The governor and mayor must agree on the issue of migrants and say: Enough!
The sun is rising, the tide is rolling in – and New York’s mayors and governors hate each other. It’s in nature.
The only thing surprising about the nasty letter Kathy Hochul just sent to Eric Adams is that it was so long in coming.
Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay were at each other’s throats just hours after his inauguration. There was a traffic strike.
Hugh Carey and Ed Koch, former fellow congressmen, have had frequent, if relatively polite, arguments since Gotham’s narrow escape from bankruptcy.
George Pataki and Rudy Giuliani engaged in epic confrontations, largely conducted by their respective publicists, as the city recovered from a near-crime-induced collapse.
Yet somehow these reluctant but inevitable partners made it all work, and New York prospered as a result.
Unfortunately, entropy is also eternal. To paraphrase the Norma Desmond character in Sunset Boulevard, the problems are still great; It is the politicians who have become small.
That said, Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio couldn’t make it. Can Hochul and Adams?
They seem on the brink of collapse – overwhelmed by the problems, the ongoing refugee crisis being only the most pressing.
Certainly, Hochul and Adams were on migration routes long before the first buses arrived from Texas.
Now it’s no longer possible to ignore the crisis – so in her letter to the mayor, the governor naturally dismisses the blame and accuses the city of not doing enough to help itself.
It’s not exactly a “stunning” statement, but it’s close enough.
And since this is happening just after the government torpedoed its request to use Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn as a shelter for migrants, there’s undoubtedly a lot of trouble involved.
The thing is, though, this time Hochul is more right than wrong.
She has a lot to answer for – will the migrant tent at the old Creedmoor Psychiatric Center really cost $350 million? — but Adams fell flat first.
To be clear: Yes, City Hall is scooping out billions – but that’s not a solution, it’s a big part of the problem.
Here’s the rest:
41 years ago, New York City conjured up a universal “housing right” out of thin air – anyone, anywhere, who makes it to Gotham gets a roof, free, by request only.
There is also free food, health care and schooling for the children.
It took a while for the world to understand. But here it is, so the world is coming — and because the world has more people than New York has money, space, or the ability to handle, the first thing to do is go away the “right to housing.”
(Really. How can the city make a credible plea for federal aid when the perfectly reasonable answer is, “Well, you asked for it?”)
Adams and Hochul must somehow exceed expectations here – get on the same political page; We need to weather the continuing fierce opposition to the necessary reforms and get spending under control – and that’s just the beginning.
But other governors and other mayors made it happen — not to mention the fireworks along the way — because in the end, New York was what mattered most.
Whether Kathy Hochul and Eric Adams can keep up is the question of the hour.
And it shouldn’t be long before New York finds out.
