New York City used to be the place the whole country looked to. Money, media, culture. If something new was going to shape America, odds were good it started in one of the five boroughs.
And it belonged to regular people. A guy from Queens with a truck and a plan could build a life there.
People still move to New York believing that. What a lot of them don’t know is that the dream is broken. People are leaving. Businesses are leaving. And the city’s answer has been to double down on the same policies that got it here.
I talked with Larry Sharpe about it. He was born in Manhattan, joined the Marine Corps at 17, built a trucking company from nothing and sold it. In 2018 he ran for governor as the Libertarian candidate, pulled more than 95,000 votes, and put his party on the New York ballot for the first time in its history.
I asked him what it would take for a young man today to build what he built.
A license to walk a dog
His first move back then was finding the largest truck that didn’t require a CDL, because the licensing was that harsh.
It has not gotten easier. In New York State today, you need a license to braid hair. You need a license to walk a dog. He is not joking.
On the other side of every one of those rules is a person who wanted to work and got handed a form instead. Some fill it out. Some give up. Some go underground.
Then there’s hiring. Larry walked me through the math on paying someone twenty dollars an hour. Decent money, not great. The payroll tax runs about sixteen dollars on top, so the employer is out thirty six. The worker is taxed too, and takes home somewhere around fourteen.
Two thirds of that money goes to the government. Everybody in the deal loses except Albany.
New York built the American economy doing the exact opposite of this. Farming, finance, and forward thinking, as Larry put it. The Erie Canal was New York. Fashion was New York. Glassware. Kodak. Built by people who did not wait for permission.
Why a bad answer wins
You would think a city squeezed this hard would try something different. Instead it elected a democratic socialist.
Larry says that is the most predictable thing in the world. When people are desperate and want an answer, and the choice is the status quo that is failing them or a bad answer, they will take the bad answer. It is at least an answer.
And New Yorkers have not had a real choice in a generation. No Republican has won a statewide election there in 24 years. Not senator, not governor, not attorney general.
Part of why is that the people who disagreed left. Two million people packed up over the last twenty years. That is more people than live in all of Manhattan. A lot of them wanted lower taxes and fewer rules, and every time one of them left, the people who stayed agreed with each other a little more.
Do that for twenty years and one way of thinking dominates everything.
The trap inside all of it
Here is the mechanism. The more decisions a government makes for you, the more every decision becomes a vote. What you can build. What you can sell. What you pay your workers. How many people can sleep under one roof.
And when everything is up for a vote, losing an election means losing your way of life.
That is the trap. It sounds fair because everybody gets a say. But when the majority decides everything, the people who disagree have two choices. Go along or go away.
Two million chose to go away.
Compare that to a place where people own things and decide for themselves. Your neighbor can build a duplex. You can keep your big yard. The guy down the street can cut hair in his garage without being hassled. You do not have to agree with each other on nearly as much, because it is not on the ballot.
That is how people who think differently live side by side. Take it away and the ones who think differently leave, the conversation narrows, and eventually the people in charge only hear their own voices.
When you know you cannot lose, you do not have to deliver.
The city is the slumlord
New York politicians talk about punishing slumlords. Larry’s answer is to ask who the biggest slumlord in the state actually is.
It is the city.
The New York City Housing Authority runs more than 160,000 apartments. In 2018, federal prosecutors announced it had stopped doing required lead paint inspections and lied to federal regulators about it. Children living in its buildings were poisoned. When inspectors came around, managers covered holes with painted cardboard and shut the water off so leaks would not show.
The winter before that, 320,000 tenants lost heat at some point. Families slept in their coats.
The city admitted it in 2019 and signed a deal putting the housing authority under a federal monitor. That monitor is still there. The authority’s own estimate of what its buildings need in repairs is north of 78 billion dollars.
If you want to see what happens when government owns the housing, there is a longer running experiment. On many Indian reservations the family living on the land does not own it. The federal government holds it in trust. You want to build a house, you need Washington’s permission. You want a mortgage, the bank will not lend on land it cannot take back. A simple lease can sit on a desk at the Bureau of Indian Affairs for years.
The result is some of the worst housing in America, among people who would build if they were allowed to.
What the rules actually produce
Try building a home in New York. The zoning map tells you what you can put on your own land, and on most lots it is not much. Want to build bigger, you need a rezoning, which means hearings in front of the community board, the borough president, the planning commission, and the city council. Any one of them can slow you down. Any neighbor who shows up can drag it out.
Then the environmental reviews, the permits, the inspections. Years can pass before anyone pours a foundation, and every one of those years costs money. Lawyers, consultants, interest on the loan while the land sits empty.
The builder does not eat that cost. You do, in rent.
Plenty of builders look at the process and walk away. Those homes never get built at all.
So there are not enough places to live, prices climb, and people at the bottom get squeezed into whatever is left. A basement that was never designed to be an apartment becomes one. A dining room gets a curtain and a mattress. Five people share a place built for two.
None of it is legal and none of it is safe. It is what is left.
In September of 2021 the remains of Hurricane Ida dumped more than three inches of rain on the city in a single hour. Water poured into basements across Queens and Brooklyn. Thirteen people died that night. Eleven of them drowned in basement apartments. One was a two year old boy trapped with his parents in Woodside.
Most of those apartments were illegal. The city knew places like them existed. By its own estimate, more than 100,000 New Yorkers live in basement units.
They did not live there because they wanted to. They lived there because it was what they could afford.
Those families did not die because they broke the rules. They died because the rules left them nowhere else to go.
Then it writes more rules
The city’s answer to crowding is more law. Limits on how many unrelated adults can live together. A minimum number of square feet per person in a bedroom.
On paper that sounds reasonable. Nobody wants ten people in a closet.
But think about what enforcing it requires. Somebody has to know who sleeps in your apartment, how many beds are in each room, whether your roommate is your cousin or a guy from Facebook Marketplace. City Hall cannot see any of that, so it relies on your neighbors to see it for them.
That is what 311 is. A hotline where anyone can report you and you never learn who did. An inspector shows up, counts the people, counts the beds, and if the numbers are wrong the city can order everyone out.
First the government makes housing scarce. Then it trains neighbors to watch each other. When you make housing illegal, you end up policing the people trying to live in it.
As Larry put it, the building inspectors carry badges and look like cops, because they are kicking in doors. If you have to give your building inspectors badges, maybe the problem is the rules.
It does not have to go this way
Larry’s view is that you beat bad ideas by showing people something better, and he points to Argentina. Milei told people up front that ending rent control would hurt for a year, and asked them to give him that year. Argentina’s government reported real rent prices fell nearly 27 percent in the first seven months, and listings in Buenos Aires roughly tripled.
Closer to home, Houston never adopted zoning and remains one of the cheapest big cities in America to buy a house.
But his deepest point was about ownership.
Gentrification only hurts if you rent. If you own, it is the best thing that could happen to you. So make more owners and the problem mostly goes away. When wealthy people leave a place they leave with a check. When renters leave, they leave with a moving bill.
Even a small place counts. A studio, a tiny home, something on top of five other people. If you own it, you leave with something.
Every rule that blocks the small building, the tiny home, the legal basement apartment, keeps somebody on the wrong side of that line. And a city of renters with nothing to lose will keep voting for whoever promises to freeze the rent.
The city is still in there
In the summer of 2020, restaurants were dying, so the city did something it almost never does. It got out of the way. It waived the usual permits and let restaurants build outside.
No three year review. No hearings. Within weeks, thousands of restaurants had tables on the sidewalk and in the street. Plywood, string lights, heaters. Some ugly, some beautiful, all of it built fast by the people who needed it built.
Streets that had been parking spots came alive at night.
Then the city came back with the rulebook, and most of those sheds are gone now.
But for a moment everybody saw it. Give New Yorkers a little room and they build fast, everywhere, at every price.
Now point that same energy at housing. Basement apartments made legal and safe. Small buildings on empty lots. Old offices turned into homes. Rent coming down because there are finally enough places to live. Kids who grew up in Queens able to stay and build a life in Queens.
The people who built New York showed up with nothing and made one of the greatest cities in the world.
I like to think that city is still in there. It is waiting on permission it should never have needed in the first place.
The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.
I’m David Rand from the Land Liberty Movement. This is Build the Dream. Let’s rebuild the American Dream together.
