On Monday, Hell Gate published an interview with one of the authors of a new study that challenges the idea that the "abundance agenda"—shorthand for building more housing supply and decreasing regulations to do so—is the key to fixing New York City's housing crisis, highlighting the study's findings that "inequality, not regulation," is the problem.

The study's conclusion, and co-author Maximilian Buchholz's assertion that "no amount of housing we build is going to make prices drop," sparked intense criticism from supply-side evangelists and a spirited debate in the article's comment section about what has led New York City to a rental crisis marked by historically low vacancy rates and record-high rents.

The article's fiercest critics appeared to be the housing policy wonks who subscribe to the school of philosophy best articulated in the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book "Abundance," which argues that local zoning laws and building codes keep rents overinflated by preventing the housing market from creating enough new housing. Some picked apart the study's methodology, and expressed concern that it was not peer-reviewed. Others pointed out that the study's conclusions were disingenuous because the authors actually did concede that vastly increasing the housing supply would lower rents. (Other critics were less substantive: Former NYPD Chief of Department John Chell called Hell Gate "the extreme toilet bowl of NYC journalism," while former state lawmaker and current real estate mouthpiece Kenny Burgos referred to us "the most unserious 'news outlet' in NYC.")

Because we love a good debate, Hell Gate asked independent urban policy researcher Ned Resnikoff to explain what he felt was flawed about the study and our original Q&A. Resnikoff, who has a master's in Public Policy from UC Berkeley, and who has previously worked as a policy director for California YIMBY, and as a housing fellow for the Roosevelt Institute, previously criticized Buchholz's study in a piece for his blog Public Comment. He recently authored a piece titled, "There Is No Housing Affordability Without Building More Housing."

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

Music presenter and author Ronen Givony's new book, "Us v. Them: The Age of Indie Music and a Decade in New York (2004-2014)," revisits the millennial indie rock scene in Brooklyn. Here's the problem of writing a history like this: You could go anywhere in America and argue with some success for the cultural impact wrought by most of the once-subcultural stars of Lizzy Goodman's oral history of New York's post-9/11 rock scene, "Meet Me In The Bathroom." Or, for God's sake, Jeff Chang's history of hip-hop, "Can't Stop Won't Stop." But to explain this era to someone who hasn't devoted their psyche or youth to "indie rock," you'd need to spend a whole dinner, and maybe a few drinks afterwards, justifying why the tentpole events that "Us v. Them" returns to multiple times in its 300-page run mean anything. 

You mean to some people, seeing Jay-Z and Beyoncé at a Grizzly Bear show in Williamsburg was like seeing Blondie debut at Max's Kansas City?, your date might ask. OK, but why are people still podcasting about it (to promote a whole other book, no less)? They might appreciate a change in subject by the time you're mentioning that Jeff Mangum—he's from Neutral Milk Hotel—had a secret show once. Oneida? Ryan Schreiber? Their Uber's here, but it was nice meeting you…

It's Wednesday, you deserve a treat, like an episode of the Hell Gate Podcast! Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On Tuesday night, dozens of New Yorkers crashed a Hudson River Park Trust public meeting to demand that the trust immediately cancel its contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which allows the agency to park its vehicles at Pier 40, a popular community recreation venue.

"Hudson Trust, you can't hide, we have justice on our side," chanted protesters at the rally, which was organized by Chelsea Neighbors United and the NYC-DSA Immigration Justice Working Group, as they marched around the Pier 57 building before going inside to confront trust leaders head-on. 

The trust, however, is not budging. In advance of Tuesday's meeting, a Hudson River Park Trust spokesperson told Hell Gate that, after legal consultation, it had decided it would not break its contract with the Trump administration before it expires on June 30.

Almost four years have passed since Hell Gate first launched, and thanks to you, dear reader, our worker-owned news outlet is continually growing to cover the vastness of New York City through engaging reportage, correct blog posts, exhaustive investigations, incisive podcasting, and loads of fun events. To that end, we're excited to announce that, once again, we are expanding our operation: Please welcome Hell Gate’s newest editor, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd!

Julianne has spent the last 25 years covering culture, politics, and the general fabric of New York. A co-founder of the music publication Hearing Things and a member of the Flaming Hydra collective, she's deep in the worker-owned co-op sphere. She's also been the top editor at both Jezebel and the Fader, and has published writing in outlets like the Guardian, Dwell, Another Man, Vibe, and a bunch of publications that unfortunately no longer exist. She wrote Bad Bunny's first cover story and has profiled Rosalía for Vogue in multiple countries; she has reported on an Alabama family's effort to obtain a life-saving abortion and investigated the issue of coercive control. And she's spent the last few years writing her forthcoming book on Penguin, "Vaquera," about growing up Mexican American in 1990s Wyoming and the myth of the American West. 

Julianne's also been a Hell Gate contributor for the last few years; you might remember her from her profile of NY1 anchor Dean Meminger, her report from the 50th anniversary of Toñita's Caribbean Social Club, or her (controversial?) story on why the new East River Park is good. 

An avid reader, lifelong raver, and diehard Knicks fan, she will help to expand our culture coverage as well as shore up Hell Gate's mission to put everybody and their malfeasance on notice. (Also: she's a huge proponent of the dumb blog, so gird yourselves!)

Contact Julianne with tips or tricks at [email protected]. 

We're able to hire brilliant editors like Julianne thanks to our paying subscribers. Support Hell Gate's local, worker-owned, independent journalism right now.

On Tuesday, St. Patrick's Day, Zohran Mamdani released a video celebrating the long struggle of the Irish people, and how their own battles for sovereignty have mirrored those of oppressed people worldwide. 

He spoke of the way that the Irish were once discriminated against in New York City, but banded together to become part of the vanguard of America's labor movement. "It was Irish hands that helped build so much of the city we recognized today," Mamdani says in the video.

Wow, for a moment, you'd think that Mamdani actually cared about our Irish communities. But THINK AGAIN. 

This story was produced in partnership with New York Focus and supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

For the past year, reporters at Hell Gate and New York Focus have been working together to report on the extraordinary number of sexual abuse allegations made by people held in New York prisons in a flood of lawsuits under the Adult Survivors Act, as well as the state government's efforts to block those lawsuits.

This reporting raises major questions: How seriously do state prison authorites take allegations of sexual abuse by prison staff? What mechanisms are in place to prevent it, investigate it, and protect people in state custody from people found to have committed abuse? 

To try to shed some light on those questions, reporters at New York Focus filed public records requests a year ago for the personnel records of prison staff named in the lawsuits, and records of any investigations into their alleged abuse. 

But the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, or DOCCS, which runs the state prisons, has so far stonewalled the requests. Last week, New York Focus, represented by the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic, sued the agency in state court to get the documents it seeks.

We spoke with Chris Gelardi, New York Focus’s justice bureau chief, and Hell Gate's own Jessy Edwards about the lawsuit, their reporting, and why it matters.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

Hell Gate: How did you end up suing the state prison agency? What's the backstory that got us to this point?

Jessy Edwards: When state lawmakers decided to pass this legislation that would allow adult survivors of sexual assault a window to file lawsuits outside of the statute of limitations, they have told us they didn't even anticipate how many of these lawsuits would come out of New York's prison system, and Rikers Island as well. The act produced this trove of data: 3,000-odd lawsuits were filed, over 1,600 of which appear to be filed against the state by women who were formerly incarcerated in New York prisons, all of whom say that they were sexually assaulted by state employees. 

DOCCS has been a real black box on the issue of sexual abuse until recently, though we've had national surveys that show that the New York prison system is a place where women report some of the highest rates of sexual assault. These lawsuits shine more of a light on it. There are hundreds of state employees named in these lawsuits. And so it raises the question: What are the circumstances that led to so much alleged sexual abuse in New York prisons?

Chris Gelardi: The records we requested from DOCCS, that we're now suing for, are all about trying to understand how the agency handles allegations of sexual misconduct by staff. We've heard in interviews that there's a culture of impunity, that corrections officers cover for one another, and that the department itself doesn't take allegations very seriously or fully investigate them. In order to get to the bottom of that, we need to know exactly how the prison system responds to these issues internally.

These records that DOCCS is so far refusing to show you have to do with the personnel files of prison staff and any investigations into their misconduct. Part of what DOCCS is saying is that giving you these documents could hurt the guards' privacy rights, and even their physical safety. Why is the news media and the public entitled to such sensitive records?

Gelardi: I would point you to what the legislature said six years ago when they repealed section 50-a of the state Civil Rights Law, which specifically exempted law enforcement disciplinary records from disclosure via FOIL (New York's Freedom of Information Law). They repealed that because they recognized that these are very crucial to understanding allegations of all types of law enforcement abuse. And, you know, in the years since 50-a was repealed, we've seen really aggressive pushback from law enforcement agencies. A lot of people were expecting a flood of records, when it's really been sort of a trickle, and a lot of lawsuits. This is part of that effort to pry the records free after the state recognized that they are indeed in the public interest. 

Edwards: I think a lot of the time when we're talking about reporting on sexual assault, agencies and organizations will be quick to say, "we can't release that information because we have to protect the privacy of the victim." But in this case, we have spoken to many alleged survivors who are willing to waive their privacy rights in order for us to have a clearer view of what is going on inside these prisons.

And when you supply the prison administration with these waivers, they turn the records right over, right? 

Gelardi: No. One of DOCCS's main responses to these requests has been to deny records in order to protect the privacy of the officers accused of abuse. So a huge part of what will get litigated in this lawsuit is the question of to what degree they're allowed to do that when the legislature has asserted that these are records that are in the public interest.

It's clear at this point that this is a huge, systemic problem, and has been, truly, for decades. So we're doing the legwork in the reporting to figure out the exact mechanisms by which DOCCS fails to catch this and fails to hold alleged users to account.

What do we know already about the accountability mechanisms when someone is accused of abusing people in custody?

Gelardi: It's largely a matter of DOCCS policing itself. There is an internal investigations unit, which is run by DOCCS. One of the top people in the investigative office is the brother of the current Commissioner, and the current head of the Sex Crimes Division is an old friend of those two. So, it gets a little—let's say it's a close circle of people who are involved.

It's not all that common to see reporters from different publications collaborating in this way. How did that come together, and how's it going?

Gelardi: It's a match made in heaven, baby! New York Focus and Hell Gate both have different flavors of the same accountability mission. Jessy's Adult Survivors Act work on Rikers was really boundary-pushing, the exact thing that we're trying to bring to the state level with this project. Having her on this investigation, bringing us into this world, has been really valuable. I've covered the state prison system for years. I've done a lot of reporting on the internal investigations unit, so that subject expertise there. Chris Bragg [New York Focus's Albany bureau chief], who's also been working on this, is a public records genius. We have all this complementary expertise, it makes sense to be working together.

Why are these records worth suing over? Why does the issue of sexual assault in New York prisons matter?

Gelardi: These people are incarcerated, but they're people. They were sentenced to prison, as the state puts it, for rehabilitation. Being assaulted is not part of their sentence. That's very important. 

Edwards: Some of the women I've spoken to were sent to prison on marijuana offenses. So the idea of severely punishing that crime on the one hand, and then having the state mount this robust defense of a different crime, sexual assault, I think there's a real hypocrisy there.

Gelardi: I would also say, carceral systems, places like New York prisons, that are punitive by nature and largely hidden from view, can be a place where state violence germinates. It's where the state is able to abuse its citizens most readily and most easily. Looking at how the state treats people in its custody is something I think we all should care about and pay attention to.

As New York City rents have risen into the stratosphere in recent decades, City officials and policy wonks have mostly sought to respond by building new housing, arguing that increased supply is the only way to bring down rental costs. 

Michael Bloomberg rezoned huge sections of the city to allow for taller buildings, leading to the apartment towers that today crowd downtown Brooklyn and the Williamsburg waterfront. Bill de Blasio vowed to build or preserve 200,000 units of housing, in part by relaxing zoning rules and removing other regulatory barriers to construction. Eric Adams's "City of Yes" upped that goal to 500,000 units, largely by making it easier for developers to build. And Zohran Mamdani has made housing construction one of the pillars of his affordability agenda, first with his appointment of two City of Yes stalwarts as his deputy mayor for housing and City Planning executive director, and most recently with this month's’s trip to the White House to revive a de Blasio-era plan to build 12,000 units of housing over the Amtrak-owned Sunnyside railyards—hoping to sell Donald Trump on the plan by letting the president pose with a fake 1975-style Daily News front page reading "TRUMP TO CITY: LET'S BUILD."

"I'm looking forward to building more housing in New York City," Mamdani captioned his photo alongside Trump on social media. Freshly installed deputy mayor for housing Leila Bozorg, meanwhile, has called for "progressive people to come together" to work on protecting existing tenants while also "addressing our housing shortage."

It's a sign of how political consensus for building our way out of the pandemic of crazy-ass rents has grown in the past few years. That's been especially true since last year’s publication of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book "Abundance," which argued that local zoning laws and building codes were keeping rents overinflated by preventing the housing market from creating enough new housing—and that lowering housing costs was a noble enough goal to override any lingering qualms about running roughshod over existing neighborhoods. 

It makes a sort of common sense: The basics of supply and demand dictate that if something is scarce, the price will go up. So if the rent is too damn high, it seems only logical to bring it down by loosening red tape to flood the zone with new apartments.

But that idea, according to a major new housing study, is dead wrong. 

This winter was undeniably, documented-ly miserable. Temperatures dipped so low that they were deadly; five-foot-tall piles of ice and snow, black with exhaust and debris, clogged the city's intersections; piles of dog poop peppered the sidewalks. To put it mildly, that shit sucked! 

But I'm sorry to report that after the brief and glorious reprieve that was False Spring, we are officially entering the very worst stretch of the year to be out and about in New York City—when the cold snaps back into place, open-toed shoes must be shoved back under the bed or into the closet, and it is somehow always, always, wet outside. 

It's mid-March, and things are about to be gross for the foreseeable future. 

A brand-new Hell Gate Podcast will be dropping later today! You won't want to miss it. Listen and subscribe here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Will supermarkets like Wegmans and Whole Foods finally be able to sell wine in New York state? Not if your local wine shop has anything to say about it. 

Alongside big-ticket items like taxing the rich and strengthening protections for undocumented immigrants, legislators in Albany this year are once again debating legislation that would allow grocery stores to sell bottles of pinot grigio, bringing New York state in line with most other states in the country. 

It's become a perennial topic up in Albany, and one that State Senator Liz Krueger, the sponsor of the bill alongside her State Assembly colleague Pamela Hunter, believes is an idea whose time has come. 

"Forty other states already allow for the sale of wine in grocery stores, and those states continue to have liquor stores. This is not a radical idea, it's actually completely mainstream," Krueger told Hell Gate. A 2025 Siena poll found that 70 percent of voters in the state back the move, down slightly from 75 percent in 2023.

We're back with our weekly politics newsletter—this time, we're focused on our new mayor's first 100 days. To get our weekly First 100 Days newsletters delivered straight to your inbox, sign up here. Not yet a paid subscriber to Hell Gate? Subscribe here and support local worker-owned journalism!

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Mamdani, and the financial barons WILL NOT HAVE IT!

It was just a matter of time, but at some point, capital, the holistic system of systems, was going to make its move to squeeze the mayor of New York City. 

It didn't take long to mete out a punishment for our socialist turn—on Thursday, Moody's Ratings, the venerable bond rating company that, among other things, ultimately helps determine the interest rates at which municipalities like New York City can borrow, updated its financial outlook for New York City from "stable" to "negative."

At first glance, it really looked like Moody's was striking a heavy blow for the titans of industry. 

What changed for Moody's, beyond a foe of capital now helming the largest city in this failing and flailing empire, which still acts as the global financial capital?

According to the rating agency's explanation, it was influenced by the City's "updated spending projections, which give rise to larger multi-year budget gaps than previously forecast."

Moody's underlined the City's dire budget projections, despite the City economy itself doing extremely well: "That the city projects large and persistent imbalances under still-favorable economic and revenue conditions highlights the extent of its underlying structural budget challenges."

Members of the Eric Adams administration always weirdly touted the City's credit rating as a sign they were doing a good job and not fucking around. (New York City, we're not the first to report, is actually always a good investment.) 

Funny enough, though, Moody's was pointing at the massive budget hole the Adams administration left the city in as a reason for the downgrade in outlook. 

It's a bitter irony that Mamdani is now getting dinged for telling the truth about New York City's finances (despite at first being a bit hyperbolic), whereas the Adams administration simply lied about expense projections—of course, in capitalism, it always helps to just lie to the market. 

Mamdani has very loudly said that the City still faces around a $5 billion budget gap over the next two years, which he says can be easily remedied, without cuts to services, through his proposal for a hike in the state's top income tax rate. This week, legislators in Albany backed up his calls to tax the rich, albeit with some different ways to get to $5 billion—by taxing only those with higher incomes than Mamdani's proposed tax hike (which would kick in for anyone making over a million a year) and lowering a tax credit given to some businesses. 

And what does Moody's think about all this? Certainly the paragon of the ruthless efficiency of the markets, one of the arbiters of the vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars, would call for ruthless austerity in the face of the budget gap, no?

Well, cue up "The Internationale," because Moody's actually thinks this whole taxing the rich thing sounds pretty reasonable. 

"Gap-closing strategies that rely on non-recurring measures, including the use of reserves, would limit financial flexibility, especially if economic growth slows sharply or an outright downturn materializes," Moody's analysts wrote. "State-level proposals to enhance revenue or other spending policy changes that benefit the city could have a stabilizing effect over time, if enacted."

Most important, Moody's didn't change the city's credit rating, which retains one of the highest possible ratings. It just wants something to be done about this massive budget gap Eric Adams left the city. 

And what would happen if Albany doesn't come through with the revenue raisers? Mamdani has said he'd then raise property taxes, a virtual nonstarter in the City Council. That would leave him with only one option to balance the budget, which he's legally obligated to do: cut services to the tune of billions of dollars and enshrine cuts he's already proposed for city agencies.

Some of the media has already begun portraying this as Mamdani steering the city toward a fiscal cliff, right off a mountain he didn't actually create. Meanwhile, sober-minded members of the state legislature, almost all local politicians, and even fucking Moody's agree it's time to soak the rich. 

But too bad, because Governor Kathy Hochul doesn't. And if she doesn't change her mind, we'll have to live amid the wreckage of that decision. 

—Max Rivlin-Nadler