The writer is a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, a professor at the University of Toronto and Kresge Foundation fellow
The approach of Zohran Mamdani’s swearing in as New York’s next mayor has set the city’s economic establishment on edge. Hedge fund managers, private equity partners, investment bankers and real estate titans warn that new taxes and regulations will drive business away. Conservative pundits say that capital and people will flee and the city’s economy will go into terminal decline.
But this isn’t the first time New York has been written off. The city has survived far worse — the Spanish flu, the Depression, deindustrialisation and white flight, fiscal crises that nearly bankrupted it, riots and the crack epidemic of the 1980s. Every time, it came back stronger.