“What happened to representative government? Get upstate politicians out of our city!”

Comment published in New York Times online, reply to: “Cuomo and di Blasio: Subway chaos is your shared foe,” by The Editorial Board, February 4, 2018 (61 “recommend”), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/04/opinion/cuomo-deblasio-subway-chaos.html?comments#commentsContainer

I have never understood why so much of New York City's affairs are the business of the state government. We are supposed to have representative government. The proper concern of state government is with matters that concern the governing bodies proper to more or less all or most citizens of the state. The city has a population roughly one-half of the state, which means half of the state's voters are not NYC residents. 

The most glaring of case of this has long been our housing laws. Upstate residents are mostly homeowners; city residents are mostly tenants. We have state-level housing laws that attempt to please both a few individual and corporate landlords and many tenants. Our housing laws would be more favorable to tenants if the homeowners upstate and in the suburbs would get out of our affairs. America is an unusually property-owning society. And big city lifestyles often differ. When I speak to people who have lived most of their lives in other places, I sense an incredulity to the point of view of tenants (should we have any rights at all?) not unlike, perhaps, to workers.

The subway is also in this category. While our suburban transit systems rightly belong to an inter-state public corporation, the NYC subway runs only in the city. Most city residents are dependent on it. It's our affair. I care less about what is Cuomo's position and what di Blasio's and more about the fact that the mayor represents the city and the governor does not.