Update On "Homelessness" In New York

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Update On "Homelessness" In New York

  • Recently (May 2026) I did an update on the “homelessness” situation in San Francisco. The title was “The Homeless Industrial Complex Eats San Francisco For Lunch.”‍ ‍

  • I have taken a particular interest in “homelessness” in San Francisco ever since that city had a big referendum back in 2018 to pass a special payroll tax supposedly to solve the “homelessness” problem once and for all. The result in San Francisco, you will not be surprised to learn, was that the Homeless Industrial Complex has since swallowed up all the new funding and much more, while the number of people identified as “homeless” has only gone up, and then up some more.

  • But how about New York? In recent years the City hasn’t exactly been bragging about its success in this area, so data have been a little hard to come by. However, a few days ago (September 5) the New York Post had a story that gives an idea of the overall picture.

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The World View Of The Supreme Court's Liberal Bloc

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  • Over the course of the past week, the Supreme Court has released a group of the most important decisions of this year’s term. Most of those decisions involved the federal government/Trump Administration as a party.

  • As you probably have seen, the government won the majority of those decisions (ability of President to fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, ability of President to end “Temporary Protected Status” for certain migrants, ability of government to refuse to consider asylum applications from those who have not entered the U.S.), but also lost a few (birthright citizenship, ability of President to fire Federal Reserve Board Member Lisa Cook).

  • Many things about these cases are interesting and worth commenting on, but to me one thing is particularly fascinating: the three “liberal” justices (Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson) voted as a unified bloc in every case.

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The Race For Congress In New York's 10th District: Dumb And Dumber

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The Race For Congress In New York's 10th District: Dumb And Dumber

  • I know that you readers are all hungry for some information on the race for Congress in New York’s 10th District. So I am here to fulfill your wishes.

  • NY-10 is the home District of the Manhattan Contrarian. It is a very prominent District, encompassing Lower Manhattan (from about 14th Street south) and a large piece of Northwest Brooklyn. Neighborhoods in this District that you may have heard of include Greenwich Village, Soho and Tribeca in Manhattan, and Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope in Brooklyn. And then there is the Financial District/Wall Street area — the heart of the financial system of the U.S., if not the world — which is also in this District. The District’s population includes large numbers of highly-educated and high income people. This 2024 study at SmartAsset.com found that the District ranked 12th wealthiest in the country as measured by percent of households earning more than $200,000 per year, with more than 103,000 such households. The District’s business community includes many prominent entities. As examples, the headquarters of Goldman Sachs and of Citigroup are in this District, plus major operations of companies like Google, Disney and Meta.

  • You probably already know that this District leans heavily Democratic, and particularly toward the elite and “progressive” factions of that Party. What you may not fully realize is what that actually means in practice in today’s bizarro world. In practice, the key to winning in this District is to promise to act as vigorously as humanly possible against the interests of the District’s residents.

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The Homeless Industrial Complex Eats San Francisco For Lunch

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The Homeless Industrial Complex Eats San Francisco For Lunch

  • It’s been a long time since I have done an update on the homelessness situation in San Francisco. The reason is that I have avoided the issue until sufficient evidence had accumulated to make the obvious conclusion completely definitive and undeniable.

  • It was all the way back in 2018 that some of San Francisco’s foremost do-gooders, led by billionaire Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, organized a referendum to implement a new payroll tax to raise the revenue to solve the homelessness problem once and for all.

  • The referendum was designed to raise some $300 million per year, on top of San Fran’s already generous homelessness spending. All of the new spending was to be dedicated to the task of ending the homelessness crisis.

  • On October 24, 2018 — just a few days before the referendum was scheduled to take place — Benioff got an op-ed published in the New York Times advocating for its passage. The gist of the op-ed was that it was time for San Francisco’s business community to step up and get this done.

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The New York Times Thinks That American Taxpayers Are Obligated To Solve The Personal Problems Of Everyone In The World

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  • I often make fun of the liberal mindset that prescribes that all the personal problems of people in our society can and must be solved by government taxing and spending and the creation of more and more “programs” of one sort and another. As I write on my “About” page:

  • The central tenet of [the Manhattan] orthodoxy is that all personal problems of the people in society can be solved by government taxing and spending.  The obvious corollary is that since all problems can be solved by taxing and spending, therefore they must be solved by taxing and spending, and anyone who stands in the way of those solutions is immoral.

  • The fundamental difficulty here, as Margaret Thatcher famously quipped, is that pretty soon you “run out of other people’s money.” And that’s when you are only trying to create perfect fairness and justice within your own country. More recently the progressive orthodoxy has morphed to a point where the American taxpayers are now seen as obligated to solve the personal problems of everyone in the world.

  • Do you think I am exaggerating? Consider if you will the most extreme of possible examples: Afghanistan.

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"Affordability": Two Theories Of How To Achieve It

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"Affordability": Two Theories Of How To Achieve It

  • “Affordability.” That’s the new political mantra of Democratic politicians. Or maybe it’s one of two mantras, the other being that deporting illegal aliens makes ICE the modern-day “Gestapo.”

  • So, how to achieve “affordability”? There are two approaches, which are essentially opposites of each other. Can they both be right?

  • Approach Number 1 is that the government orders producers not to increase prices, and sometimes also offers handouts of one sort or another to favored constituencies to reduce their effective costs. Approach Number 2 is that the government mostly keeps out of the relationship between producers and consumers, and thereby makes the producers reduce their costs if they want to attract customers.

  • My observation would be that there exists an enormous amount of evidence on this subject, all of which supports that proposition that Approach Number 2 works, while Approach Number 1 is counter-productive. But maybe that’s just me.

  • So there was Mikie Sherrill last week in Newark, getting inaugurated as the new (Democratic) Governor of New Jersey.

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