Only smart choices will deliver NYC prosperity

New Yorkers send a clear message: the city does not deliver enough. The recent survey of the Citizens Budget Commission, directly from New Yorkers, painted a brutal image with residents noting quality of life, public services and well below pre-pale levels. Only a third of New Yorkers positively assess the quality of life and only 11% say that the city wisely spends its annual budget of $ 115 billion.

Alarming, the population of New York began to decrease in 2017, then lost almost half a million residents during the Pandemic peak.

While the rapid influx of international migrants has reversed the decline in the population in recent years, interior migration is still a net negative: more people leave New York in other parts of the country than to move.

For example, New York has lost more than 100,000 net residents and their $ 13.7 billion in personal income against Florida between 2018 and 2022. Affairs, concerns about security, lack of space and high taxes lead more New Yorkers to leave the city for other places.

New York has already overcome major challenges. In 1975, the city landed on bankruptcy, having overcome deficits with money borrowed to finance unaffordable programs. Making a tax wall, the city hit services and residents fled. But this crisis has become our return plan. Government, business and work have united to stop the slide and restore budgetary discipline and responsibility, throwing the basics of decades of growth.

Today, New York needs the same reset. With the dynamic elections of conversations on the future of the city, we have to face facts: New York has all the ingredients to be the greatest magnet for talent and the epicenter of the opportunity but will only succeed if our leaders make intelligent choices. We need decisive leadership, daring action and public support for a solid fiscal policy and relentless management that strengthens services while maintaining long -term stability.

This is why CBC is launching intelligent choices, a better future – our call for action to restore the competitive point of New York.

First of all, we have to put the city’s finances in order. City spending exceeds income while federal cuts are looming. Budget gaps are not only figures on a spreadsheet – they show that the city spends more money than it can afford it and telegraphs damaging the future reductions in essential services.

Managers should choose to reduce expenses to sustainable levels, build up rainfall funds during good times and negotiate work agreements that balance fairly fairly wages with budgetary reality.

Second, New Yorkers should get what they pay, so we have to provide services that work. It takes six months to the city to place a homeless household in a newly built unit, during which it remains vacant. Managers must choose management systems that provide results and hold responsible managers.

Let us focus on programs based on evidence in mental education and health and make the difficult choice of eliminating ineffective initiatives, whatever their political popularity.

Third, we must make the city affordable, safe and livable. In the midst of our highest taxes in the nation, our overly expensive and public security concerns, more and more New Yorkers have more difficulty justifying to stay here, to worsen us all.

We must choose to maintain the line on taxes, to withdraw all stops to stimulate the production of housing, make public spaces dynamic and use only tax incentives proven to develop our economy.

Finally, we have to build for the future of New York. Our aging infrastructure is not only embarrassing – it is in the form of a terrible and more and more expensive. Large public works can inflate civic pride, but we must first choose to put in good condition our roads, our bridges and our buildings where we will have no base on which to build our future economy. Choosing standardized designs on personalized designs is not sexy but saves money.

The choices made by the mayor elected in November – and supported by the people – will determine if New York becomes an edifying story or a return story. New York’s greatest strength has always been its ability to reinvent itself. Today, New York must choose governance based on evidence on the policy of inaccessible promises.

The ingredients of success are there. The question is whether the leaders are ambitious enough to pursue major objectives and pragmatic enough to deliver them. The future of New York depends on making smart choices today for a better future tomorrow.

Rein is the president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a civic reflection group and a non -partisan and non -profit guard dog.