Thursday, July 30, 2026

Mamdani needs to make a Nixon goes to China move on Housing

AI reports that according to recent state and local housing data, more than 57,000 rent-stabilized apartments—and roughly 26,000 units classified as vacant but unavailable for rent—are sitting empty in New York City. In a city where the young can’t buy or rent apartments at anything approaching a reasonable price these idle properties are a wasted resource that Mayor Mandani should move to resolve by allowing these properties when renovated to go back on the market without rent control, forever!

Mr. Mayor the forever part is a requirement. It's what will give confidence in investing in a building’s rundown apartments and its infrastructure because the general disrepair of neighborhoods with rent controlled apartments will keep rents low for those willing to endure the blighted zone that rent control created. This proposal will be as ideologically hard for Zohran Mandani to consider as it was for the anticommunist Richard Nixon to go and start relations with Mao’s China but the free market apartments to be made available by this release is a small number added to the million free market apartments already offered and countered by the greater million plus New York apartments that are rent controlled or stabilised.

New York Will Regret Going Into the Grocery Business

What might the city do if it really wanted to deliver lower food prices for everyone? Well, it could relax regulations that make it extremely difficult to open a large retail business and prevent big-box retailers from entering the market. Or it could be a bit less eager to increase labor costs of existing businesses. Instead, it has a plan for government grocery stores that is eerily similar to its system of rent stabilization — by which I mean, an expensive and inefficient way to provide some benefit to a few at the expense of the many.

By Allison Schrager

Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she is author of “An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.”

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

Public charter schools have proved the key to success for minority and low-income students.

The Answer to the Academic Achievement Gap Is Obvious

Jason L. Riley

July 28, 2026 5:17 pm ET

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

It’s hardly been lost on America’s political class that even as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani leads a resurgent local and national left, the famously progressive city of San Francisco, under Mayor Daniel Lurie, appears to be moving decisively in the other direction.

Lurie Is No Mamdani. San Francisco Is Fine With That

July 28, 2026 at 6:00 AM EDT

By Jonathan Weber

Jonathan Weber, author of “City on the Edge: Technology, Politics and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco,” was the Los Angeles Times’s first-ever Silicon Valley reporter, starting in 1990. He was also editor in chief of The Industry Standard and The Bay Citizen, oversaw West Coast news and global technology coverage for Reuters, and co-founded The San Francisco Standard.