20 years ago I finished college and considered where to jump into the Real World and look for a job. With a degree in foreign languages and translation, I wanted a world city with a big literary scene. I could look in Berlin, where I had just spent a semester abroad and made great friends. Or I could look in New York, where I also had dear friends and relatives strewn about the tristate area. In the end, Berlin won the match not just because I had loved my time there so much but because it was so. freaking. affordable.
It’s one of the main reasons why I’m still here 20 years later. And it’s why every chance my partner and I had to consider a stint in New York never worked out.
There is so much to love about New York, and not just the books, the clubs, the theaters, the museums, the bridges, the skyscrapers and the artists who walk on tightropes between them. The Statue of Liberty and the United Nations BELONG in New York because Queens is the most linguistically diverse urban area in the world, with an estimated 800 languages spoken across its dinner tables. And all those speakers know how to handle both hail AND hurricanes. They’re more willing to get by on foot than anyone else in the States. The Atlantic Coastal Plain that those from the Catskills and the Rockies call uninspiring renders New York far more bike-and-wheelchair-friendly than, say, San Francisco.
And while the City proper isn’t exactly my homeland, it is definitely my cultural ancestor, what with my deep Long Island roots. (We Islanders know you love to disown us, New York. But where did we get our ugly accents and loud mouths, our mean humor, the Yiddish vocab, and our unwavering snobbery about pizza, pastries and bagels if not from you?)
I love New York for so many reasons, but what I absolutely hate about New York is that it’s way too easy for someone to conclude that the real, unspoken slogan is: If you don’t have money, we don’t give a f*ck about you. Exorbitant rent and $20,000-a-year preschool fees means that the only families in New York are either rich or close enough to the poverty line to feel its chill. The rich send their kids to elite private schools, leaving the rest alone in the public school system, winning New York the honor of having the most racially segregated school system in the entire U.S. of A. It is, after all, the city that produced Trump.
People struggle to get by in New York, and not just fresh-out-college middle-class kids with parents to fall back on. Millions of people who have just arrived and millions of people who have lived there generations. And they shouldn’t. It doesn’t have to be this way. Mamdani knows that. What he’s pushing for is not that radical. Preschool here in Berlin is free, making all school straight through college free. Middle-class families in Berlin only move to the suburbs if they want a backyard, not because they can’t afford to exist in the city limits. Rent is rising here, but both Berlin and New York can stop it from being callously high if they really want to.
It was a joy to wake up to a Mamdani victory. We know he won’t solve all of New York’s problems. Mayor Mamdani will face massive opposition every step of the way. And there is more than one media empire out to declare him a failure for not fixing everything five minutes after he takes the oath. But his victory will say something great about the place. It will show that most New Yorkers want the best possible New York there is. And in the city that constantly likes to brag that anything is possible, why the f*ck shouldn’t we get excited about that?
Painting On Scars 