New York City’s Chaos Mayor

Eric Adams sounded certain—his city was in crisis. It was September 6, 2023. The mayor of New York was standing in a public-school gym on the West Side of Manhattan, in his shirtsleeves, mic in one hand. “The city we knew, we’re about to lose,” he warned. More than 100,000 migrants had made their way to New York over the past year. Caring for them would be an all but impossible task. “This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City.”

And the mayor was getting a little tired of being pressed on how he was going to handle the situation. “As you ask me a question about migrants,” he said to a group of community leaders and local officials, “tell me what role you played.”

In the weeks that followed, Adams called for massive cuts to make up for the $12 billion he said New York would need in order to provide shelter, medical care, and classrooms for the migrants. He and his deputies proposed slashing services including police-academy classes, pre-K funding, and public-library hours; they even reduced the number of firefighters per truck.

And then Adams’s prediction fizzled. Thanks to better-than-projected tax revenues and cheaper-than-expected costs for migrant care, New York found itself with an extra $3 billion in its budget. The proposed cuts were mostly restored. The “migrant crime wave” that Adams’s police commissioner claimed was “washing over our city” never materialized, with some high-profile exceptions. The city incorporated 34,000 migrant children into its public-school system. Providing services for the estimated 65,000 migrants who remain in New York’s shelter system is still a titanic challenge. But the idea that they collectively presented an existential threat to a city of 8.3 million—a city that survived the crack epidemic, 9/11, and the worst of COVID—seems, in hindsight, a bit hysterical.