Good morning:
One of Zohran Mamdani’s key campaign promises, and the marquee feature of his affordability agenda, was a four-year rent freeze for New York City’s 1 million rent-stabilized apartments.
As Manhattan Institute scholars have documented for months, Mamdani’s wish is checked by the fact that the independent Rent Guidelines Board determines rent increases on rent-stabilized units, not the mayor’s whimsy. Attempts by the mayor to make good on his freeze-the-rent pledge will draw a strong legal challenge. But, as MI’s director of Cities John Ketcham and adjunct fellow Christian Browne warn in a new column for the New York Post, Mamdani is testing out a new political pressure campaign to fulfill his promise.
Last week, Mayor Mamdani announced a new effort, Organize NYC, which would use the auspices of democratic participation to allow the mayor to do indirectly what he is not allowed to do directly.
Ketcham and Browne write that Organize NYC is “taken straight from the Democratic Socialists of America’s community organizing playbook” and explain the serious political, legal, and ethical questions Mamdani’s move raises. Find the full column below.
It isn’t only city officials who often have too light an appreciation for the rule of law. Two American intellectuals, play-acting as revolutionaries celebrating theft and normalizing political violence, sat down for an interview with the New York Times. Fellow Heather Mac Donald disassembles the interview for City Journal and warns that the riots and property destruction in the summer of 2020 were “only a warm-up to the current glamorization of law-breaking.”
Also in City Journal, investigative reporter Stu Smith documents the transformation of the Sunrise Movement, a former climate advocacy organization, into a group flirting with forms of protest that may expose Sunrise to potential criminal or civil action. From deliberately violating late-night noise ordinances to tactics pressuring hotels to cancel the reservations of ICE agents, Smith argues that these increasingly confrontational tactics are ripe for investigation.
In American K-12 public schools, education departments are spending historic amounts of money on fewer and fewer students and yielding disappointing results. In the Daily Wire, fellow Danyela Souza Egorov explains that although there are some bright spots in American education—the “Mississippi Miracle” for one—most states are not improving student outcomes and dedicate much of their funding to hiring more staff.
Finally, the Research team published a new issue brief by fellow Daniel Di Martino today, about the marriage gap between native-born Americans and immigrants to the United States. Over the last few decades, the U.S. marriage rate has been propped up by immigrants, but increasingly second-generation Americans and immigrants who arrive to the U.S. at young ages, assimilate to American marriage norms. Continue reading for all these insights and more. Kelsey Bloom Editorial Director |
|
|
|
The Vanishing Immigrant Marriage Advantage: How Assimilation Leads to Fewer Marriages
By Daniel Di Martino | Manhattan Institute | Photo: MykolaSenyuk/iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images
Marriage rates in the U.S. have fallen dramatically over the past half century, but immigration has partially masked the scale of the decline. In a new Manhattan Institute issue brief, Daniel Di Martino shows that immigrants are substantially more likely to be married than native-born Americans: among adults aged 25–54, about 64% of immigrants are married, compared with just 52% of natives. But that “immigrant marriage advantage” fades quickly across generations.
Di Martino finds that immigrants who arrive in the U.S. as children—and especially the American-born children of immigrants—rapidly assimilate to the U.S.’s lower marriage-rate norms. Across nearly every racial, ethnic, and educational group, second-generation Americans marry at rates similar to, or lower than, their native-born peers. The pattern cannot be fully explained by education or age. Instead, Di Martino argues, it reflects cultural assimilation: immigrants tend to bring stronger marriage norms with them, but those norms largely disappear within a generation as families assimilate into broader American society. |
|
|
Mayor Mamdani’s New Scam: Charge NYC Taxpayers to Hire His Rent-a-Mobs
By John Ketcham & Christian Browne | The New York Post | Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
“New Yorkers, you’ve been slacking — so the mayor wants to organize you. Mayor Zohran Mamdani isn’t happy that only 400 people showed up to last year’s Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) hearings. In response, last Wednesday, he launched Organize NYC, a supposed volunteer effort to have New Yorkers participate in local government.”
His office “will soon recruit so-called volunteers to fan out across selected neighborhoods and encourage rent-stabilized tenants to attend the hearings.
“In other words, City Hall is mobilizing the constituency most likely to support the mayor’s preferred outcome while insisting it is merely promoting civic participation. ... Organize NYC is a thinly veiled, taxpayer-funded effort to embed campaign-style political organizing inside city government, dress it up as civic virtue and deliver Mamdani’s (dishonest) campaign promise under a veneer of official neutrality.” |
Schools Received More Money Than Ever. Parents Aren’t Seeing The Results.
By Danyela Souza Egorov | Daily Wire | Photo by Alejandra Villa Loarca/Newsday RM via Getty Images “American K-12 public education spending reached $1 trillion for the first time in 2024. But what are students getting for that money?
“While spending grew by 56% since 2013, reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — known as ‘the nation’s report card;’— declined. Over the next decade, national student enrollment is projected to decline by 5.5%, around 2.7 million students. ... What they have done is hire staff. A lot of staff.
“K-12 staff grew from 5.9 million in 2014 to 6.6 million in 2024, even as schools served about 1 million fewer students. This disconnect between spending and enrollment has resulted in situations such as a Chicago school with 28 staff members for 27 students.” |
|
|
The New York Times’s Latte Logic of Social Collapse
By Heather Mac Donald | City Journal | Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
In a video interview with the New York Times, leftist commentator Hasan “Piker calls for ‘chaos. Full chaos. Let’s go.’ He and his peers admire themselves for courting anarchy, secure in the belief that their own comfortable lives will never be in jeopardy. But the civilization that they know nothing about, yet take for granted, can in fact be eroded into nothingness. Every time someone ducks under a subway turnstile in New York City..., every time someone steals from a drugstore despite the plexiglass shields to protect the increasingly vulnerable merchandise, another brick in the magnificent edifice of the rule of law is dislodged. ...
“The Times video expresses a worldview that gives the selfish, the greedy, the mediocre, and the lazy permission to prey on others and to justify that predation in righteous terms. More theft and more death will follow.” |
How the Sunrise Movement Became a Vehicle for Disruptive Protests By Stu Smith | City Journal | Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
“At its inception, the Sunrise Movement was a youth-led climate advocacy organization. ... Last September, after years of mission drift, Sunrise shifted its purpose to ‘getting rid of the authoritarian government we’re in.’
“As part of this revamped mission, Sunrise has embraced increasingly confrontational tactics: training students to manufacture conflict with college administrators, coordinating campaigns to pressure corporations linked to ICE, (and) disrupting hotel guests with late-night protests. ...
“Sunrise’s drift highlights the growing extremism of America’s activist infrastructure—extremism that routinely turns to lawbreaking. Indeed, the group’s actions raise questions about whether Sunrise is still operating in a manner consistent with its original nonprofit filing status or has instead become a vehicle for organized disruption that crosses legal and regulatory lines.” |
|
|
Reforming Child Welfare: The Hidden Crisis No One Talks About
By Manhattan Institute Naomi Schaefer Riley and Rafael Mangual discuss the complexities of the child welfare system in the U.S. They explore the scope, challenges, and controversial policies surrounding child protection, neglect, and foster care, emphasizing the need for transparency and reform. |
|
|
For more information and media requests, please contact
communications@manhattan.institute.
Are you interested in supporting the Manhattan Institute’s public-interest research and journalism? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and its scholars’ work are fully tax-deductible as provided by law. |
|
|
|
Photo Credits: adamkaz/E+/Getty Images; Noah Berger/AP Photo; Anadolu/Getty Images; Wong Yu Liang/Getty Images; Catherine McQueen/Getty Images; Probal Rashid/LightRocket/Getty Images |
|
|
The Manhattan Institute works to keep America and its great cities
prosperous, safe, and free. Manhattan Institute 52 Vanderbilt Ave. 3 floor New York, New York 10017
Want to change how you receive these emails?
Unsubscribe | Subscription Preferences
Copyright © 2026 Manhattan Institute, All rights reserved. |
|
|
|
|
