In 1936, hundreds of workers began construction on Williamsburg Houses, the crown jewel of the New Deal’s unprecedented investment in New York City’s public infrastructure. For the project’s design, the City turned to prolific and renowned architects Richmond Shreve and William Lescaze, known for designing the Empire State Building and the tallest building in Philadelphia, respectively. When the complex opened two years later, City officials buried in its cornerstone an autographed copy of How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis’s seminal work of urban photography and the catalyst for a generation of progressive reformers who dedicated their lives to improving the living conditions of New York’s burgeoning urban poor. This was not just a declaration from the City that it was going to support the livelihoods of its most vulnerable people - it was an ideological crusade to win the City back from the Tammany Hall machine and industrial robber barons and build in their wake a social democracy.Almost exactly forty years later, New York was in a state of malaise, having left that crusade back in the pre-war era. In October 1975, all that stood between Mayor Abraham Beame, diminutive both in stature and character, and citywide bankruptcy, was the Teacher’s Union, which was mulling over the opportunity to buy City bonds that were plummeting in value. New York was not an exceptional case: all throughout America’s industrial heartland, cities were failing to respond to America’s shifting position in the global economy. The 1985 Volcker Shock, which dramatically raised interest rates to curb inflation, was the capstone of a decades-long process that transformed America from an industrial superpower into the world’s consumer of last resort: you make products, and we will buy them. The steel, garments, and asphalt that had supercharged the heart of American Empire for 100 years had left New York for European and Asian pastures and left behind an existential question: what is this city?By the end of the decade, nearly a million people had fled New York - especially its white middle class - for suburbs in New Jersey, Long Island, and Westchester. The last wave of Puerto Rican and Black immigrants who were promised reliable-enough industrial jobs watched the nascent suburbanites take with them the City’s tax base and leave the shards of a dream of New York they were just too late to assemble. Those people were one answer to the question of what the City was, but that was not an answer that would resolve the looming fiscal crisis. And unlike in 1936, federal subsidies were not going to flood the streets with bridges and roads and trains, and jobs and training and dignity.In a pinch for cash and willing to accept it from even the most unsavory of lenders, the City essentially entered into a series of agreements with America’s fledgling private financial institutions, New York State, and, yes, the Teacher’s Union, to secure just enough money to pay off its maturing debts. In response, banks demanded control of New York’s economy. And they got it, funneling through City Hall austerity measures that hit every sector of the public economy. Wages were cut, large swathes of city workers were laid off, and the City began to support itself through increasingly precarious future loan obligations. A new New York emerged, with its globally significant public spending programs replaced by public-private partnerships, Business Improvement Districts, and privatized open spaces; Robert Moses’s agencies built New York in his image, but by the 1990’s the City’s pre-eminent development agency, the NYC Economic Development Corporation, was being configured by McKinsey in the hazy image of financial capital.We are here today at the tail end of this process. I’ll make the claim that New York in 2025 is perhaps the most pleasant it been in decades for people like me. Though you won’t hear it from cable news, crime in Manhattan is at a multi-decade low, new parks are regularly opening in the city’s core urban areas, and thousands of young professionals are flocking to the city on a daily basis. On the flip side, the subway system (ruled from the Governor’s Mansion in Albany) hasn’t been comprehensively upgraded once since its inception and is viscerally ugly and declining. The New York City Housing Authority has been hollowed out from its 1930’s heyday into a purely reactionary husk of an agency, attending to tragic stabbings in its elevators and weeks-long power outages in its outer borough complexes with band-aid solutions while receiving fewer dollars every year from the City. The City’s most disinvested neighborhoods, spared the fates of Williamsburg and Bed-Stuy, sometimes appear to be in states of terminal decline. And that’s not to mention the City’s acute cost-of-living crisis. I often visit Morris Park, a working-class, relatively stable and family-oriented neighborhood in the East Bronx, for work. When we ask people what kinds of investments they would like to see in their neighborhood, every single person, from the kids leaving elementary school to the senior citizens on their nightly walks, clamors for affordable housing. “I came from the Dominican Republic 42 years ago,” a grandmother told us. “I can’t stay here anymore.”New York has been neoliberalized through and through. Core government functions have been ceded to the private sphere, which cannot plan at the temporal scale required to build and maintain a city. We’ve experienced a tremendous influx of private capital, enough to make our lives - especially those of us with stable, professionalized jobs - deliciously consumptive in the short term. But the fiscal crisis of 1975 casts a long shadow. The City’s inability to service the core functions of city-building, which necessarily improve the conditions of its most disadvantaged, has manifested in all of the aforementioned issues but is threatening to arise more catastrophically in the form of infrastructure failure and civil unrest. We’re already seeing it with the BQE, now entering its retirement age cracking and heaving.I say all this to attempt to reframe the 2025 mayoral election, not as a contest between a hardline veteran politician (and sex pest) and an upstart ideologue, but between the flailing current of neoliberalism - the status quo - and a movement trying to figure out what to do with the pieces of the New York that once was. Zohran Mamdani is a progressive and a self-proclaimed socialist, sure, but he enters the fray at the end of a 60 year-long process that saw his ilk excised entirely from politics and replaced by a logic that is fundamentally incompatible with long-term city-building. Viewed from that perspective, he appears to me to be our bare minimum answer to the question of what this city is, the only one offering an affirmative vision for a place that we can love rather than fear. I don’t know enough to speak intelligently and in-depth about some of his policy proposals, but I’ll conclude with this quote from FDR that precipitated the construction of Williamsburg Houses and feels eerily apt at this time: “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”