Sometimes the things you can’t believe have happened are not only not bad, but actually quite good. Like Manhattan’s congestion pricing plan that finally crawled past the finish line on Sunday.

Drivers now have to pay $9 to enter the busiest part of Manhattan during peak commuting hours, which, if all goes as planned, will unclog the city’s gridlocked streets while raising billions for the MTA. This idea has been stalled for years, most recently by Governor Kathy Hochul. An angry chorus of suburban commuters and public officials has done everything in its power to stop implementation. On Friday, a federal judge rejected a last-minute challenge brought by the state of New Jersey.

Although the city dodged the post-COVID doom loop that many anticipated, the MTA has remained mired in dysfunction. Subway ridership this fall climbed to about 75% of comparable days in 2019, but New Yorkers still don’t think the subway feels safe. Since 2019, felony assaults in the system are up 55%, and more people were pushed to the tracks in 2024 (25) compared with 2019 (20).

Oftentimes New York feels like a maelstrom combusting within its own time zone. Rain was forecast on New Year’s Eve, but we also got an eerie bit of thunder and lightning—lightning that seemed to stamp the sky with blinding blocks of white. If this unexpected storm was an appropriate finale for 2024, the image of the burning Tesla truck in front of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas was an unsettling one to usher in 2025. People immediately assumed it an assault on the impending “rule” of Donald Trump and Elon Musk when the motivation was actually the opposite. To me, the burning Tesla represented the ugly monstrosity of these machines that Americans can never break free from. In the war between people and vehicles, people are losing, despite the implementation of congestion pricing in New York.

According to a year’s worth of 311 service calls in the city, noise was the number one complaint of angry New Yorkers—noise from streets and sidewalks but also vehicles and helicopters. In my neighborhood, noise has progressively increased over the past two years primarily because of Amazon’s huge Ryder trucks—mobile warehouses that park on the street in front of your building for ten hours a day, seven days a week. At least there’s one in front of my building most of the time. It’s a crappy job for the workers, and they rebel by playing music loudly and having conversations in which everyone shouts. You could blame the city for allowing Amazon to do this, but the fault lies with every New Yorker in the Prime club who expects delivery within 48 hours.

My own top complaint about New York post-COVID is not just the growing extremes of wealth and poverty, but how residents are complicit in the self-sorting. Neighborhoods have always been determined by class and money, but it used to be you had subtle gradations along a spectrum. Rent stabilization was one factor in this diversity, but as buildings like mine claw back stabilized units with the death or institutionalization of older residents, diversity dwindles and gradations disappear.

Post-COVID New Yorkers became more frenetic about acquiring property as rents shot up. People who used to rent in racially diverse buildings have bought into co-ops where everyone’s the same color. As the subways get dirtier and more stressful, fewer “professionals” use the subway after work hours. Because people with fully remote or hybrid jobs don’t ride the subway daily, they feel that the money saved on Metro cards can be used to take Ubers instead. It’s a vicious cycle: the MTA loses operating funds with the loss of the professional class, service declines and the cars become dirtier and less safe, and even more of the professional class abandon the subway.

Everything has conspired to make the world worse for the working poor, who have no other transportation option than the MTA. Meanwhile, the professional class is safe in their sanctuary properties where they live, work, and play. Yes, this is nothing new, but it’s reaching down among income levels to draw a line in the sand within the very middle of the middle class. You’re either with the money or with the poors, and this dichotomy only breeds resentment among those living at the border.

It’s not just residential property where money is winning against the public. Mets owner Steven Cohen wants to build an $8 billion park in Queens that will include a casino, athletic facilities, and a Hard Rock Hotel. The Queens Borough President now supports the plan, downplaying the impact of a casino, a business model that steals wealth from communities. Gambling—whether in casinos or online—is mark of a dying society. An August 2024 study found that low-income families will spend a much larger share of their available cash gambling than do wealthier families. I guarantee you that suburban families with money won’t be driving to Queens to gamble.

Another recent real estate deal struck me more for its symbolism: the auction house Sotheby’s has bought the modernist Breuer building on Madison Avenue—the former home of the Whitney Museum—to redevelop as its new global headquarters. Thus, a space where all members of the public could once enjoy art will now be another place for billionaires to buy it up, filling palatial empty houses.

Before COVID, the metaphor of New York was Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. Now it feels more like the same unequal city but one where more ordinary people inhabit the self-defined sanctuaries from the very idea of “public.” §