Construction on the long-delayed Gateway tunnel beneath the Hudson is set to resume next week, after the Trump administration begrudgingly unfroze $205 million under judicial order. The states, irritated by presidential naming ambitions and dire war…
The US National Weather Service warned New Yorkers from Manhattan to Suffolk County to expect up to 18 inches of snow and 55 mph gusts from Sunday morning through Monday evening, with whiteout conditions likely to make travel hazardous and power outages possible. We may grumble at winter survival kits, but in the face of this blizzard, discretion seems preferable to digging out one’s own sedan.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pitch for a 9.5% property tax hike—meant to plug New York City’s shrinking but stubborn budget gap—has left budget-watchers and lawmakers cold, who deride his “fiscal crisis” rhetoric as theatrical and his solutions as a false choice. As the defined deficit dropped from $12 billion to $5.4 billion, the performance, we note, offered more drama than dazzling new math.
New York City’s Local Law 97, ambitiously aimed at slashing greenhouse gas emissions from 63,000 buildings by 2030, has left co-op boards—like Glen Oaks Village in Queens—eyeing $50 million upgrade tabs they can scarcely afford. Federal aid is now scarcer, City Hall’s reassurance remains notional, and many expect to swallow million-dollar annual fines—hardly the electrifying transformation legislators had in mind.
New York’s Department of Transportation is still mulling what to do with the decrepit Brooklyn-Queens Expressway triple cantilever, a 1950s feat now held together by ever-costlier patches. After two years and 13 options under former mayor Eric Adams, officials must soon choose: bold overhaul or drawn-out tinkering—lest the BQE join Boston’s infamous “Big Dig” and become a byword for urban dithering at global scale.
New York’s DMV has paused its “non-domiciled” commercial driver license program for immigrants—about 200,000, many legal residents—after the Trump administration threatened to yank $73 million in highway funds. School bus companies fret over already acute driver shortages, while the newly jobless, like Rosario Argueta, are reassigned at a steep pay cut. Apparently, the road to tighter regulation comes with new bumps for everyone.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s threat to hike New York City property taxes by 9.5%—a “last resort” aimed at persuading Governor Kathy Hochul to support higher taxes on millionaires—has provoked a chorus of outrage from Queens homeowners. Their complaints about displacement and gentrification may fall on deaf ears in Albany, where the governor has told the mayor to rethink his sums, ideally before everyone decamps to Atlanta.
Zohran Mamdani, newly installed as New York City mayor, lobbed his opening budget salvo: a property tax hike for millions, unless Albany targets wealthier wallets instead—a threat as much as a policy. He tossed rent freezes to stabilized tenants, then muddied waters by reviving homeless encampment sweeps, this time managed by welfare officials rather than police. We suspect political theater remains the city’s most reliable constant.
New York is test-driving its newly minted Expedited Land Use Review Procedure, or ELURP, shaving the approval time for a South Bronx affordable housing project from 212 to 90 days. Although Mayor Mamdani was as noncommittal as ever pre-election, voters—especially in the Bronx—embraced the ballot measure in November. Eighty-four discounted apartments and a theater may not end the city’s crisis, but at least something’s moving quicker than the D train.
