The Bigger Apple: Model Cities

New Yorkers like to think of our city as utterly unique, but this lull in the mayoral campaign marks a good time to look around the country and learn from some of our peers. Think Zohran Mamdani’s kind of social media success is only available to the Far Left? Take a look at San Francisco’s wildly popular new Mayor Daniel Lurie, who is nerdily ubiquitous on TikTok, visiting new restaurants and commenting on cleaner streets and lower crime. Next, he must tackle its messy finances, Bill Jackson writes.

Worried markets alone can’t solve New York’s affordability crisis? Look at Austin, the red-hot Texas metropolis where rents have fallen steadily for two years amid a massive housing construction boom.

And then there’s Detroit, once synonymous with urban decay. That’s now a wildly out-of-date perception, according to Judith Miller, who writes in City Journal about how Mayor Mike Duggan built a stable, moderate political coalition to restore the city’s finances, build new housing, and bring crime to its lowest level in six decades. 

More on Detroit — and much more on the greatest city in the world, of course — below.

Thanks for reading!

Liena Zagare

Cuomo’s Pre-K Claim: Andrew Cuomo appeared on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, causing a stir with his assertion that he deserves credit for New York City’s universal pre-K program—long considered Mayor Bill de Blasio’s signature achievement. While critics quickly pounced, Cuomo does have a point: the program depended on state funding, and it wouldn’t have succeeded without Albany’s help. 

Midtown Massacre and Mamdani’s Return: It remains uncertain how public sentiment might shift in the wake of Monday’s shocking shooting in Midtown Manhattan, which claimed four lives—including those of an off-duty police officer and a Blackstone employee. Zohran Mamdani, freshly returned from Uganda as of Wednesday, met with the victims’ families before forcefully responding to criticism of his absence and distancing himself from beliefs he said he no longer holds: “I am not defunding the police. I am not running to defund the police,” Mamdani told reporters.

Mamdani’s “High Wire Act” on Safety: Mamdani faces unenviable challenges as he tries to balance his relationship with the NYPD and public expectations on safety. His platform centers on creating a Department of Community Safety mostly using existing NYPD overtime funds, but his broader approach to crime remains somewhat ambiguous outside his acknowledgment that “the police have a critical role to play.” 

Sanctuary vs. Federal Enforcement: Under sanctuary city rules, the NYPD cannot participate in civil immigration arrests—but it still collaborates with ICE on gang, narcotics, and terror investigations. As ICE ramps up operations to deport criminal aliens, and many with no criminal records are getting swept up as well, the next mayor will need both political finesse and legal know-how to prevent clashes between federal agents and local policy. 

Anybody but Mamdani? Money vs. Momentum: Five newly formed groups backed by real estate interests and financiers have pooled millions into super PACs to oppose Mamdani’s campaign, The New York Times reports. Their odds look steep—recent polls put Mamdani ahead, but that could change if the opposition were to consolidate behind one candidate; however, right now, that seems unlikely.

Vibe Shift on Israel: An overwhelming 78% of NYC’s Democratic primary voters believe that Israel is “committing genocide” in Gaza and that the United States should stop arming the Jewish state, according to new polling from a pro-Palestinian group that was shared first with Semafor. Democratic elected officials are getting more vocal on the issue.

Mamdani’s Lead Holds Across Polls

Mamdani is the frontrunner in three recent general election polls—albeit without a majority—while his opponents struggle to unite the anti-Mamdani vote.

Slingshot Strategies poll  (July 2–6, n=1,036): Mamdani leads with 35%, Cuomo is at 25%, Sliwa 14%, Adams 11%, Walden 1%, and 13% undecided. He tops every borough except Staten Island and is the only candidate with net-positive favorability (+4 vs. Cuomo’s –2 and Adams’s –34).

HarrisX poll (July 7–8, n=585): In a tighter four-way, Mamdani holds 26%, Cuomo 23%, Sliwa 22% and Adams 13%, with 15% undecided. Head-to-head matchups show Cuomo beating Mamdani by 15 points one-on-one, while Mamdani would best Adams by seven.

Acceptability gauge: Zenith poll (July 16–24, n=1,453 “would consider” ): 51% of registered—and 57.7% of likely—voters say they’d consider voting for Mamdani, compared with 42.4% for Cuomo, 28.2% for Adams, and 24.9% for Sliwa.

Bottom line: Mamdani’s message resonates widely enough to lead in every poll’s multi-candidate field, but none yet show him cracking 50%. Cuomo remains the strongest challenger in head-to-head matchups—suggesting that only a unified anti-Mamdani coalition and/or decisive late swing among the 13–15% undecided will upend his advantage.

The Trump administration has made clear, across multiple policy fronts, that it intends to use federal funding as leverage to pursue policy change. President’s July 2025 executive order on homelessness shifts policy from housing-based solutions to prioritizing forced institutionalization and enforcement, cutting funds to cities that don’t criminalize homelessness or require treatment, and has drawn sharp criticism from advocates for threatening civil rights and alternative solutions. 

Our in-house experts on what this means for New York City, and what should happen next:

Stephen Eide: On the one hand, New York devotes extensive state and local resources to homelessness, making it less dependent on federal resources than mo communities and thus theoretically more immune to federal leverage plays. On the other hand, city officials’ limitless appetite for social spending will make them terrified of even a small loss of federal grants.

But city officials should heed this executive order (EO) not just to keep the funding flowing but because it’s the right thing to do and the popular one.

The average New Yorker is closer, philosophically, to this EO’s ideas on mental illness, policing, disorder, harm reduction, etc., than New York progressives’ agenda on homelessness. Trump himself may not be personally popular in New York, but his ideas on homelessness are.

John Ketcham: [O]verwhelmingly, what’s needed right now is more shelter bed capacity, and more inpatient bed capacity above all else. Right now, states won’t get reimbursed through Medicaid for “institutes of mental disease” (IMD) that have over 16 beds of inpatient psychiatric care. That’s a longstanding policy meant to deter institutionalization.

But what it in effect does is it prevents the economies of scale necessary to provide care for the most acute needs at a reasonable cost. Overturning that exclusion would mean that states can spend more on larger institutions that are modern and humane, not like the nightmares of the past, but truly contemporary humane facilities, so that we can use public dollars to care for the most acute needs in our society.

MI’s Carolyn D. Gorman agrees, writing in City Journal that deinstitutionalization, driven by Medicaid funding restrictions, left many severely ill people without effective care, fueling homelessness and public disorder. For the order to truly work, the U.S. must rapidly increase inpatient psychiatric capacity, repeal the Medicaid IMD exclusion, and adopt evidence-based measures like Assisted Outpatient Treatment.

Everyone Wants to Fix 14th Street. Going beyond the busway, the city and BIDs are aiming to overhaul almost everything. (Curbed) 

Don’t expect Zohran Mamdani — or any other mayoral candidate — to fix NYC’s troubled schools, MI’s Ray Domanico writes, noting that abandoning mayoral control is a terrible idea. (New York Post) 

Dan Weisberg on literacy, migrants, and his decision to step down as NYC’s No. 2 school official (Chalkbeat).

City’s older rent-regulated buildings with high shares of regulated units are approaching perilous financial shape as expenses exceed revenues. (Politico) 

New York schools have introduced new rules for electronic devices: students must store them while in school. The implementation is up to individual schools, with many exemptions. There will be no suspensions, but confiscated phones will require parents to be contacted. (NYT) 

The Sanitation Foundation’s littering survey finds that while the great majority of New Yorkers think littering is a problem and that litterers are lazy and disrespectful, 4 in 10 admit to littering themselves.

Working-class residents are leaving New York City at higher rates than wealthy residents. (NY Focus)

MTA wants subway fares to go up to $3 per ride starting next year. (The City)

Detroit’s turnaround under Mayor Mike Duggan has been nothing short of dramatic. When Duggan took office in 2013—elected as an unlikely write‑in candidate—Detroit was staggered by bankruptcy, mass population loss, rampant crime, and tens of thousands of abandoned properties. Over three terms, Duggan forged unprecedented public–private partnerships, never vetoed a city council measure, and balanced the budget for 11 straight years, Judith Miller writes in the City Journal.

Duggan slashed unemployment from 20% to under 5%, restored the city’s bond rating from junk to investment grade, and drove homicides to their lowest level since 1965. His “Project Green Light” camera network, a $10 million violence‑intervention program, and a $10 000 raise plus 350 new officers were central to the crime decline. Meanwhile, the Detroit Land Bank demolished or rehabilitated over 90% of derelict homes, sold side lots to neighbors for community projects, and spurred $1.3 billion in new housing.

Yet sustaining these gains without Duggan poses real challenges, Miller argues. One‑quarter of Detroit’s economy still hinges on an auto industry facing automation and trade uncertainties. The Motor City’s next mayor must resist a return to identity‑based patronage politics—the very dynamic Duggan overcame—and maintain his coalition of council members, businesses, philanthropies, and residents, she writes. History offers cautionary examples: reformers who win two terms often give way to successors drawn back into old, divisive fault lines. Detroit’s primary on August 5 will be the first test of whether Duggan’s model of collaborative governance could have staying power.

The bar at Le Rock in Rockefeller Center (45 Rockefeller Plaza) is a gem of the restored Rockefeller Center, a glorious Art Deco hideaway where you can contemplate the best of 20th Century urbanism without shelling out for a full expensive meal. Have a glass of wine and try the seasonal strawberry vacherin while they’ve got it.