Stifling Housing Growth in New York City

In 1961, New York City created “manufacturing zones”—zoning districts for public facilities and businesses. But the city’s industrial sector soon declined, paving the way for large-scale rezonings.

In the early 2000s, to provide clarity about which areas were important to reserve for manufacturing, Mayor Michael Bloomberg created Industrial Business Zones (IBZs). But these still include some of the city’s most valuable land, Eric Kober points out. “New York’s dire housing need should preclude leaving land in high-value communities underused and blighted,” he writes.

Thankfully, the city’s new draft industrial plan offers a solution. You can read about it here.

President Trump’s fight with Fed governor Lisa Cook over allegations that she lied on a mortgage application has reached the Supreme Court. While Cook remains in her position for now, the Court may decide that Congress can limit the president’s authority to remove at least some Fed officials.

The episode raises a question: Could a senior executive in the private sector retain his position if faced with similar allegations? It’s likely that he couldn’t.

“Even if the executive’s agreement provided that he could only be terminated for cause and the company wound up terminating him without cause,” Robert T. Miller writes, “he would be entitled merely to collect damages, not to remain in office.”

Read more about the case here.

Before the pandemic, New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) proposed an Agenda for Decarceration. It included proposals to eliminate cash bail, decriminalize drug possession, and abolish mandatory minimums.

If implemented, the agenda would reduce the city’s incarcerated population and weaken the criminal justice system, Adam Lehodey writes. Yet several staffers on mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s campaign are DSA members and strongly back the agenda.

Read more about the proposals, and what they would mean for New York City, here.

Opened in 1947, Langer’s Deli in Los Angeles may be on the verge of shutting down. Norm Langer, the owner, recently told Stephen Eide that he wants to stay open through the 2028 Olympics, but that “it’s iffy whether I will be able to hold out.”

Part of the problem? The deli sits across from MacArthur Park, which has devolved into a center of crime, drugs, and homelessness. “Visitors on an ordinary weekday afternoon will witness dozens of people in and around the park openly using and selling drugs—and hard drugs at that,” Eide writes. “While marijuana clouds are scarce, the ‘fentanyl fold’ is everywhere. The day after my recent visit, someone was fatally shot near the park. A week earlier, a dead body was fished out of its manmade lake.”

Read more about the deli, the park, and L.A.’s homelessness problem.

“It is organized, but not as the past radicals organized. It is an outgrowth of decades of victimhood as chic. Once everyone is convinced they are victims, and all of civilized society are oppressors, it does not take long for the most wacky among them to respond with violence to ‘existential’ threats.”

Photo credit: Gary Hershorn / Contributor / Corbis News via Getty Images