Central Air - Urban Centers

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.comThis week: Reihan Salam of the conservative Manhattan Institute on the state of the center and the right in cities. Why have we been asked to support politicians like Andrew Cuomo who discredit the center? Is Zohran Mandani really doing such a bad job? Can conservatives and cities be persuaded to take interest in each other again? All subscribers hear that conversation.Paying subscribers hear the rest of the conversation with Reihan about why people can’t leave Israel out of municipal politics, and what it’s like to run a conservative think tank in the age of Trump. Also: Ben, Megan and Josh discuss the “Save our Bacon Act” and the ethical obligations we have toward livestock, and finally, the implosion of the “Freedom 250” festival.Upgrade your subscription now at centralairpodcast.com.

Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Megan McArdle, columnist for the Washington Post, and Ben Dreyfus, who writes the Substack newsletter, Calm Down, and is coming to us this week from the Salt Lake City International Airport. Oh, yes. How's that Sky Club? Well, it's the newer Sky Club, and I have to say, so far it is 10 out of 10, especially for this limited use, where they have what seems to be a sort of suave case that I am in,

that is very warm but has adequate internet and a nice place for me to put a mic and hell of old fashion. Ben, of course, is on his way to Washington. When you're hearing this, we all will be in Washington or will have left Washington, depending on when you're listening. The Welcome Fest Center Left Democratic Conference is coming up on Wednesday. I might get protested by climate defiance like I did last year, and we're going to have some more hot, hot content coming for you from there. But this week, we have with us, Ryhan Salam. who is president of the Manhattan Institute. That's a right of center think tank in New York with a focus on urban policy.

Also, long ago, my employer, I worked at the Manhattan Institute from 2009 to 2012, which is sort of when I first got to know Rihon. But it's really nice to have this reunion and have you back here with us, Rion. I'm really happy to be with you. I am a huge central air fan and I've known Josh and Megan for many years and hopefully will so traumatize Ben with this encounter. Yeah. So, right, I'm like, how are you these days? By which I mean, it feels like a tough time for the center right in urban policy, right? Like in New York, I feel like we have these big coalitional fights between the socialist left embodied by the mayor, Zaron Mandani, and then a so-called centrist establishment in the Democratic Party that's really built around public employee unions and does not really like have a particularly centrist outlook, even though it's.

is often at odds with the socialist coalition. And it feels to me like the influence of anything, you know, really in the center to the right of center has waned from, you know, the days of Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg. Are things that grim? Am I underestimating the fight that is left in the center and the right in the cities? One piece of this is just the general nationalization of our politics. When you think about the coalition that elected Giuliani in 93 and 97, you had this rump liberal party run by Raymond Harding and his family that played a role when he was planning to run against Ed Koch before David Dickens defeated Ed Koch in a Democratic primary. He was going to run as a liberal. And he was going to actually run in a sense to the left of Ed Koch back in 1989.

It was just a very different world. And now I do think that fundamentally there are some core ideas, the idea that. You know, you want a growth-oriented policy. You want to make use of markets. You know, you want to foster abundant housing, you know, that kind of thing. These are all ideas that you could describe as growth-oriented classical liberalism. But, you know, fundamentally, you're very right to say that the real conflict is between the forces of incumbency, the status quo, and the forces for change. and right now that kind of the incumbent forces, you know, are the kind of, you know, union forces,

the people who already own a home, their, you know, incumbent tenants who are rent regulated, yada, yada, that's the kind of group. And then there's a change coalition. And the change coalition right now, that's overwhelmingly folks who are coming from the left. So I think that there's certainly something to that. But I think that at the level of ideas, I think the ideas that I and my colleagues are advancing are actually very relevant. And, you know, they manifest here and there.

You don't have a ton of people who are bearers of those ideas, however, getting elected to high office in big cities. Rehan, you are a close observer of New York politics and policy. Can you give Mom Donnie a grade for his first few months in office? What has he done well? Where does he need improvement? Are you having to send any notes home to his mother? So I'd say that at the level of politics and media strategy, he is doing pretty respectably, partly because Democrats right now are desperate for a winner.

So if you look at Mom Donnie's approval rating, you know, in early April, it was like 48 percent, according to one survey. It's probably higher now. There hasn't been a more recent survey than that. I think that he has not been really all that well scrutinized by the media to the extent that he's been scrutinized. The New York Post is certainly scrutinizing him. But also to some degree, you know, they're playing to an audience that, you know, they have. I'm an avid reader of the New York Post. I love the New York Post. But to some degree, the attacks from that corner are priced in for Mondani.

And then you have this media ecosystem in New York City that's really different than it was 30 years ago. So basically, he's just not getting a ton of scrutiny. he is basically mobilized this army of micro-influencers whom he's actively cultivated to create this parallel reality where he's always getting these incredible wins that are always being celebrated. And for right now, it's actually working pretty well. And again, nationally, I hear from a ton of center-left Democrats who just want to think well of him. They want to give him points. They actually want to say, hey, look at this. Look at this thing that he said that Eric Adams said or someone else said, but hey, you know, this is somehow validating because he's someone who seems to have a kind of cultural momentum.

And I think that that's all really buoying him. So he hasn't screwed that up. When it comes to the substance of governance, I mean, you know, pretty bad, but also not in a transformative way. So, you know, is he better than Eric Adams? No. He's doing many of the exact same things Eric Adams did. but he's a bit more radical. You know, he's created this office of mass engagement.

He takes his politics seriously, more so than some expected, but it's only playing out marginally. Overall, it's the same kind of mediocre, extend and pretend kind of stuff, but there's an ideological plus to it, which is that, you know, the budget is structurally unbalanced. That's been true. That will continue to be true. But now this allows him to create the morality play of I have the structural deficit. and then every year that gives him an opportunity to demand higher taxes on the rich. So in a way, that could be a kind of win. He's turning something good as a fundamentally broken situation into something that could be a way to kind of gin up enthusiasm for his movement nationally.

This actually brings up something that I've been thinking about, which is the curious, curiously dismissive attitude that socialist mayors, you know, left mayors in big cities are taking towards their. tax base. You had the famous video where the mayor of Seattle was like, well, of millionaires leave by. And then you also had Mom Dani making this video about Ken Griffin's huge, very expensive penthouse. And this seems counterproductive to me, right? Like, maybe at the national level that politics works, but at the local level, you want all those billionaires there so you can expropriate them. And you've got to think of them as like tax kettle, right? You need to, you need to tend to the tax kettle and not make things so miserable that they're going to break the fence and go to greener pastures. So, like, has Mom Dani learned that lesson? Because he does seem to have come back a bit

and walked back a bit his attack on Ken Griffin. Or do you think that we're just going to see more and more of this? And does the tax base actually react or is New York just too awesome? There is some reporting on this. You know, he's offered to speak with Griffin personally. He's made overtures. He's made references to Griffin's philanthropy. He's, you know, just trying to kind of cultivate CEOs. And, you know, it does seem as though people in his circle believe that whereas going hard against Israel is never a mistake for him, that actually this was one thing that actually does seem to have been a bit embarrassing, a reversal where if there's any, you know, kind of any employer that leaves or what have you, this is something that you could kind of come back to.

So it does seem as though this is one thing that he's seeing as a political misstep. So look, to the broader question, this is absolutely central. This is, I mean, completely, completely important, both at the level of the, you know, centimillionaire, billionaire taxpayers, but also more broadly, if you're looking at the kind of broad, upper, upper, upper middle class that is the bedrock of the tax base of these cities that have these super progressive tax codes. And, you know, look, I mean, fundamentally, if you look at the salt deduction and you look at a variety of other things that have happened since 2018, these, you know, jurisdictions are just New York City is more top-heavy than it had been when it comes to revenue. And also, you know, fundamentally the world has changed relative to 15, 20 years ago. So first of all, salt is a really, really big deal. Because if you look at the top tax rate, you know, in New York City and New York State in the mid-70s, you know, it was way, way more. but that wasn't the effective tax rate.

Now it really bites much more than it did before. That's one thing. The other thing is that if you want to lead a kind of cosmopolitan, you know, whatever, matcha drinking life, you know, this is something that you can do in many more places. If you're in a kind of, you know, affluent North Dallas suburb, you know, one of these pasteless that didn't exist 30 years ago and now has like 300,000 people, you can, you know, use Amazon or whatever else to kind of put together a pretty decent life. If you're in financial services, look, I mean, Goldman Sachs, you know, people are clamoring to move to Dallas Fort Worth.

You know, there are a lot of people in New York City are a part of our financial services tax base who would have been perfectly content to live in West Palm Beach, you know, 40 years ago. They just couldn't. And now they can. You'll sacrifice something material. You know, there's still some real advantages. I love, deeply love New York City and I love being here. But it's just, it's a more competitive landscape than it had been before. and though there are real advantages, they have eroded to some degree, and therefore the thing you want to lean into is becoming a quality of life superpower.

You want to have excellent walkable urbanism. You want to lean into those things in a way that a lot of, you know, my fellow urban conservatives might not like, you know what I mean? They might not like the fact that actually you do need to be much more hostile to parking, let's say, in order to make this model work. But that's what you would lean into. And also, you know, fundamentally public safety, all these issues. they matter much more when you're crammed together. The demons of density are real. The upsides of density are huge to someone like me, to the kind of minority of people who want to live this way. But that also means more aggressive management of the streetscape. It means that actually people, maybe you could be like, hey, you know, six people get murdered on the subway, no big deal. But actually, that does cause significant anxiety. And also, you know, the thing is that you might not get murdered on the subway, but when there's a man who's pantsless on the subway, it has a material effect on your willingness to, you know, take your kids on the subway, as I do quite often. So I think that, you know, there is a

formula for these cities to work and thrive even in this competitive environment. But I think that the socialist formula, as of now, isn't that? Can I make my case that Mom Donnie is really beating at least my expectations? I wrote in for Jessica Tisch in the mayor's race. I was not thrilled by Mondani. I've also long disliked Andrew Cuomo for reasons that we can into later. So I was annoyed about people trying to shoehorn me into a Cuomo coalition to stop him. But in any case, I look at the way he's governed for the last few months. I've been pleasantly surprised in a few key domains. One is, you know, Ryan, you mentioned like this sort of incumbent versus change coalitions and most of the change effort is coming from the left. And I think at least some of the changes that Mom Dani has identified as important are ones that there's a lot of support for beyond just the left.

I mean, for example, our state budget this year has a significant reform to our state environmental law called SICRA that will significantly ease approvals to build substantial, you know, new residential developments in the city. They're looking at doing building code reforms, including permitting small elevators, which sounds like a niche issue, but there's all this stuff that actually aspects of the building code force you to have like many more square feet in a building devoted to non-residential usage. they seem to be serious about looking for things that are barriers to investment and growth that don't gore the ox of some, you know, key constituency to the left. And I realize that that boxes you win a lot of ways and you can end up doing really expensive things for the building trades and for other unions that add a lot of cost. But I think that they're being creative about looking for things that work like that. And some of them like the secret thing are actually important and, you know, should do something to encourage new development. They've also been sticking up for these public, private. partnerships in NYCHA or public housing authority that basically bring in private investors to build new units, including some market rate units on those existing properties. They take some flack from the left for that, but they really seem to be serious about this understanding that you need to bring in new capital to build new housing, and a lot of that has to be private capital.

I wrote a piece a few months ago calling this communism for landlords, capitalism for developers, and there are problems with that model, but they do seem to be genuinely serious about the capitalism for developers part. about looking for ways to draw on that investment. And then at the same time, there are things that aren't changing that I was worried would change. And in particular, you know, Jessica Tish has stayed on as the police commissioner, seems to be running an NYPD with a similar approach to what we had during her tenure at the end of the Adams administration when she was significantly improving the NYPD, which had had significant corruption scandals before she got there.

And there was an article in Gothamist just a week ago about how, you know, lefty police abolition advocates are angry because they thought that Zoron would change things a lot and, you know, really ease off, especially on quality of life enforcement. And in fact, they've been issuing more summonses in the subway, more summonses for, you know, low-level, quote-unquote, quality of life crimes. So I think that it's a sign that they take seriously. I mean, maybe it's that, you know, Mamdani knows that as a lefty politician, you can be destroyed if you end up in a fight with the police. You're not going to win it. But it also maybe shows that he understands exactly what you're saying about the disamenities of density, that if you're going to have

a successful city. People need to feel safe. And the NYPD needs to be a key partner in that. And so, you know, generally, I felt pretty good about that. And then the final thing is that he's hemmed in by our governor, who sits significantly to his right. He had a bunch of tax ideas that I think would have raised rates on duly high and, you know, caused some amount of capital flight. But the governor wouldn't do those in the budget. I think the, the pietta tear tax that they are doing, that's the thing that led to the fight with Ken Griffin, you know, I think is designed to be much less encouraging of capital flight than other things that they might have done. And so overall, I'm not, you know, I'm not afraid of what this means for me as a New York resident as a New York homeowner.

I've actually been, you know, I think this is as good as we might have gotten from a Cuomo mayoralty, probably better. There's a lot there, Josh. So first, I'll say that when it comes to code reform, some of these other measures, I do think that he's appointed people who are credible serious people who are thoughtful about those issues. I think that those are places where Mayor Adams made significant strides and Mayor Mamdani is building on them. However, I think the fundamental challenge is mandatory inclusionary housing. So when you look to Bill de Blasio, you know, whom Mayor Mamdani described as the best mayor of his lifetime, you know, there is some continuity

there. And I think that fundamentally this is an area where if he were to break on that and say that, look, in White Plains, Road in the Bronx, south of Prospect, these are neighborhoods that are not going to be able to sustain this, what is essentially a tax on new market rate housing. So mandatory inclusionary housing, basically the idea is that anywhere we rezone, if you are going to build multifamily housing under this rezoning, allow you to densify housing, you know, in these areas, you are going to have to have on a mandatory basis a big set aside of below market rent units in your building. And so what that effectively means is that outside of the strongest areas where you can charge the highest market rate rents, just a lot of buildings

are simply not going to pencil out. And so, you know, they're looking to a wide range of neighborhoods building on City of Yes, Mayor Adams' big rezoning effort to say, hey, we're going to really up zone. We're going to lean into all these ways in which we've changed the multiple dwellings law. You know, there are some state reforms that have happened. But fundamentally, if you're are not kind of pumping the brakes on this idea that we need to put the burden of subsidized below market rate housing on the people who have the temerity to build any new housing in the city. There's just a fundamental tension there. So my view is that you may well get some new housing built. It's going to be very, very heavily subsidized by the city. You know, Mayor Madani

is trying to increase the city's capital budget to do this when, in fact, there are private developers who would build significantly in the absence of these constraints. A lot of things that lefty folks in housing world are saying now is that, hey, the problem is that inclusionary zoning mandates are not being funded. But the whole problem is that we're operating under these very stringent budget constraints, right? So I think that there is a totally plausible world in which you could be a socialist and say that, hey, you know, the sewer socialists in Milwaukee in the first half of the 20th century were fiscal conservatives because they weren't getting a ton of money from the state government or the federal government. They had to operate under austere budget

conditions, and that's what actually incentivize them. You know, what Mondani is thinking is that I'm super charismatic, and I'm going to be able to rattle the tin cup louder, and I'm going to be able to extract more. Now, my colleague, Steve and I have made this really great observation. Mayor Mamdani's framework to the kind of tax-based question is actually not about competition. We're not looking to compete for employers, entrepreneurs, investors. He's not really focused. He has an affordability agenda, but it's affordability agenda that's not on job creation in the city or wage growth in the city. What he wants to do is make New York City a moral exemplar. Now, part of that is, yeah, being smart about code reform and things like that. But the thing is that if you're not also willing

to say, hey, actually, we need these buildings to pencil out in a meaningful way. We need to welcome private capital in a bigger way that's more than symbolic. And I think that he does say the right things. He talks about, Auckland. Hey, we need to look at cities that have really upzoned. Auckland did not have

these mandatory inclusionary housing rules. And doesn't have rent control. They don't have rent control. They don't have a lot of these things, right? So the thing is that he strikes me as someone who is clearly bright and just kind of smart enough

to kind of get, I don't want to be nasty. I mean, but you know, he's surrounded by smart people. He's a bright guy himself. But he's not thinking through the full implications of what this would look like. Or he doesn't like the full implications, right? Like, if you look at rent-regulated housing, and we could go on and on about that

forever, and I promise not to. But that's an area where basically you're breaking a huge part of the city's housing supply because the 2019 rent law we had in New York State that was- Signed by Andrew Cuomo. Oh, don't get me started in Andrew Cuomo. And, you know, basically, you know, championed by Cia Weaver and the people who are his brain trust. And they're the ones who basically blew up a system of rent regulation that more or less. worked in a tolerable way. On the crime front, you know, I guess I have a somewhat different view. I think that Commissioner Tish, you know, I won't claim to speak for her. But I think that, you know, she has a deep sense of responsibility. She's going to be there until it is no longer tolerable.

I think you're right that they have some shared interest that if you started seeing really dramatic deterioration there, that would be a bad look for him. But also, there are going to be a lot of other shoes to drop? You know, are you going to shut down Rikers Island in 2027? Are you going to, you know, there's been a huge increase of felony assaults in the city. Are you going to start talking about that in a frank, direct way? There's a great American Democratic Socialist, Bayard Rustin, who wrote a brilliant essay in the 1970s about crime and why socialists need to think very deeply and speak very frankly

about why violent crime is a scourge. If Zoroamandani made a short-form video about the fact that little gangs that are organized crime rings that are breaking into every, you know, CVS in the city, every Duane Reed in the city, if he made a video about how that's not socialist, I would be thrilled. I think that it would be incredibly powerful, incredibly powerful for him nationally, you know, politically, I think it would be an incredibly shrewd thing to do. So I'm struck by the things that he's not willing to do. But look, you know, Josh, I take your point, but New York City is an extremely fragile place right now, and I think we need more than not a disaster.

I think that we need something a bit stronger than that, particularly after several years of being governed very badly. I thought that you said a really interesting thing a few minutes back about how for a long time, you know, people in New York and in Los Angeles and in a lot of these places sort of thought they could kind of get by

on how nice New York is, right? So there was people who were just willing to pay the cost of being there. And then in addition to the salt taxes and all of these various other things that have happened, it doesn't pencil out as much as it used to. People constantly talk talk about the capital flight situation with these billionaires leaving. And they talk about

it all the time in California right now because of this idiotic law that they might pass. But what you see, what I've seen in Los Angeles and in San Francisco, particularly, San Francisco, most of all, maybe, is that it's the upper middle class that is actually like on the way out. That's where you get these people who really are noticing some of these problems and aren't as, you know, detached from it the way a billionaire would be. And that those people actually make up the huge, powerful parts of a lot of these tax bases and a lot of all of that. And so you get people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in San Francisco looking at job opportunities in Wisconsin or whatever. And then you end up with someone like Spencer Pratt, right, in Los Angeles, who is on one level, like, proving the Manhattan Institute's point that you guys have made for decades, which is that like when basic services in a city decline, the social fabric of that city,

falls apart, you know, and that you need to keep some sort of semblance of order around this. Otherwise, we all just become lunatics. And I guess what I wonder is when you guys made those predictions for all of these decades, did you ever anticipate that it would lead to so many reality stars entering politics? So there's a lot to say about Pratt, and you, of course, you know, know, you've been following him really closely, I'm sure. The upper middle class point strikes me as super dead on. You could speak more broadly about this, but let's zero in on that constituency. So one big issue champion, not just by Mayor Mamm Dani, but a lot of folks on the urban left

is this idea that what we need is more early child care, right? You know, we need universal not just pre-K, we need 4K, you know, we need 3K, 2K. You know, literally Mayor Mammondani campaigned on providing care for children as young as 12 weeks old. Really remarkable. But then this year, he said, well, actually, it's still undersubscribed, as it has been for several years. And, well, that's because we haven't been spending out of money to promote it. Well, no, I actually know as a New Yorker, as a parent of young children, there's absolutely incredibly aggressive efforts to get people to enroll in subsidize child care. But the trouble is that when you're a middle class, upper middle class parent, you're thinking

about forward guidance. You're thinking about, you know, not just what am I going to do with my 12-week-old? You know, oftentimes families have some way of figuring that out. You're thinking about, is my kid going to have a safe place to go to middle school? Is it going to be a decent school? something where I do not feel like I'm, you know, engaging in a kind of child abuse by sending my kid there, right? So you're thinking about forward guidance. How am I going to build a life longer term, you know, when I'm making big consequential decisions? And I think that, you know, that's a really

striking area because, you know, what do Democratic socialists have to say about the quality of public education? I know exactly what they have to say in New York City about the UFT. I know exactly what they have to say about public employment and how you treat public employees. You know, Josh made an excellent point that I'm a, it's always how I think about this, you know, about the status quo versus the change coalition. But, you know, fundamentally what many of the Democratic socialists are doing is trying to defend the existing incumbent welfare state of rent regulations, subsidies and taking care of the public employees who are a core part of your base, while also creating a new welfare state for the kind of couple that's earning, you know, 200,000. thousand dollars and feels incredibly squeezed. You know, they feel incredibly squeezed living on the west side of L.A. and thinking about like, oh my God, can I even, is there even a public school I can send my kid to and what have you? So, you know, Mom Dani actually was speaking to that

constituency because they're not worried about getting mugged. You know, they're not necessarily worried about that. The city did become somewhat safer. They find that hysterical. These are people who moved to the city from somewhere else, and they actually embrace urban life. But they were thinking that can actually lead a life. Can you please give me a Viennese social housing apartment. You know, when I'm earning, yeah, I'm earning $250,000 a year, but I know other people are a lot richer than me, and I literally like when I go to the grocery store, oh, my God, I'm paying $400 for groceries, this is insane.

Those people really matter. They are vocal, they're influential, they're a decent chunk of the electorate. And the problem is, if you're going to take care of this incumbent welfare state that is actually in some ways at odds with the needs of this other constituency, because, like, look, if you need to have, like, decent public schools in your middle class, upper middle class neighborhood. That actually does mean being, you know, you're going to have to shut down some of these schools in areas that no longer have kids. You're going to have to focus your resources.

You're going to actually have to think about the quality there. So this is a really interesting tension. And the tension is heightened when you actually don't have fiscal surpluses. Now, right now, what's going on is you can fake your way through it when Wall Street bonuses come through. Hey, in California, Anthropic just filed for its IPO. Like, hey, maybe that's going to mean that you don't actually have to confront that problem today. But the thing is that that is a very serious challenge because these two kind of welfareisms are fundamentally at odds with each other. You know, again, a lot more to say about L.A. and S.F.

But I think that that is the dilemma that, you know, basically these guys are able to fake their way through right now. The moment that there's an economic downturn, because like these guys, they're. have a structural budget deficit when we're actually not at the bottom of a business cycle. And that's going to be interesting to see a play out. Right. One of the differences that you have, right, between New York where is the famous example of all of these things we're sort of talking about, is that it's like a strong mayor system. And then in L.A., you have like a weak mayor system where if ever there was sort of going to be a system where we should just put someone who's good at the attention economy and they're going to run the vibes, you know, maybe there's, that would be an okay maybe place to put them, even though obviously like the mayor. Valley does do things besides just the bully pulpit. But I wonder then with what you're talking about, all of these cities, including Los Angeles and including San Francisco and including run these massive deficits that when I see Pratt and I see the making various promises to fix this, one thing that Pratt, even if you put him in charge tomorrow, wouldn't be able to do was he wouldn't be able to influence any of those things. And then he would run for re-election talking about how he tried and failed. But it's just sort of like built into the system. And I am curious how, how, how,

We're supposed to handle that in a place where this is what they are running on. This is how voters treat accountability on it. But it's also so profoundly disconnected from anything they can actually do. So first of all, there are so many questions around what would a Pratt mayoralty look like. I considered pretty unlikely, by the way, but that is something that, you know, I think deserves airing out. But fundamentally, I guess my, okay, so, you know, New York City, you know, our district schools, I send my kids to public elementary schools. They basically, the kids in the schools, get about 1,200 hours of instruction a year.

And, you know, everyone talks about, hey, they're spending $40,000 per people. Well, you know, okay, let's leave that aside. But if you look at, you know, the charter schools, the kind of, you know, well regard, whatever, the kind of the biggest charter schools, the biggest charter school networks in New York City. It's more like 1,400 plus hours of instruction, and they're spending significantly less. And I'm not even saying they should be spending, whatever, but they happen to be spending. a lot less and just kids are getting more hours of instruction. And, you know, I guess one way that I think about this is just there are actually people and institutions who will just do things

if you let them. So literally in L.A., there are people who are like, we will open a charter school, we will eat shit. You know what I mean? We will actually take less money than the public schools get, and we'll do it, and it will be kind of hard, and we'll figure out a way to do it, and there's going to be a lot of churn in our workforce and whatever. But, like, we could do it. And there are some networks that are going to doing that. Just let us. us do it. Or similarly with a housing thing, it's like, look, that's a good but a manager like, I'm all for single stair buildings. I'm all for like, let's have more like Spanish style elevators. Like, let's totally do that. But also like, how about we say that like where I grew

up in like ocean parkway or like if you're like, you know, on the border of like, I don't know, you're like, you know, in South L.A. And like there are people who would build like a four over one building. You know what I mean? Like as long as they just don't have to like sub. You don't know, They will just do it if you let them do it. And that would solve so much of the problem if you didn't actually. And that's why the whole thing about not having a growth agenda. So, you know, Spencer Pratt, you know, is he a deep public policy expert on everything? No.

But also, when he says that he's going to make L.A. Dubai, you know, when you're talking about, like, vibes, like, directionally, he's like, you know, some people, some Yimbies were complaining because he was saying that, like, he was saying something critical about SB 79, you know. But it's like fundamentally, he wants the city to. get back on its feet and to grow. And like, by the way, could he be terrible? Maybe. But directionally, he seems to be really right about this idea that fundamentally, if you get the basics right, one of my favorite, like, anecdote things, like talking point things that, you know, will be very annoying to Josh. But it's this idea that like the 1830s, you know, in the United States, we started insane asylums. We started insane asylums because, you know, these were families that were pretty self-reliant, did a lot on their own. But when you have someone who's like

shouting in tongues and like stabbing their siblings. You know, that's kind of like, okay, like, you know, let's get the government involved. And right now, you know, we have a situation where we will pay for your dental care. You know, we will have you on Medi-Cal up to like $95,000. We will like subsidize your kind of like hospice center, which has like no one actually in hospice care. We will do all of those things. But if you have like a severely schizophrenic family member who's on the street, no, I'm so

sorry we can't deal with that. It's this crazy inversion about how government works. And what Pratt is speaking to is this idea that, hey, what if we focused on the basics and getting the basics right? And we kind of trust that more or less functioning, you know, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class people can like more or less fend for themselves if we kind of allow them to and allow employers to kind of do the things that they like to do. That seems like directionally right to me. What's interesting to me about Pratt is, in a way, a similarity with Zoranamani. He's the first major right of center candidate I've seen in a municipal election recently who really seems to have like a clear positive vision of change as opposed to like, you know, Curtis Slewa, twice, you know, Republican nominee for mayor in New York basically focused on how, you know, all these lefty mayors have done these terrible things and will do these terrible things. And I'm, you know, I'm going to, you know, stop them from allowing a crime way or whatever. But there's no grand vision of what Curtis Slee was New York was supposed to be. And Andrew Cuomo was an in an an even worse version of this, where it was just this wholly negative campaign about all the

terrible things that might happen if the city changed. And he was going to stop that. Here you have Pratt, like, out there saying L.A. can be different. And I see what's appealing about that to a substantial number of people. I'm going to be very interested to see the precinct results and the primary that happens there on June 2nd because there was one poll that had Pratt leading with Hispanic voters, which I'm not sure I believe. But when we see the precinct results, we'll have a much better idea of how that's breaking down. L.A. is, you know, a lot less white than it was in 1993 when Richard Reardon was elected mayor, so you need a very different coalition to have someone like that elected. At the same time, you know, I do worry that he's like an empty suit reality star. We've had

negative experience with this in the past. And the stuff that he says about the way L.A. needs to change is often contradictory. You know, like him complaining about SB 79, that law about upzoning around transit. You know, he talks about, you know, that really we need it near commercial uses. but often that's the same places. And then, you know, he also is fond of saying this thing that, you know, L.A. doesn't have a housing problem. It has a drug problem. And he has a number of critiques about, you know, that you have massive, unsheltered homelessness with a huge fraction of those people with obvious and significant drug and mental health problems and the state not being as interventionist as it could be.

And much of that is well taken. Although a lot of what he has to say about it is glib, like that he's, you know, anyone whose last home was outside the city, he's just going to offer them a ticket to go back to where they came from or they can go to Seattle and be Katie Wilson's problem. Like, that problem is not going to be as simple as he makes it out to be. And, you know, I worry about some of his base being, you know, suburban homeowners who basically don't want L.A. to change and whose main focus around housing is thinking that it's bad that there will be traffic. It's like if something tall gets built near them. And there's sort of this fantasy among some people that, you know, if you just send some people away, if you put all those homeless people on the buses to Seattle, then maybe we don't

need to build a new apartment building that I'd have to look at and that people will have to park near. But partly it's a vacuum. Like, I wish that there was someone who was not Spencer Pratt who would speak to some of these ideas because I think that there's something very real there about how the establishment has failed and has wasted a ton of money and has gotten in the way of the private sector. I think that's a real thing. And so, you know, I'm trying to have a less negative view about him than I did initially when he started in this race because there are some things he's saying that somebody needed to say. Ben's point was really well taken. Just, you know, L.A. is a weak mayor city, and that is a double-edged sword in the sense that, on the one hand, having him as a cheerleader in chief, having someone who's kind of drawing attention, or frankly, just as a kind of, you know, kind of antibody response, an immune response of, you know, kind of the broad middle class of L.A. I think would be interesting and powerful unto itself. But, you know, he would have to build coalitions, you know, with the council. He would have to figure out some way to do that. And I think that would be a really interesting challenge. You know, also another challenge

for LA is that so many of the problems are at the state level, right? So, you know, it's the interaction to those things. So you have to be the lobbyist in chief, which is, you know, going to be really interesting challenge. But, you know, I do think that that's shock to the system, I could see it doing a lot of good. And also just, you know, Josh, your larger point about how you need a new change faction, and this is where this got a center-right sensibility, if you want to call it that, you know, part of it's the failure on the part of, you know, have there been any candidates emerging

out of it. So Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, it seems like an exceptionally bright guy, really impressive. He's actually accomplished quite a lot. He hasn't been mayor for that long, but he's accomplished quite a lot while he's been there. And he also just seems like someone who's in tune with reality has an appealing story. But he did not succeed in offering some compelling vision of how California would change, despite having a ton of resources. That is a failure. And, you know, part of it, it's kind of hard to say that, like, basic competence and being in tune with reality and understanding how markets work and understanding how, you know, like, that's not necessarily like super appealing.

But Pratt is demonstrating that there is a way you could use a certain kind of storytelling and tie it to that kind of more credible message where part of it is just people want to be validated. They want to, you know, know that their concerns are legitimate, that they're not going to be laughed off, that they're not on serious people for believing that things really have deteriorated. So I think that, you know, seeming to listen to people and respect them while also, you know, some kind of like Pratt Mayhan hybrid would, you know, would be very appealing, you know, kind of would it win? I hope so. But I think that's what we need. Right. Hound, one thing that drives me nuts as a

New York City voter who does not care that much about the Israel-Palestine conflict is the extent to which the Israel-Palestine conflict appears to be a top issue for many voters and politicians in New York in municipal elections, not even just considering who should be president, who should sit on the Foreign Relations Committee in Congress. The mayor's position, Israel has been like a huge political thing. And the mayor himself is very much a part of this problem. Like, you know, the, you know, people are too obsessed with Israel and Palestine and New York, Zaron Mamdani is definitely one of the people who is on the too obsessed list. But I have just been struck that like the portion of the electorate that has been the least likely to be, you know,

mollified by what he's actually done in office, by the overtures that he has made toward the center, by what I see as like relatively good moderate choices he's made, are people who are very heavily focused on Israel, in part because the mayor is not moderated on that at all. But I just like, it feels to me like a mental disorder, the extent to which people care about this. Like, why does it matter what the mayor thinks about this? Why are we having fights over like who marches in the Israel Day parade? I can't relate to Karen. This is an area where I may well be someone that you see as being in this category of mentally deranged by this issue. That's it for this week's free episode of Central Air. There's a lot more for paying subscribers. We have the rest of our conversation with

Rihon Salam about the outsized role of the Israel-Palestine conflict in municipal politics, and Zoran Mamdani's role in that. We also talk about what it's like to run a conservative think tank during the Trump presidency, and we talk about the time that I tried unsuccessfully to convince Rihon to learn how to drive a car. Megan and Ben and I also talk about the implosion of the America 250 celebration and about the Save Our Bacon Act, a proposal that looks like it make it rolled into the farm bill that would preempt state laws, which currently seek to get pigs out of tiny gestation crates. Megan says that we need to make sure livestock live in a way that's better than not living at all, and that includes banning these crates. If you want to hear all of that,

please join the nearly 1,700 other fans who've gone to Centralairpodcast.com and signed up. You'll get every full episode, who'll get replays of our substack live chats that you can listen to any time. And you'll be part of the community that makes this show possible. We'd love to have you. Thanks for listening.