CNN Host Erupts At ‘Out Of Control’ Blue Cities

CNN host Fareed Zakaria ranted at New York City and Los Angeles on Sunday, saying the two cities are “delivering less” even as spending increases.

Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City proposed a $127 billion budget for the city, drawing criticism from an editorial in the Washington Post. Zakaria said that both cities, as well as Chicago, were “producing unaffordability,” even as their mayors campaigned on affordability.

“New York is really a prime example of a problem Democrats seem unwilling to confront. Blue cities are out of control. Promising more, spending more, delivering less and pushing off the fiscal problems to some future day. Take Los Angeles, another one-party metropolis wrestling with affordability and disorder,” Zakaria said. “The city’s homelessness budget for fiscal year 2025-‘26 totals about $950 million. The L.A. Homelessness Services Authority reported that in 2023, homelessness was up 9 percent countywide and 10 percent in the city. And a 2024 AP account noted that homelessness has surged 70 percent countywide since 2015, and 80 percent in the city.”

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“All this amid public frustration despite billions spent. An audit reviewed 2.4 billion in city homelessness funding and found that officials could not reliably track where it went or what it achieved,” Zakaria said. “Or take Chicago, with a mayor whose approval rating is deep underwater, where the pension promises are so large that they will surely bankrupt the city at some point.”

California’s homeless population increased 60% since 2015, despite billions of funding being provided to cities like Los Angeles by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Twenty people froze to death during a January cold snap after Mamdani announced an end to sweeps of homeless encampments in the city.

Mamdani’s $127 billion budget included a 9.5% increase in property taxes in order to address a $5.4 billion shortfall in his budget after Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York rebuffed his call for a tax increase on wealthy people and corporations.

“Zohran Mamdani’s basic instinct is correct: focus on affordability, especially housing. But not by providing government subsidies,” Zakaria said. “These only seem to have driven up the cost of rent, as subsidies naturally do. The city’s rental assistance spending rose from $263 million in fiscal year 2020 to $1.34 billion in the most recently reported fiscal year. That is a five-times increase in a handful of years, and housing costs only got worse.”

“Matt Yglesias persuasively argues that the city should make it easy and routine to just build abundant market-rate housing,” Zakaria continued. “That will bring in more people, expand the tax base, fill the schools and increase local GDP. And that will make the budget affordable.”

Democratic Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles was fact-checked on the spot by a reporter while discussing pothole repairs at a Friday press conference. Bass also came under fire for spending over a million dollars on a two-stall restroom near Runyon Canyon.