State has czars for housing, transit, rats, fentanyl, AI, crypto, vibes, and one czar whose portfolio is other czars
Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The Czar Ecosystem Achieves Complexity
ALBANY — Governor Hochul’s office confirmed this week that the state now employs seventeen individuals holding the title of czar, covering portfolios including housing, transit, fentanyl, rats, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, grid modernisation, broadband deployment, waterfront resilience, small business recovery, child care, adult literacy, tourism, and an individual titled the Interagency Czar Coordination Czar whose job, colleagues say, is to ensure the other czars are aware of each other, which the other czars were not before the position was created.
The czar model, borrowed from federal practice during crises requiring urgent action and adopted by state government during periods requiring the appearance of urgent action, has expanded steadily since 2020, when the emergency czar appointments made during the pandemic created an expectation that problems require a named official, which has since extended to problems that could be addressed by existing agencies if those agencies had funding, which they do not, which is why there are czars.
The Rat Czar Reviews Her Portfolio
New York City’s rat czar, an official first appointed under Mayor Adams and retained by Mamdani’s administration with expanded authority and a state liaison position, held her quarterly briefing this week and reported that the rat population has been reduced by an estimated twelve percent in targeted intervention zones through a combination of containerised waste bins, biological deterrents, and what she described as ‘a cultural shift in how New Yorkers relate to rat habitat,’ which in practice means the city bought different bins. She noted that the remaining eighty-eight percent of rats are unaffected by the cultural shift and have continued to thrive in a city that produces thirty-three million pounds of garbage per day, which she said provides, in the language of ecology, a favourable habitat, and in the language of her job, full employment.
The state’s AI czar and the rat czar briefly collaborated on a pilot programme using machine learning to predict rat sightings based on 311 complaint data and food establishment inspection patterns, which researchers at MIT said was a genuinely promising approach. The pilot produced a map of probable rat activity that matched the actual distribution of rats with seventy-eight percent accuracy, which the AI czar described as a success and which rats demonstrated was not a deterrent by continuing to appear in the locations the map predicted, correctly, that they would appear. The NYC 311 helpline has received seventeen calls asking whether the map is also a trap. It is not. It is a map.
The Czar of Czars Proposes Consolidation
The Interagency Czar Coordination Czar, whose title has been shortened in internal communications to ICC-C, released a white paper this week proposing the consolidation of four overlapping czar portfolios into a single Office of Complex Problem Adjacency. The white paper was reviewed by eight czars, three of whom submitted comments, two of whom submitted comments on the comments, and one of whom is on sabbatical at Harvard studying governance, which the governor’s office said is directly relevant to his czar duties and also involves teaching a seminar on urban administration that has a two-year waitlist.
The consolidation proposal awaits approval from the governor, who is thinking about it, which observers note puts it in the same queue as the free bus proposal, the capital programme, and the signal issues at Roosevelt Avenue, all of which are also being thought about, all of which would benefit from an actual decision, and none of which have a czar, because czars are appointed for problems that need a face, not problems that need money, and the distinction between those two categories is, in New York State governance, the most important line in the budget and the one that nobody draws.
The Eleven-Year Wait
The city’s affordable housing waiting list, maintained by HPD and currently at over 260,000 households, is not an abstraction. Each number on the list is a household: a family in a doubled-up apartment sharing a bedroom, a senior in a unit whose rent has increased past her fixed income’s capacity, a working couple spending sixty percent of their earnings on housing because they applied for affordable housing in 2015 and are thirty-seventh on the waitlist for a building that has not had a vacancy since 2019. The list grows every year. The number of affordable units grows more slowly. The gap between the list and the units is the housing crisis, stated as arithmetic. The community board voted 18 to 4. The lot is still vacant. The LLC is still in Delaware. The 400 people are still somewhere in the city, in whatever they could find, which is what New Yorkers always do, which is the city’s greatest resource and its most regularly exploited one, and which shows no sign of running out, which is not the same as showing no sign of costing.
The mayor’s housing plan includes, alongside the community board provision, a proposal to tax vacant lots held by LLCs for more than three years, a levy designed to create carrying cost pressure that makes development more attractive than continued vacancy. The Real Estate Board has opposed this too, citing investment uncertainty. The Urban Institute’s study found that approximately 8,000 vacant lots in the five boroughs have been held by entities similar to the Carroll Gardens LLC for more than five years, and that the collective housing potential of those lots, at even modest density, exceeds 60,000 units. The lots are in the database. The LLCs are in Delaware. The units are not built. The people are on the waiting list. The community board is not involved, because nothing has been proposed yet, and nothing will be proposed until someone buys a lot and files plans, and someone will buy a lot and file plans, and the board will meet on a Tuesday evening, and the process will proceed exactly as it has, unless something changes, which everything suggests it should, and almost nothing in the actual structure of New York land use governance requires it to.
More civic absurdity at https://www.private-eye.co.uk.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism