Big City began its life as a weekly column under my byline in September 2011 with the objective of looking at New York through the prism of economic inequality. Week after week, it chronicled a social unraveling that, to my mind, had seemed to define a place that had ably served the working class for much of the 20th century. With this entry, the column now comes to an end — at a moment as fortuitous as the one in which it first arrived.
By pure chance, it made its debut a week before dozens of people took over Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, giving birth to Occupy Wall Street and its quick escalation into a global movement. Although amorphous and goal-averse, the project delivered a message about disparities engineered by the financial class that has found lasting resonance, especially among the young, disillusioned and debt-ridden.
In the 14 years since, New York has been governed by three different mayors; in two months, it will most likely elect another. If current polling is accurate, the projected winner was a 19-year-old Bowdoin College sophomore when Occupy took off, someone who, barring a sharp ideological pivot, would stand as the most progressive mayor to preside over the city since John Lindsay in the 1960s and ’70s. It has been two months since Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary, but his popularity continues to shock and confuse many New Yorkers who would prefer not to see him spend the next four years or eight in City Hall.
As it turns out, the past decade and a half provides a convenient framework to explain how a candidate focused purely on affordability could emerge to command such attention. During that time, to cite one dispiriting metric, the number of people sleeping in city shelters has more than doubled, to 105,000. If we consider the origin story of Occupy — that the gap between the rich and poor had become insidiously large — we find that the intervening years only broadened the gulf.
Using data from the U.S. Census, the Federal Reserve of St. Louis has tracked income inequality in New York City by borough since at least 2010. From that point on, through 2023 (the most recent year for which analysis is available), the trend lines more or less take the form of straight shots upward.