New York mayor calls for end of private property

Dear fellow Democrats:

To judge from the polls and personal experience, many of you are somewhere between lukewarm and ice cold toward Mayor Bill de Blasio. You love that crime keeps falling and that murders are headed for a record low, but worry that the growing disorder on the streets smells like trouble is coming.

You have never seen so many vagrants, and so many of them looking deranged and dangerous. Why didn’t he tackle the problem in the beginning, instead of denying the obvious — that the numbers were exploding?

You also don’t like it that the subways are a mess, traffic is pretty much congested everywhere all the time and bicycle riders are treated as privileged characters even as they routinely flaunt safety laws.

You pay the nation’s highest taxes, but it’s never enough. The cost of living here is out of control, despite what looks and feels like diminished public services.

Streets are filthy, roads are rutted, yet every time you turn around, City Hall is focused on race, gender and identity politics, as if that’s what working people care about most. Is the mayor really going to take down the Christopher Columbus statue in — of all places — Columbus Circle?

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