Whitney Tilson for Mayor?
The race for the Democratic Party’s nomination in New York City’s mayoral contest has narrowed to two men: Andrew Cuomo, New York’s disgraced former governor, and Zohran Mamdani, a state senator and member of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America).
Cuomo has led in every poll except Public Policy Polling, which gave Mamdani a slight edge. Complicating the race is that New York uses ranked choice voting, which means a candidate who gets the most votes in the first round may not finish as the winner. In the polls that take that into account, Mamdani gains significantly on Cuomo but doesn’t score a win.
But the race isn’t over until Tuesday, and there are seven other candidates in the Democratic contest who have some views on what New York needs.
I met with one of them, Whitney Tilson, to discuss his campaign for mayor. He may not, as he quickly admits, be a favorite to win, but he brings a lot of experience as well as new ideas to the table.
Tilson is the 58-year-old son of Peace Corps volunteers who met and married in the Philippines. He spent part of his childhood in Tanzania and Nicaragua before heading off to get degrees in government and business from Harvard. His first job out of college was joining the founding team of the non-profit Teach for America, which places teachers in underserved communities around the country. He then went on to manage a hedge fund, Kase Capital Management, for 18 years. Since retiring from finance, he has been involved in business writing and charity (from helping those suffering in Somalia’s wars to raising money for victims of COVID in New York).
Housing
On housing, Tilson doesn’t think the answer is more publicly funded housing. Instead, he wants a city that prioritizes changing zoning rules and cutting red tape so that private developers can build the housing New York needs.
It’s all supply and demand…
…The majority of the people on the [debate] stage were talking about rent [freezes]. I want rents to go down by 20%…
…Have you ever looked at Austin? Austin's rents went up by 25% in a single year, you know, coming out of the pandemic, a lot of people moving down there. And the city business leaders and government saw that as a crisis … They changed zoning restrictions, sped up the regulatory approvals, etc. … As a result, there's a glut and rents and housing prices have dropped.
In general, this seems accurate, although it’s unclear how much resulted from Austin changing the rules and how much was due to Austin already being more development-friendly than New York City.
From a National Multifamily Housing Council report:
In recent years, Austin has adopted more pro-housing policy in its Home Options for Middle-income Empowerment (HOME) initiative—reducing minimum lot sizes and allowing up to three units on single-family lots—but these changes came after the large spike in development seen post COVID. — NMHC
So while the NMHC sees deregulating and up-zoning as good, the new housing was helped more because
Austin, and the state of Texas generally, has a more favorable regulatory environment than much of the coasts. — NMHC
It’s this East Coast clogged regulatory environment that Tilson wants to fix.
Under Bloomberg, it was two years start to finish to develop a project, from getting zoning and approvals to revenue generation. Now it’s four years. We need to get it back to two years.
Or to quote him from the first debate:
Unleash the private sector to build a lot more supply … Ease zoning restrictions, fight Nimbyism.
Unlike Tilson, the other mayoral candidates support a rent freeze. When asked during the second debate, five of the seven candidates raised their hands in support of a freeze. Cuomo waffled by saying he’d leave the decision up to the rent board.
The evidence is overwhelming that a freeze would be bad for New York.
Freezing rents freezes owners’ income while costs—property taxes, maintenance, utilities—continue to rise. Some owners may be able to cut into profits, but others will be forced to cut back on building upkeep, letting needed repairs slide. New developers are less likely to build in a climate that makes higher profits harder to achieve, which will exacerbate the housing crunch.
A freeze is also regressive. It helps tenants no matter what their income. Sure, some working-class tenants may be shielded from higher costs, but plenty of upper-middle-class New Yorkers also get to live in those same protected apartments.
Public Safety
In general, Tilson is happy with the direction crime numbers have been heading.
Murders down from January through June 1st … Six of the seven major felonies down this year….
…I give a lot, a majority, of the credit to [police commissioner] Jessica Tisch. I will keep her on.
Like most of the mayoral candidates (Mamdani being a major exception), Tilson supports hiring more cops.
The key to reducing crime is fully staffed police out there enforcing the laws … We need to make crime illegal.”
He is also against closing Rikers because New York doesn’t have enough cells for the number of prisoners.
What would he do to fix Rikers?
Shrink it and rebuild it. Modern jail facilities, like the new jails being built, require 75 percent fewer corrections officers … The most dangerous thing about Rikers is the physical plant … There are areas that don't have camera surveillance just because they're hundred-year-old facilities … If you can get Rikers down to 2,000 from 7,500, I think you can fix it
Homelessness
What about the problem of homelessness?
We're talking about the street homeless, about 4,000 people. Not the 90% of homeless who are in shelters.
I don't think you can eliminate it until you outlaw it. I would call on the city council to reverse the homeless bill of rights. Not all of it, just one piece of it: the right to sleep outside. A lot of communities, in fact, the entire state of Florida, but even in liberal California, San Jose, and San Diego, they are passing legislation saying, no, you're not allowed to sleep outside.
This is a forcing mechanism to make the city serve the last and most difficult 10%, because nobody wants beat cops going in and arresting people and sending people to Rikers. It's not a crime, it's a tragedy for people who are out there. But what no other candidate is willing to say, because they get accused of criminalizing homelessness, is you have to outlaw it—combined with the involuntary commitment law that's getting passed in Albany.
Of course, this brought up deinstitutionalization, a nationwide trend (that began in the 1950s and accelerated through the 1970s1) which shut down mental hospitals (many of which were horrible), but often failed to find any decent substitutes, leaving some vulnerable people abandoned on the streets.
The first 50 percent [of deinstitutionalization] probably made sense. The last 50 percent has been a disaster.
I asked someone what they did when they shut down the mental health hospital. The answer was: “We gave them a bus ticket to the Port Authority.”
Education
What issues does Tilson feel have not been talked about enough?
On education reform, we should end social promotion after third grade. If a kid can't read even at a basic level, we say stop. You don't go on to fourth grade. We're not going to allow you to keep lying to the kids and parents [telling them] that things are fine.
I'm the only champion of charter schools out there. We've got the best charter sector in the country. It's really rigorous.
Could we convert New York’s schools to a charter system?
Right now about 15% of New York City public school kids [are in charter schools]. And I can see that number going up modestly over time, so I'm not calling for a New Orleans-style, you know, charterized the whole system. But I do think we need to introduce charter-type accountability in the system. There are public schools that have been failing kids for not just decades, but generations.
Tilson pointed out that Mississippi has had educational success by focusing on the basics. Teachers in Mississippi used proven educational practices like phonics (rather than trendy but ineffective techniques like Whole Word and Whole Language approaches), and students were required to repeat third grade if they didn’t meet reading standards. As a result, a cash-starved school system still managed to improve immensely between 2013 and 2022.
Not Mamdani
In the first debate, Tilson said that he was ABZ (Anyone But Zohran), playfully echoing all the progressives who were saying ABC (Anyone But Cuomo). In the second debate, he said that he’d place Cuomo number two after voting for himself.
Realistically, Tilson knows his chance of winning is somewhere between slim and divine intervention.
Yeah, with polling at 1% in the last poll … So what do you do? I got into the race recognizing it was always gonna be a very difficult lane for an outsider first-time candidate.
But as Mamdani rose in the polls, Tilson became more focused on making sure he did not win the Democratic nomination.
I think he is a wolf in sheep's clothing. I think he is at his core, a radical socialist who truly believes in the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America], the organization he is one of the leaders of, to abolish capitalism, defund the police, and whip up as much anti-Israel sentiment as possible. All of those are disqualifying for me. And I put him in a very different, much more dangerous category than the guy polling third, Brad Lander, who is just your run-of-the-mill progressive. I don't think it would bring about the ruin of this city if Lander were to become mayor. I think Mamdani would ruin this city.
Because he sees Mamdani as such a threat, Tilson has been following through on his ABZ motto. Tilson’s latest Facebook ad touts a semi-endorsement from the New York Times, but spends much of its 30 seconds explaining why Mamdani would be a terrible choice. “Let me keep it simple. Rank me #1, Cuomo #2, and not Mamdani!”
What to do?
I liked Tilson. I took an issues quiz before meeting him, and he was my top match. We agree on many points, from how to build more housing to wanting schools to have stricter standards. I also enjoyed our chat. He’s a smart guy interested in a wide range of topics (at one point, we segued from the 1898 Spanish-American War to the Bataan Death March of 1942 to running the New York City Marathon, which Tilson has done, and I have not).
I also share some of Tilson’s worries about Mamdani.
I don’t see him as quite the extreme threat that Tilson does, probably because I am less concerned about how a New York mayor feels about Israel. And unlike some, I do not think Mamdani is antisemitic.
But even so, some of Mamdani’s views on Israel suggest a worldview and style that is wrong for New York City. Below is his official statement the day after the October 7 attacks, where 1,200 died, mostly Israeli civilians. His response gave equal weight to the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians “in the last 36 hours.” While it’s reasonable (if politically maladroit) to make the case that in the long haul both Israelis and Palestinians have contributed to the current quagmire, that’s not what you should be saying in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 horrors. It’s like yelling “All Lives Matter” at a Black Lives Matter rally. It’s neither the time nor the place. That choice, and others, suggest that Mamdani’s instinct is always to follow the DSA position.
Mamdani has toned down some of his rhetoric, but given his policy recommendations, I don’t think he’s changed his views. He supported defunding the police in 2020, now he calls for a Department of Community Safety to replace some police functions. He’s also going to make city buses free (never mind the hit to the budget), and create government-sponsored grocery stores (which will almost certainly be expensive boondoggles that will also take away income from small neighborhood bodegas and groceries).
It is clear that Mamdani remains the anti-capitalist activist who tweeted this back in 2020. This may wow the crowds at the DSA, but calling what Amazon or Walmart do “theft” is juvenile nonsense.
As Michael Powell said in The Atlantic
Zohran Mamdani is a left-wing daydream of a New York City mayoral candidate
But few of Mamdani’s policy and funding proposals weather scrutiny
So I’m ABZ as well.
My final ranked-choice vote on Tuesday will be:
Whitney Tilson
Zellnor Myrie
Brad Lander
Adrienne Adams
and, unfortunately, Andrew Cuomo.
Why vote for Cuomo at all? Because it’s a two-man race, and if Cuomo doesn’t win, Mamdani will. I’d prefer a sleazy, competent mayor to a socialist whose goals, if achieved, would damage my city in multiple ways.
It reminds me of the 1991 governor’s race in Louisiana. Corrupt former governor Edwin Edwards had won the Democratic nomination, but he was up against David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the KKK, whom Louisiana’s Republican voters had chosen as their nominee. Darkly humorous bumper stickers during the campaign said, “Vote for The Crook: It’s Important.” Edwards was victorious.2
Good luck, New York!
Popular media fed some of the anger at abusive institutions. A 1972 television exposé, Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace, hosted by a young reporter named Geraldo Rivera, showed the terrible conditions at one Staten Island facility. In 1975, the critically praised film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest illustrated abuses at a fictional mental hospital.
To be clear, I think Mamdani, as a human, is a perfectly decent dude, unlike racist Duke. But he’d still make an awful mayor!
Plenty of voters who want an alternative to Cuomo and Mamdani, *seven* other candidates on the ballot--and none of them have caught fire. Why?
Andrew Cuomo not Mario (see first sentence)