Reihan Salam has a lot in common with the man he is trying to stop. <\/p>\n
They went to rival New York City public high schools. Both are South Asian Muslim men with a talent for remembering faces and names. Mr. Salam, the head of the conservative Manhattan Institute, and his democratic socialist foil, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, both favor merch embroidered with the same 1970s cursive City of New York insignia. <\/p>\n
They share something else. They are convinced that their beloved city is in crisis. For the mayor, the crisis is affordability. For Mr. Salam, the crisis is Mr. Mamdani. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou have a couple of decades of prosperity that are slipping away,\u201d said Mr. Salam, 46, who lives with his family in a Brooklyn neighborhood that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Mamdani. \u201cWe are squandering this incredible opportunity to show that urban life can work.\u201d<\/p>\n
He fears that many of his fellow New Yorkers have been seduced by what he sees as the mayor\u2019s vilification of the city\u2019s wealthiest residents and misled by Mr. Mamdani\u2019s vision<\/a> of free buses, free child care and frozen rent. He believes the mayor\u2019s big plans to subsidize the costs of city life for even well-off New Yorkers (\u201cunlimited welfarism for the near-rich,\u201d Mr. Salam calls it) could steer New York City into a financial tailspin reminiscent of the dark days of the 1970s. <\/p>\n To counter all that, Mr. Salam is trying to make the Manhattan Institute, a think tank with a roster of New York City obsessives, the intellectual engine of the resistance. <\/p>\n Slowing down the mayor and his popular movement will be no easy task, as others have discovered. The city\u2019s vaunted business elite<\/a> spent tens of millions of dollars trying to persuade voters that Mr. Mamdani\u2019s ideas about capitalism and Israel were too radical for New York, without success. The Democratic establishment has largely been cowed by the mayor\u2019s political strength<\/a>. Elected Republicans are so outnumbered in New York that they have no real power to stop him.<\/p>\n Neither does the Manhattan Institute. Over a half-century, the organization has lobbied constantly for shrinking the city\u2019s sprawling bureaucracy and letting private industry work its magic. The election of a democratic socialist marks a low point for the institute in New York, where its project has never been further from the halls of power. <\/p>\n But Mr. Salam, its president since 2019, sees an opportunity. Mr. Mamdani\u2019s electric campaign has created unusual interest in big ideas about what works, and what doesn\u2019t, when it comes to administering government in the city.<\/p>\n Where some right-wing critics have caricatured the mayor as a communist, a jihadist and a candidate for deportation, Mr. Salam and his fellow conservative urbanists are testing a less hyperbolic approach. They have taken direct aim at Mr. Mamdani\u2019s policy agenda, deploying deep knowledge of city history and policy expertise to try to serve as a voice of skepticism whispering in the city\u2019s collective ear.<\/p>\n Do people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year really need<\/a> free child care? <\/p>\n Might a rent freeze cause even fewer people to leave their apartments, driving the vacancy rate so low it could destabilize the housing market<\/a>? <\/p>\n Could free buses turn the M4 into a daytime shelter for homeless people?<\/p>\n The mayor\u2019s office declined to comment on the Manhattan Institute. Mr. Mamdani has said he believes it is government\u2019s job to deliver excellent services rather than choose who receives those services, especially in the face of the city\u2019s affordability crisis. In his inaugural address<\/a>, the mayor took on critics of \u201cbig government,\u201d saying, \u201cNo longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers\u2019 lives.\u201d<\/p>\n Changing the mayor\u2019s worldview may be out of the question. But if Mr. Salam and his group of warrior-wonks can influence other pillars of the New York cognoscenti \u2014 activists, nonprofit leaders, city commissioners, journalists \u2014 they hope it might be just enough to slow down the big-government bandwagon.<\/p>\n \u201cI vehemently believe that we are defenders of the beautiful mosaic,\u201d said Mr. Salam, using a twist on a phrase coined by David N. Dinkins<\/a>, a former Democratic mayor, to describe New York in all its glorious complexity. <\/p>\n \u201cBut it means that you need to not be an idiot.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018I try to be constructive\u2019<\/p>\n A half-century ago, the mosaic was seriously blighted. <\/p>\n Decades of poor fiscal management had left the city teetering on the edge of total financial collapse, and signs of New York\u2019s imminent demise were everywhere. The subways were covered in graffiti, muggings were common, trash piled up on the sidewalks and streets, some landlords set their buildings on fire for the insurance money and a 25-hour blackout led to widespread looting<\/a>.<\/p>\n These days, the city is not in pristine financial health. Fiscal experts estimate that New York will face significant budget deficits within the next few years. But the city and state set up guardrails decades ago to avoid a repeat of the irresponsible accounting and financial chaos of the 1970s. <\/p>\n The Manhattan Institute is not expecting another financial emergency to set in tomorrow. Still, to Mr. Salam and his colleagues, the \u201970s fiscal crisis is not so much a historical event as a scriptural one \u2014 a Great Flood whose legacy should serve as a permanent warning to the city\u2019s leaders that things can go terribly wrong when government spends more money on social services than it can actually afford. <\/p>\n A few weeks after Mr. Mamdani was elected last year, a crowd assembled at the institute\u2019s headquarters around the corner from Grand Central Terminal for a panel titled \u201cThe Fiscal Crisis at 50: Lessons for a New Era of City Government.\u201d The room was so packed that even Dean Fuleihan, a longtime Democratic Mr. Fix-It who had just been named Mr. Mamdani\u2019s most senior aide, had to hunt for a seat. <\/p>\n In an impromptu exchange with the panelists, Mr. Fuleihan said the reforms that had been put in place to prevent future fiscal calamities were \u201cmaking my life easier.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cIt is the responsibility of government to listen to the opinions of the people they serve, even when it leads to spirited discussions about the 1975 fiscal crisis,\u201d Mr. Fuleihan told The New York Times in a statement.<\/p>\n Getting a consigliere of the mayor to show up at its office for any reason was a good sign for the Manhattan Institute and its efforts to start a conversation that city leaders might actually engage in.<\/p>\n The think tank, created in 1978, has always had a broader focus than New York. Many of the organization\u2019s 85 scholars comment on national issues, and some have taken up arms in the conservative culture wars<\/a> over public safety and transgender rights. But a subset of New York-focused wonks are now working overtime to try to come up with more Manhattan Institute-y solutions to some of the problems the mayor wants to solve. <\/p>\n \u201cI try to be constructive,\u201d said Eric Kober, the institute\u2019s local housing expert. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not enough to simply criticize him,\u201d he added, \u201cit\u2019s also necessary to offer something that he could do.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Kober, who spent 35 years<\/a> working under mayors of all stripes at the city\u2019s planning department before joining the think tank, has tried to come up with tweaks of Mr. Mamdani\u2019s policy proposals that could save money and lean more on private business. <\/p>\n The mayor could, for example, roll back regulations that require local government to decide how many parking spots should be required for commercial businesses, and leave it to developers, which might encourage investment in the city. Or, instead of spending $30 million on a new municipal grocery store in East Harlem, with prices subsidized by taxpayers, Mr. Kober wrote recently<\/a>, the mayor could take that money and upgrade existing small supermarkets or try to bring in more discount stores like Aldi and Lidl. <\/p>\n Stephen Eide, a fellow focused on social services, is hoping that he can appeal to Mr. Mamdani\u2019s interest in \u201csewer socialism,\u201d the idea that progressive government should be laser focused on improving city services. He argues that decreasing spending<\/a> can actually help orient local government to the city\u2019s most urgent problems.<\/p>\n \u201cKeeping government small to us is not an end to itself,\u201d Mr. Eide said. \u201cIt\u2019s a larger goal of making sure that government can focus on the stuff that only government can do,\u201d like providing better treatment for mentally ill people on the subway or responding more quickly to 911 calls. <\/p>\n Nicole Gelinas is a transit expert whom even some critics of the Manhattan Institute take seriously. (Brad Lander, an ally of the mayor, said he had \u201clearned a lot\u201d from her even if they often disagree.) She has spent the last few months honing her central thesis of the Mamdani era: The mayor has promised a vision he can\u2019t actually deliver on<\/a>. She considers it her responsibility to help reset expectations.<\/p>\n She has noted that Mr. Mamdani showed some fiscal restraint by backtracking on two promises he made as a candidate; he has pushed state lawmakers to delay an expensive cap on public-school class sizes and scaled back<\/a> a proposed expansion of a multi-billion-dollar housing voucher program. <\/p>\n But finding the money for free buses and more free child care, she contends, could force the mayor to make more difficult decisions about what gets funded and what doesn\u2019t. <\/p>\n \u201cThe idea that you are going to have some magic bag of tricks and the city will become affordable,\u201d Ms. Gelinas said, \u201cit\u2019s just not going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n Patrick Gaspard, a top adviser to Mr. Mamdani who led the Democratic National Committee, said he had found the Manhattan Institute\u2019s work to be rigorous and thoughtful. Its scholars, he said, are engaging in \u201cthe kind of conversation reasonable people can have about the appropriate role of government, the relationship to the private sector, what it means to general growth.\u201d <\/p>\n But Mr. Gaspard took a dim view of the institute\u2019s relevance these days. <\/p>\n \u201cThey have neither the political heft or the cultural currency to be consequential,\u201d he said. \u201cThey just don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Someone is going to have to pick up the pieces\u2019<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t always like that. In the 1990s, the Manhattan Institute had so much political heft<\/a> that Rudolph W. Giuliani, the city\u2019s Republican mayor, later joked about having basically plagiarized its ideas. <\/p>\n In those days, the group identified crime, poor city services and struggling public schools as New York\u2019s biggest problems and helped steer city government toward solutions. <\/p>\n Many believe the city became safer and more functional as a result. <\/p>\n But the broken windows theory of policing evangelized by the Manhattan Institute, which held that the police should focus more on small crimes to prevent larger ones, exacerbated racial tensions in the city when police officers targeted Black and Latino New Yorkers at higher rates than other groups.<\/p>\n And the rightward pivot of the late 1990s arguably marked the beginning of the moment when New York became so desirable, and so expensive, that the city began to slip out of reach for its working-class and middle-class residents \u2014 and then for its reasonably well-off <\/a>ones.<\/p>\n Today, Mr. Salam\u2019s warnings about the mayor and his agenda still have an audience with New York\u2019s moneyed elite. <\/p>\n Hundreds filed into a majestic old bank building in Midtown in May for the institute\u2019s annual black-tie fund-raising gala. Outside, protesters greeted attendees with chants of \u201ctax the rich,\u201d a slogan of the city\u2019s recent political revolution. Inside the room, Mr. Salam told the assembled donors \u2014 who were paying as much as $250,000 for a table \u2014 that the protesters represented a certain view: that \u201cprosperity is something to be handed out by the state, and that the only thing standing in between them and the lives they want is someone else\u2019s wealth.\u201d<\/p>\n The Manhattan Institute, he told them, \u201cexists to confront this seductive lie and to stand for something better.\u201d<\/p>\n Recruiting allies in other precincts of Mr. Mamdani\u2019s New York, though, could be harder.<\/p>\n They are trying. Some of the Manhattan Institute\u2019s local fellows turn out a weekly newsletter on Substack about city government, the Bigger Apple<\/a>. City Journal, the Manhattan Institute\u2019s in-house magazine, recently delivered a scoop<\/a> on how one of Mr. Mamdani\u2019s commissioners had scheduled a meeting with an Iranian diplomat without the mayor\u2019s knowledge.<\/p>\n One of the institute\u2019s fellows, Daniel Golliher, teaches his own course<\/a> about New York civics, and requires his students to attend community board meetings and memorize sections of city law. The goal is to create more educated voters \u2014 and perhaps eventually city employees and politicians.<\/p>\n The Manhattan Institute\u2019s credibility with fellow New Yorkers may depend on the ability of its content creators to signal that their bias is, above all, pro-New York. Mr. Salam calls himself \u201can aggro partisan of urban life,\u201d and draws a line between the institute and those on the right who see the city as inherently doomed. <\/p>\n \u201cWe are trying to make an argument for a multiethnic, metropolitan future for the country,\u201d said Mr. Salam, whose parents immigrated here from Bangladesh before he was born. \u201cThat is a place where others on the right see as hopeless or deserving of their misery, we affirmatively reject that.\u201d He says New York is the only place he\u2019s ever wanted to live, the only place he could ever live, especially because he never got his driver\u2019s license.<\/p>\n Despite its New York City roots, the Manhattan Institute is unquestionably part of the national conservative landscape, in ways that may alienate some New Yorkers.<\/p>\n Although the institute is not central to the MAGA movement, its work is funded by some of the same conservative megadonors<\/a> who support President Trump. It produces proposals that Republicans marshal in polarizing national political fights, like recent draft legislation that would reclassify disruptive acts of protest like blocking roads as \u201ccivil terrorism\u201d felonies<\/a>. Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and writer on the payroll, has led the movement against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.<\/p>\n Even some of its New York-focused scholars have dinged the mayor in ways that can come across as less than collaborative. Ms. Gelinas wrote a New York Post column<\/a> headlined: \u201cMamdani acts like a petulant teen in front of the king and queen.\u201d Another Manhattan Institute fellow wrote an article accusing<\/a> Mr. Mamdani of being a \u201cshow-off,\u201d more interested in photo opportunities \u201cthan the dirty work of governing.\u201d And after Mr. Mamdani asked New Yorkers to keep their air-conditioners at 78 degrees during a heat wave, following the same advice as mayors before him, a Manhattan Institute fellow posted a video<\/a> in which he turned his air-conditioning down to 67 degrees, while blasting the song \u201cGod Bless the U.S.A.\u201d<\/p>\n Liz Krueger, an influential state senator from Manhattan, said she had stopped reading most of the think tank\u2019s output years ago because she felt it was biased. \u201cToo many of the far-right messengers in today\u2019s era are nut jobs,\u201d said Ms. Krueger, a Democrat. \u201cI don\u2019t know whether that includes the Manhattan Institute because that would require I actually read it.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Salam said he does not need New Yorkers to like everything he and his colleagues say. <\/p>\n He imitated a serious-sounding scold who might say: \u201cThese guys are terrible, noxious, a dangerous force, but by the way, I agree with them on some things.\u201d <\/p>\n If that\u2019s the case, he added in his regular voice, \u201cthat\u2019s wonderful.\u201d<\/p>\n As for Mr. Mamdani, Mr. Salam doesn\u2019t believe they have ever been in the same room, and isn\u2019t sure they would have all that much to talk about. \u201cHe seems to have a rather well-developed theory about the world,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n This is also something one could say about Mr. Salam. He holds an admittedly idealized memory of his own childhood, in Borough Park, during the Giuliani years. His parents worked long hours and saved enough money to eventually buy a small home in nearby Kensington. They rented out the top floors, and the family slept in a partially finished basement, until they saved enough money to take over the whole house.<\/p>\n Mr. Salam now makes about $800,000 a year from his post at the institute and lives with his own family in a home in a nearby neighborhood. The story of his family\u2019s rise from one generation to the next is part of why he sees New York as the ultimate beacon of ambition, prosperity and capitalism. <\/p>\n His current neighbors in a leafy, low-slung part of the city close to Prospect Park are perfectly lovely, he said. Many of them have more than his parents did when he was a child: social and cultural capital, and at least some family money. And yet they seem to feel the city owes them even more, he said, in the form of free child care or buses or cheaper groceries. <\/p>\n Even if he can\u2019t convince them otherwise, there may be something else that will: Mr. Mamdani failing to deliver all he has promised. He sees it as inevitable. <\/p>\n \u201cSomeone is going to have to pick up the pieces,\u201d Mr. Salam said. \u201cAnd I think that\u2019s going to be our responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reihan Salam has a lot in common with the man he is trying to stop. 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