New York City in brief

Federal funding cuts under the Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” have set the stage for nearly 500,000 New Yorkers to lose coverage from the Essential Plan on July 1, while 1.3 million will remain insured. The state will notify the unlucky half-million—whose incomes now exceed stringent new limits—on Wednesday, suggesting individual market plans whose premiums may well test the limits of stoical resignation.

The OECD now expects US inflation to hit 4.2% in 2026—over double the Federal Reserve’s 2% target—leaving real household incomes lagging behind pandemic-era levels despite nominal wage growth. Persistent price rises have bred a chronic sense that dollars shrink on contact with supermarkets, hitting lower-earning communities hardest. Evidently, even Fed pronouncements struggle to keep inflation—and family budgets—down to earth.

As New York’s Rent Guidelines Board kicked off deliberations on rent-stabilized increases, the word “freeze”—last year’s rallying cry—was conspicuously iced out, even by Mayor Mamdani, who recently stacked the board with allies but now treads carefully amid landlord lawsuits. While landlords decry misleading income metrics, tenants press for relief; as ever, we brace for a verdict somewhere between arithmetic and alchemy.

As New York ponders the future of its ailing Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, we might recall Boston’s “Big Dig,” which buried a highway and freed up land—only to worsen congestion by expanding lanes. Politicians from Eric Adams to incoming mayor Zohran Mamdani offer conflicting blueprints, with demolition daydreams competing with expansion plans. Past experience suggests that widening a bottleneck rarely unlocks the open road, but hope, unlike traffic, springs eternal.

ICE agents, temporarily filling in for absent TSA staff during the U.S. government shutdown, are now patrolling LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark airports, spooking New York’s immigrant travelers. Legal advocates report a spike in frantic queries as heightened airport arrests under President Trump’s 15-month-old crackdown put myriad non-citizens—undocumented, DACA recipients, green-card holders, activists—on edge. Security lines, alas, remain as glacial as agency communications.