June 12, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
The New York mayor’s race has supposedly been about the paths of two men: the comeback of Andrew Cuomo after he resigned in disgrace from the governorship and the independent bid of the current mayor, Eric Adams, whom federal authorities indicted on bribery charges last year — charges withdrawn after Mr. Adams cultivated a relationship with President Trump.
But beneath the surface, beyond the drama of those two men, the largest and arguably most important American city is in a fraught period of transition following the pandemic. New York’s population is finally growing again, according to census data, but housing is expensive and scarce, the education system is facing significant challenges, and the Trump presidency is making strong leadership at City Hall all the more important.
From transportation to immigration policy, health care and tariffs, the city’s exposure to the federal government is immense, and the problems that need to be fixed within the five boroughs are only growing more acute. If New York is going to be a better place to live for the millions who call it home, the next mayor must address these six high-pressure issues. The place to begin is the housing crisis.
The next mayor will
inherit a city facing a
housing crisis at risk of
squeezing out the middle
class — and pushing
low-income New Yorkers
into homelessness.
In a city where two-thirds of residents are renters, the soaring cost of housing is the biggest threat to New York’s future. To understand the sweep of the crisis, look at the numbers:
The usual financial advice is to spend about 30 percent of monthly income on rent, but more than half of renters in New York exceed that figure, according to city data. More than 400,000 households with incomes of under $50,000 put more than 50 percent of their income toward rent. In the first quarter of 2025, median rent in the city hit $3,397, according to Realtor.com, a nearly 20 percent increase from five years ago.
From 2011 to 2023, New York added just 353,000 housing units for a population of more than eight million, according to city data. The overall vacancy rate for rentals is 1.4 percent. The vacancy rate for rentals available for $1,100 per month or less is 0.39 percent. At the same time, the poverty rate in New York was nearly double the national average in 2023, with a quarter of residents reporting that they struggled to pay for basics such as housing and food.
That means that while the cost of housing is causing pain for renters of all but the wealthiest backgrounds, for thousands of low-income New Yorkers, it is leading to homelessness. Over 86,000 people are living in city shelters, a figure that includes more than 31,000 children. About 30 percent of the total figure is made up of migrant arrivals, Neha Sharma, a spokeswoman for the Department of Social Services, told The Times. And for those in the middle, the housing shortage is a significant threat to the city’s tax base. From 2020 to 2023, a period that coincided with the pandemic, nearly one half million people left the city, according to a report last year from the Fiscal Policy Institute. The report found that Black New Yorkers were leaving in large numbers, as were families with young children.
Mayor Eric Adams and his predecessor Bill de Blasio made at least some progress here. By the time Mr. de Blasio left office in December 2021 his administration had preserved or begun building more than 200,000 units of affordable housing. Mr. Adams’s housing plan, known as the City of Yes, has changed onerous zoning laws to make it easier to build in some parts of the city, especially in commercial areas.
This is a generational problem that demands drastic action, including a regional housing plan, from the next mayor and the governor. The next mayor will need to act with urgency to build affordable housing and fight hard to keep low- and middle-income tenants in their homes. Some solutions could be beefing up rental and legal assistance programs, backing protections for renters in Albany and preserving affordable housing where it still exists. Ideally, the next mayor would also work to build political support for the construction of the multifamily housing badly needed across the region.
Public safety may
be slowly improving
post-pandemic, but many
feel New York is less
safe than it once was.
New York City has had to grapple with a spike in crime that began during the pandemic, then abated but remained stubbornly higher than in the decade before Covid. Mayor Adams, a former New York Police Department captain, was elected in 2021 on the promise to turn this around.
The data on crime so far this year from the N.Y.P.D. suggests public safety may be back on track. The city saw the lowest number of shootings in the first quarter of 2025 than any period since modern record-keeping began in 1994.
Still, crime rates in recent years have been higher than before the pandemic, and many New Yorkers have been left with a lingering sense that the city is less safe. This is particularly true on the subways, where a series of high-profile crimes — like one in which a woman was lit on fire and killed in a random attack — have led to unease.
It will be up to the next mayor to solidify the promising momentum in crime trends, while also exercising the oversight the Police Department needs. Doing both is the best way to restore the public’s shaken trust in the city’s public safety.
While New York City’s
economy is the largest
of any metropolitan area
in America, it is facing
strong headwinds.
The next mayor will inherit an economy that is resilient but also could be greatly affected by the city’s housing shortage and the turbulent political environment in Washington.
Five years after the pandemic devastated New York, at one point in 2020 wiping out nearly one-quarter of its private-sector jobs, the city’s economy has largely recovered. New York has added more than one million jobs since then, and the labor market has rebounded. Wall Street — which provides about 7 percent of city tax receipts — did, too, keeping billions in tax revenue flowing. In 2024, the total dollar amount in bonuses on Wall Street reached $47 billion, according to a report from the state comptroller.
Other indicators are more worrisome.
Unemployment has remained slightly higher than the national average. In April, for instance, it was 5 percent, compared to the national rate of 4.2 percent. Unemployment among Black New Yorkers is 8 percent.
The city is also expecting 400,000 fewer tourists this year, a possible $4 billion loss in spending. This decline would be tough to combat if foreign travelers begin avoiding the United States to protest Mr. Trump’s policies or out of fear of being ensnared by his hard-line immigration policies.
New York’s education
system is failing many
of its students. Fixing
it will require resolve.
The next mayor will face the challenge of a deeply unequal and racially segregated public school system in which Hispanic and Black students are showing significant signs of educational distress.
For all the fights over expanding access to the city’s top-performing schools, the evidence is clear that the children who make up the majority of the system are being failed: Just 36.4 percent of Hispanic students and 38.6 percent of Black students in third to eighth grade are proficient in English, according to a 2024 state assessment, compared to 65.8 percent of white students and 70 percent of Asian students in the same grades. The National Assessment of Educational Progress exam last year found that fewer than one-third of the city’s fourth and eighth graders overall were proficient in reading.
Mr. Adams has begun instituting a new literacy curriculum. But New York’s schools are in dire need of a much larger, sustained focus from City Hall.
Fixing what is broken in the city’s schools requires political capital and political courage. Mayor Michael Bloomberg did this when he closed lower-performing high schools and created “small schools of choice,” a shift that provoked anger at the time but yielded higher rates of college enrollment and other gains for students living in poverty. Mayor de Blasio did this when he secured state funding — no easy task — to establish a landmark free prekindergarten program. Under Mr. Adams, that kind of ambition has stalled. It will be up to the next mayor to do better by the city’s most vulnerable children.
Improving quality of life
is essential to keeping
New York competitive
nationally and globally.
New York, among the most dynamic cities in the world, is also expensive, dirty and loud. The most successful mayors have understood the role of bold ideas that make it easier to live, work and play here.
Mayor David Dinkins expanded the Police Department, hiring officers that helped make for safer streets. Mayor Bloomberg worked with Gov. George Pataki to remake the city’s neglected waterfront into parkland. Mayor de Blasio established universal prekindergarten, a boon for early childhood education but also for working parents. He also set about trying to improve the streetscape to make the city safer for pedestrians.
Being mayor isn’t just about solving problems but keeping the city at the height of innovation and aspiration. It will be incumbent on the next mayor to make his or her mark.
With the current mayor
dogged by scandal, the
next mayor’s leadership
abilities will be paramount.
The scandals of New York’s current mayor have weakened city government and damaged the public trust. They have also left many New Yorkers fearing their mayor is beholden to President Trump.
Mr. Adams was indicted on charges of bribery and fraud last September. Federal prosecutors in New York said he received illegal foreign campaign donations, then helped those donors, who had ties to the Turkish government, by pressuring the city’s Fire Department to sign off on the opening of the Turkish consular building in Manhattan without the proper fire inspection.
As if that weren’t enough, the mayor then appeared to appeal to Mr. Trump for help. Justice Department officials ordered the charges against Mr. Adams dropped, saying doing so would allow him to aid in the president’s deportation campaign. Weeks later, the mayor announced that he would allow federal immigration officials to work from Rikers Island, the city’s troubled jail complex.
It may be years before the public knows the full impact of Mr. Adams’s betrayal. But even in a moment in which millions of Americans have lost trust in so many of the country’s institutions and leaders, his scurrilous actions stand out.
The job of mayor isn’t about working for special interests, personal gain, billionaire friends or even the president of the United States. The job is to protect the city’s millions of residents and its economy, fearlessly and with independence.
