Conservative Conversation and Community
Rafael A. Mangual joins Seth Barron to discuss New York City’s plan to replace the jail complex on Rikers Island with four borough-based jails and what it could mean for public order in the city.
New York City jails currently house a daily average of about 8,000 people, in a city of 8 million residents. Under the new plan, the borough-based jails (once constructed) will be able to house 3,300 people—less than half the city’s average daily jail population today. As Barron writes, the new target “will likely require a significant realignment of expectations about public safety.”
More Heather Mac Donald joins Seth Barron to discuss homelessness on the streets of San Francisco and the city’s wrongheaded attempts to solve the problem.
“San Francisco has conducted a real-life experiment in what happens when a society stops enforcing bourgeois norms of behavior,” writes Mac Donald in City Journal. For nearly three decades, the Bay Area has been a magnet for the homeless. Now the situation is growing dire, as residents and visitors experience near-daily contact with mentally disturbed persons.
More Labor unions have dramatically declined as a percentage of the American workforce over the last 30 years. A new proposal from presidential candidate Bernie Sanders seeks to double union ranks, City Journal senior editor Steven Malanga reports, which would mean adding nearly 15 million new members.
Malanga joins associate editor Seth Barron to discuss Senator Sanders’s proposal, which would put new restraints on employers, limit workers’ rights to opt-out of union membership, and make other changes to U.S. labor law. The Sanders plan would also give federal workers the right to strike and force states to allow government workers to unionize.
More Corey Johnson, Speaker of the New York City Council, joins Seth Barron to discuss the state of New York City’s transit system and his plan to break up the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), allowing the city to take control of its buses, subways, bridges, and tunnels. According to Johnson, direct control of the MTA would enhance its responsiveness, accountability, and transparency.
More James B. Meigs joins Seth Barron to discuss last month’s power blackout in Manhattan, California’s self-inflicted energy crisis, and potential energy sources for the future.
“As power outages go,” Meigs writes, “the Broadway Blackout of 2019 was pretty modest.” But energy reliability is becoming an issue in states across the country. California’s largest power supplier, Meigs reports, recently announced that it will begin shutting down parts of the grid to help reduce the risk of wildfires.
More Steven Malanga and Rafael Mangual join Seth Barron to discuss concerns that lawlessness is returning to American cities, a theme that Malanga and Mangual explore in separate feature stories in the Summer 2019 Issue of City Journal.
Memories of the urban chaos and disorder of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s have faded, and many local leaders today have forgotten the lessons of that bygone era. Malanga’s story, “The Cost of Bad Intentions” (available soon online), shows how a new generation of politicians are bringing back some of the terrible policies that got American cities into trouble in the first place. On crime and incarceration, Mangual argues that the new disorder will grow worse if progressives manage to overhaul the American criminal-justice system.
More Ray Domanico joins City Journal associate editor Seth Barron to discuss New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza’s controversial and divisive leadership of the nation’s largest public school system. Domanico details Carranza’s emphasis on ridding schools of purported racial bias in his recent essay for City Journal, “Richard Carranza’s Deflections.”
Over the past four decades, with varying levels of success, Carranza’s predecessors in the chancellor’s job have launched numerous policies and programs aimed at better serving students. By contrast, Carranza has put forth no substantive plan for improving the schools, instead charging that the system is overrun by racial prejudice.
More Nicole Gelinas and Howard Husock join Seth Barron to discuss New York’s landmark rent-regulation law and its potential impact on housing in the city and state.
Lawmakers in New York recently passed the toughest rent-regulation law in a generation, imposing new restrictions on landlords’ ability to increase rents, improve buildings, or evict tenants. The bill made permanent the state’s existing rent regulations, meaning that future legislatures will find it harder to revisit the issue.
More Erica Sandberg joins City Journal associate editor Seth Barron to discuss the deteriorating state of public order in San Francisco.
The Bay Area’s most densely populated and desirable neighborhoods are being destroyed by lawlessness and squalor. San Francisco now leads the nation in property crime, according to the FBI. “Other low-level offenses,” Sandberg reports for City Journal, “including drug dealing, street harassment, encampments, indecent exposure, public intoxication, simple assault, and disorderly conduct are also rampant.”
More At the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, Professor Jacob Howland writes in City Journal, “a new administration has turned a once-vibrant academic institution with a $1.1 billion endowment and a national reputation in core liberal arts subjects into a glorified trade school with a social-justice agenda.” Speaking with Seth Barron, Howland describes how, in early April, TU’s new administration announced a wholesale reorganization of academic departments, including the elimination of traditional liberal arts majors. Students and faculty have responded by organizing protests and launching a petition to “save the heart and soul of the University of Tulsa.”
More Nicole Gelinas and Aaron Renn join Seth Barron to discuss recent developments in New York and Chicago.
In the first week of April, both cities marked milestones: Manhattan got the nation’s first congestion-pricing plan, courtesy of the state legislature, while Chicago elected its first black woman as mayor.
More Joel Kotkin joins Seth Barron to discuss China’s urbanization, class tensions in Chinese cities, and the country’s increasingly sophisticated population surveillance.
Rapid migration from China’s countryside to its cities began in 1980. Many of the rural migrants arrived without hukou, or residential permits, making it harder to secure access to education, health care, and other services. The result: the creation of a massive urban underclass in many Chinese cities. Rising tensions in urban areas has led Chinese officials to look to technology for alternative methods of social control, ranging from facial-recognition systems to artificial intelligence.
More Steven Malanga joins Seth Barron to discuss expanding efforts to legalize recreational marijuana use, a movement helped along by extensive misinformation about the drug’s supposed health benefits.
This year, at least eight states are debating laws that would permit recreational pot. Marijuana advocates claim that the drug is therapeutic and that legalizing it will end the unjust imprisonment of casual users, especially in minority communities. But as Malanga writes in City Journal, “Even as the legalization push gains momentum, scientific journals report mounting evidence of the drug’s harmful psychological effects and social consequences.”
More City Journal contributing editor Howard Husock joins associate editor Seth Barron to discuss the Manhattan Institute’s Civil Society Awards, which recognize outstanding nonprofit leaders who develop solutions to social problems in their communities.
History has shown that free markets are the best way to organize economic activity, but a healthy society relies on charitable and philanthropic enterprises to help those in need and prepare citizens to realize their potential. To support these goals, the Manhattan Institute established the Social Entrepreneurship initiative in 2001, now known as the Tocqueville Project.
More Ray Domanico joins City Journal associate editor Seth Barron to discuss charter schools in New York City, the growing protests by education workers across the country, and Democrats’ weakening support for charters.
In teachers’ unions protests from West Virginia to California, activists claim that the growth of charters has come at the expense of district schools.
More Aaron Renn joins City Journal associate editor Seth Barron to discuss how some big public universities are expanding their tech departments to major cities to maximize their economic impact—creating new political battles in their states.
A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal, Aaron Renn writes on economic development and urban policy in America. “The Tech Campus Moves Downtown,” his article examining recent expansions of universities into city centers, appears in the Winter 2019 issue of City Journal.
More Nicole Gelinas joins City Journal associate editor Seth Barron to discuss Mayor Bill de Blasio’s State of the City address, his aspiration to run for president in 2020, and his attempts to position himself as a national progressive leader.
“There’s plenty of money in the city—it’s just in the wrong hands,” de Blasio proclaimed in a speech loaded with tax-the-rich rhetoric. Since his first mayoral election in 2013, de Blasio has tried to position himself as a revolutionary. But in practice, Gelinas notes, he is “more old-school, big-city Democratic pragmatist than new-school, Democratic Socialist of America.”
More City Journal contributing editor Howard Husock joins associate editor Seth Barron to discuss problems at the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).
With some 400,000 residents, NYCHA is the nation’s largest public housing system. In recent years, news reports have documented extensive corruption at the agency along with chronic problems at NYCHA properties, including heating outages, broken elevators, high lead-paint levels, and vermin.
More Nicole Gelinas joins Seth Barron to discuss the chaos that commuters and tourists endure on a daily basis in midtown Manhattan—especially during the holiday season.
Every year, city officials are criticized for their poor handling of holiday crowds and the traffic that fills the streets. This year promises to be even worse. As Gelinas has documented, tourists visiting the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center are being funneled between police barricades and concrete bollards, while cars move freely down the wide avenues.
More City Journal’s Brian Anderson and Seth Barron discuss New York’s upcoming elections and the prospect of a state government run entirely by Democrats.
New York’s local politics have long been driven by a partisan split in the state legislature. With the help of moderate Democrats, Republicans have held a narrow majority in the state senate since 2010. This year, however, many of those moderates were beaten in the primaries by more progressive candidates. As a result, Democrats are poised to take over state government in Albany next year.
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