including a pregnant woman, and injured more than 1,000, by advocating for increased levels of Islamic immigration and then responded to the 2001 jihad against the World Trade Center by advocating for completely open borders to Muslims.)

Who watched the debate? I saw a few snippets on X. I was, of course, happy to see Florida Realtor of the Year 2020/2021 (Andrew Cuomo) and Florida Realtor of the Year 2026 (Ayatollah Mamdani) on stage at the same time. Mostly, however, I’m amazed that these are the three ablest humans among the 8.5 million (or 9 million if we count the uncountable undocumented?) residents of New York City.

Separately, I’m close to 100,000 views on this X reply:

It is unfair to paint Mr. Mamdani as a Hamas supporter. Based on his public statements, he is equally aligned with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

New York has been substantially enriched by migrants in recent decades, especially from 2021-2024. After careful analysis, however, it seems that “New York Needs More Millionaires” (New York Times, August 28, 2025):

The rate at which New York State has been adding millionaires to its population in recent years has fallen below that of other large states, potentially costing the state billions in unrealized tax revenue, according to a new report from a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group.

At the same time, California, Florida and Texas had large increases in the number of people with annual incomes of at least $1 million residing in their states, all adding them at a faster rate than New York did from 2010 to 2022. The millionaire population in New York nearly doubled over that same time period, but it more than tripled in those other states.

Note that “millionaire” is not a peasant who owns a $1 million house outright, but rather someone who earns at least $1 million every year. The word has been updated for inflation, apparently!

There were about 70,000 people earning $1 million in New York State in 2022, with half of them living in New York City, according to the report.

Also, Ms. Eisner said the latest migration trends showed that millionaires were not leaving New York City and that, according to her research, they do not move in response to tax increases. Middle- and upper-middle class families — those in the $200,000 to $300,000 income range — are departing at the fastest rate, she said.

New York State added millionaire earners at a consistent rate from 2010 to 2022, when it had 69,780 tax filers with incomes greater than $1 million and about half lived in New York City. There were 35,802 millionaire filers in 2010 in New York State.

California stayed the top home for millionaires every year over that period, with an acceleration of top earners in recent years. It had 42,090 such earners in 2010 and 128,900 in 2022.

New York State had more top earners than Florida and Texas over that period until 2022, when those states jumped ahead. Florida had 19,450 people with $1 million incomes in 2010 and 77,670 in 2022. Texas had 23,859 in 2010 and 73,930 in 2022.

Considering that Florida has no Wall Street and is famous as a retirement destination (people tend not to earn as much in retirement as when they were working full time), it’s a remarkable failure that New York State now has fewer people who earn more than $1 million/year than Florida does. Does that mean California is the most successful? The New York Times seems to be unable to adjust numbers for population. Florida had a population of approximately 22 million in 2022 while California boasted 39 million humans (plus or minus 5 million depending on how the undocumented are counted?). Florida thus had a higher prevalence of earners over the $1 million threshold (1 in 283 for FL vs. 1 in 303 for CA).

A photo from my Lower East Side-through Chinatown-to Wall St walk, August 19, 2025:

On the Upper East Side, on the other hand, a diverse crowd in a rainbow of skin colors waits in line to get into the renovated Frick:

Speaking of the Upper East Side, across the street from the north side of the Frick is Emmanuel Goldstein’s former townhouse at 9 East 71st Street:

New York City is back, according to the media. Example… “The return-to-office trend is real — and it’s spectacular for NYC” (New York Post, August 17, 2025):

More employees now work in New York City offices than in July of 2019, according to the Placer.ai Office Index.

That’s right: The research platform, which uses cellphone data to track comings and goings at commercial buildings nationwide, found 1.3% more staffers at Manhattan desks last month than were there before the pandemic.

Similar article in the WSJ: “NYC Offices Are Back. Nothing Proves It More Than JPMorgan’s $3 Billion Tower.”

What does the lying stock market say? Here’s a 20-year chart for Vornado, a well-managed REIT whose portfolio is primarily office buildings and retail in New York City:

It’s gone from about $100 (sixty 2005 dollars adjusted for Bidenflation) to $37 today.

What about what one can see with one’s lying eyes? I visited a reader who lives near Wall Street and we surveyed some impressive towers from his 45th floor windows. We looked into the former Chase Manhattan building, fronted by an impressive Dubuffet sculpture, and found just a handful of workers at their desks at 2 pm. A nearby former Deutsche Bank tower remains vacant years after a renovation project started. In between is what used to be a name-brand hotel, now home to migrants for whom taxpayers foot the bill (their bicycles are chained up across the street):

The apparent lack of office workers means that there is more room for tourists, e.g., Fearless Tourist backs up Fearless Girl (“commissioned by State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), a large asset management company, to promote gender diversity initiatives and an index fund focused on gender-diverse companies with a relatively high percentage of women in senior leadership”):

The National Parks Service is there with 100 percent of exhibits in the “National Memorial” devoted to Americans who identify as “women”:

These exhibits that focus on a single gender ID (out of 74 recognized by Science) have apparently been up since 2021 (“Women’s Work, Never Praised, Never Done by Deb Willis, retrieving the stories of Black women in the struggle for the vote.”).

Consistent with the lack of observed office workers we found quite a few vacant storefronts, e.g.,

Maybe the retail space can be turned into mosques (masjids)? Here’s one a short walk north:

What about vacancy rates? From Moody’s, May 2025:

The current vacancy rate is a little high, but it doesn’t seem high enough to account for the observed emptiness of the Wall St. area or the terrible performance of Vornado. Covidcrats forced all Americans to learn how to work and collaborate remotely. It seems difficult to believe that a big enterprise would need to pay its support staff to work and live in Manhattan. Perhaps the Masters of the Universe still need to be in a Manhattan office building, but the trend toward moving support functions out to other boroughs, New Jersey, and other states must have been accelerated by everyone becoming proficient with videoconferencing. One would think that a typical company could get by with only half the Manhattan square footage per employee that it had in 2019 because so many people in 2025 would be either working from home or working from an office in Parsippany, NJ.

Polls should just be closing in New York City for the mayoral election (this is the Democrat primary, but no Republican could possibly win).

It seems that elites don’t like the idea of Zohran Mamdani leading his promised peasant uprising.

Here’s a typical elite:

We need more worker power and less inequality. What happens when there is a candidate who promises to empower workers and reduce inequality (maybe by driving some rich people to lower-tax parts of the U.S., but isn’t that good if you truly hate inequality?)? “[Mamdani and] the Democratic Socialist program would be profound and dangerous for NYC, for the Democratic Party, and for the USA.”

We are all New Yorkers, it seems, and we all need New York City to stay unequal with disempowered peasants. Maybe Prof. Summers is channeling Lincoln in his Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves everywhere except in all of the states that Lincoln controlled. Elite Democrats want workers empowered and inequality reduced in every city and state that isn’t currently run by elite Democrats?

Loosely related (to “every American is a citizen of New York City”), Michael Moore’s assertion that “We are all Muslim”:

Readers: What’s your prediction about who wins?

It would be fantastic for Palm Beach County if Mamdani wins. On the grounds that a Mamdani victory would be too good to be true, my prediction is that Florida Realtor of the Year 2020 and 2021 Andrew Cuomo wins.

What happens with Andrew Cuomo, though, once he is surrounded by all of the model-grade females of Manhattan? He apparently had some challenges with the young females of Albany, as noted in “These are the women who were sexually harassed by Andrew Cuomo: AG report” (New York Post):

How many New Yorkers would actually move if subjected to a combination of sharia law and higher taxes? My prediction: very few. Hardly any of them moved when Covidcrats locked them down, closed their kids’ schools, forced them to wear masks, forced healthy young people to accept an injection of an experimental vaccine against a disease that mostly kills those aged 80 and over, etc. If New Yorkers cared about personal freedom and lower tax rates they would already have moved. Americans in general lack the gumption to move, according to the NYT (some of this may simply be because a record high percentage of us are on means-tested public assistance programs; it is tough to get established on what was formerly called “welfare” in a new state):

That said, if only a handful of billionaires set up shop in Palm Beach it will result in lower property tax bills for us here in the peasant neighborhoods of Jupiter (we’re part of the same county, if not part of the same world). Just how much can the tax base grow when one rich douche moves to Florida? “The Secret to Building a $100 Million Megamansion” (Wall Street Journal):

It used to be that 20,000 square feet was big. We are currently in development on single-family houses that are over 50,000 square feet. That’s because they’re adding all these amenities. … We did a shark aquarium for a Grammy Award-winning artist. There was a glass elevator and it landed on a nurse shark pond. That was over $1 million to do. We’re currently doing a $20 million remodel for a house owned by rapper Rick Ross. We’re doing a 2,000-gallon Japanese koi fish pond—that’s also about $1 million. It will go through the entire foyer. … BURRAGE: I had a client who would say, “What’s the question? The answer is money.” … GLASER: Even in my house—it’s 17,000-square-feet—our chef does a group text to tell us that dinner will be ready in 20 minutes. … KARP: It’s like, “What if, God forbid, I can’t get to my plane fast enough and go someplace else? I have to have a safe room.” They are standard in every home, both for violence and natural events. They have to have everything—a place to eat, a place to drink, a place to poop. They also can’t be disconnected from communication; you need to continue to work. These houses have backup generators that are connected to solar panels and glass designed to sustain Category 5 winds. The idea is that after a direct hit by a hurricane you come out of the safe room and your house is still air-conditioned, the art is untouched on the walls and everything is protected. … Kobi Karp’s firm recently designed a home for a New York developer in Miami. ‘The home is designed like a luxury resort where the family never crosses paths with the staff. These clients want an environment where people bring them their shoes and their newspaper and take care of their dry cleaning but they never have to see them,’ Karp said

The article shows $150 million in new tax base that is a 30-minute drive from our house:

(Florida has something similar to California’s Proposition 13, but only for a primary residence (“homestead”). A homestead can’t be reassessed at market value unless it is sold or is transformed via renovation. It’s not as crazy as California in that commercial property isn’t included, but a regular result is that a new arrival may pay 2-3X what his/her/zir/their long-term-resident neighbor pays for an identical house.)