The Affordability Election

Out of respect for the three candidates, I waited until after Thursday's Mayoral Debate to complete and mail my ballot. Once upon a time, I thought the ideal was for everyone to vote together on the same day - a common civic celebration of our shared citizenship. Then came the ease of early voting, which in Tennessee where I was living at the time I could do at any polling site, thus sparing my back and bad knees from having to walk up and down the hill to vote at my designated downtown voting place. Having broken the link with a community election day, covid and the challenge of getting around NYC made voting by mail the increasingly easy next option. 

In any case, voting has more often than not been tribal. If anything it is infinitely more so now. All of which means that there is little or no reason to wait until Election Day, as if one's voting decision were still in doubt.

That said, this is a very issue-based election. The issue is affordability, which is the current crisis of our city and the moral crisis of our time. Just a year ago, Princeton U. Press published David Lay Williams' The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx. NYC's affordability crisis is a direct consequence of the  politically, morally, and socially disastrous increase in economic inequality that has characterized American life in recent decades.

Thus, in his New York Times review of Jonathan Mahler's Gods of New York, Garth Rik Hallberg concluded with this pointedly contemporary observation: “Mahler’s charting of the fallout of the ’80s boom, or, if you prefer, his demonstration that it was a chimera to begin with, complicates the question of alternatives. And it arrives at just the right moment, as New Yorkers prepare to vote, once again, on whether the benefits of a stratified city outweigh the costs."

Obviously, there are other issues that concern New Yorkers, but this singular substantive moral issue - "whether the benefits of a stratified city outweigh the costs" - is shaping up to be the decisive one in this mayoral election cycle. Hoe New York voters answer that question will send a significant signal to the rest of this country, whose voters have so recently seemed to be aligning themselves with increasing inequality and exclusion.