Inside an Elliott-Chelsea apartment.

Standing outside a shiny new red and tan brick building at 401 West 25th Street, indistinguishable from any other late-2000s new construction throughout the West Side, you can catch a glimpse of the future of housing if New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidates get their way.

A young woman who works in finance and moved into this building from a “real shithole” in the West Village, a computer programmer from South Carolina, a lifelong New Yorker who moved in from the projects a few blocks south, and a gay couple—one a playwright, the other a social worker—with a son, who moved from 14th Street and Seventh Avenue.

They all found places in a 22-story middle-income affordable housing development in an increasingly unaffordable Chelsea. The Elliott-Chelsea, developed by Artimus Construction, rose on New York City Housing Authority property with the help of an alphabet soup of government agencies. Some of the 168 units in the  building are typical low-income units, reserved for families earning under $40,000 a year. But the bulk of the complex is set aside for middle-income earners, a group that this cycle’s crop of Democratic mayoral candidates is eager to court.

Some of these units can legitimately be called middle-income apartments, with half a dozen one-bedroom apartments available to couples earning a combined $64,000 to $101,000 a year. But there are also 45 two-bedrooms that go for $3,421 a month, for households, no matter the size, ranging in income from $119,143 to $190,080. In the world of New York City affordable housing, this is what passes for middle-income.

So-called middle-income housing wasn’t a huge part of Michael Bloomberg’s plan to create or preserve 165,000 subsidized affordable housing units by the end of his term. Of the 147,890 subsidized housing units created (or maintained) so far, only 11,877 are classified as “middle-income,” as defined by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Among them: The Acacia, on the gentrifying fringe of Bed-Stuy, aims at incomes from $66,686 to $194,415. Or there’s Washington Mews at 89 Murray Street in Tribeca, which is open to those earning up to $150,325. If the New York City mayoral candidates get their way, there will be a lot more like them.

The pivot toward middle-income housing raises questions about whether the city can really afford to solve its housing program through subsidies—so limited compared with the need that they’re given out by lottery—especially now that the mandate has expanded to cover the vast number of New Yorkers who could plausibly be considered “not rich.”

With a limited pool of money for those in desperate need of housing—the Section 8 waiting list, for example, is completely closed—does it make sense for the city to be subsidizing new Manhattan construction for those who could pay the same in an older building in Park Slope or Yorkville.

It may be hard to see it now, but public and subsidized housing in New York was, in its early heyday, a middle-class effort aimed at shoring up declining neighborhoods. Programs like Mitchell-Lama that subsidized new construction through low-cost mortgages to developers were meant to prevent people who could afford the suburbs from fleeing the city. Rising housing costs weren’t the problem—they were the goal.

But with Americans’ impression of cities, especially big cities, on the upswing, the market demand for the country’s densest urban centers has rendered the housing programs of the ’70s and ’80s obsolete, or at least has radically altered their goals.

Whereas Penn South, a Mitchell-Lama housing complex an avenue away, was built in a declining Chelsea, the Elliott-Chelsea building, which opened last year, was built in a neighborhood where one-bedroom apartments in non-doorman buildings rent for well over $3,000 a month. Especially by the standards of new construction, a $3,421 two-
bedroom is certainly affordable.

At its groundbreaking, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in the mayor’s race, heralded the project as “ensuring that Chelsea stays a vibrant and diverse neighborhood.” She hinted at the social engineering aims of such housing—intended not only to help New Yorkers find housing, but also to preserve a modicum of diversity within neighborhoods. Middle-income housing in New York seems to be as much about neighborhoods as it is about people.

In exchange for capping the rents at merely high levels as opposed to astronomical ones, Artimus was lavished with subsidies for the $65 million project. From cheap land (it paid only $4 million, of which more than a million was loaned to the company by NYCHA itself), to tens of millions in bond financing, millions in direct loans and a $1.5 million direct grant from the City Council, the city made significant contributions to the project.

What’s more, not all city-subsidized projects are affordable relative to their surroundings. At the Acacia, the $2,729-a-month three-bedroom units went quickly in a recent lottery. Smaller apartments are still available; when asked about the project, a woman from the neighborhood questioned whether the $1,887 starting rent was really any kind of deal in Bed-Stuy.

Indeed, a report by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development issued earlier this year found that her suspicions were not unfounded: two-thirds of units created through Mayor Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace Plan are too expensive for the majority of residents in the neighborhoods in which they were built.

Part of the problem is how “middle-income” is defined. The definition revolves around an all-important number called “area median income,” or AMI, which the federal government calculates based on the greater New York area’s population—an area that includes wealthy suburbs in Westchester, Long Island and New Jersey.

“‘Middle-income’ becomes a subset of the top third of all households” in the city, ANHD’s Moses Gates told The Observer. He placed those who qualify for the apartments somewhere between the 70th and 90th percentiles of earners. “It’s upper-middle-income housing.”

So for example, at the Acacia in Bed-Stuy, not only are the units not middle-income by the neighborhood’s standards, but they’re not even particularly middling by the standards of the city’s population.

And there’s no limit to how much tenants can earn once they qualify. “Once you’re in, you’re in,” explained the young computer programmer on Ninth Avenue. (He said it was the first thing he asked.) Even if he or the young woman in finance ends up with a household income over the $190,080 limit, they can keep their subsidized apartments.

The lobby of the Elliott-Chelsea.

In her housing platform unveiled in February, Ms. Quinn promised to create 40,000 new middle-income affordable housing units over 10 years. Anthony Weiner didn’t give a headline number of new apartments, but he wants to turn the city’s 80/20 affordable program into 60/20/20, which would require developers to set aside not only 20 percent of their units for low-income residents in exchange for density bonuses and tax breaks, but also another 20 percent for middle-income renters or buyers.

And neither of the plans—or even Mayor Bloomberg’s, which was far more ambitious—even comes close to replacing the dwindling stock of rent-stabilized units. In 2009, the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University found that 200,000 affordable, mostly unsubsidized apartments were lost to market increases in rent.

With nearly half of the rental units within the five boroughs falling under the rent-stabilization program, it is far and away the largest government effort aimed at maintaining affordability in the city. But with no appetite for strengthening the laws among upstate Republicans, who hold the reins on rent regulation, the prospects of reversing the program’s decline seem slim.

And then there’s the market cure: simply allowing more housing to be built, in the hope that if supply is allowed to meet demand, rents will at least level off. Economists of all stripes tend to agree that New York City’s fundamental housing problem is that not enough new market-rate buildings are allowed to rise.

The city has cemented neighborhoods as they were in 1961, when the modern zoning code was adopted, with only pockets of growth allowed—in Downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City and the Far West Side today, for example.

“New York has made it so difficult to build that you forget what free and easy supply really does,” said Harvard economics professor Ed Glaeser, who co-authored a study a decade ago that found that half of the cost of housing in Manhattan could be blamed on artificial supply constraints. “Chicago remains a vastly more affordable city because Mayor Daley unleashed the cranes on Lake Michigan”—a reference to the Windy City’s far more lenient land-use regulations and commensurate low rents.

When it comes to New York City housing policy, said Mr. Glaeser, “there’s been a funny combination, from an economic point of view, of on one level making it difficult to build housing supply, and then trying to make up for it on a smaller scale by giving a privileged few access to housing.” In other words, those lucky enough to win the housing lottery like the couple at Elliott-Chelsea, who said they’d been applying for 15 years before they won a spot.

For better or for worse, middle-income affordable housing may be the best chance those  who are neither poor nor rich have to move to Manhattan south of Harlem. Meanwhile, for those who earn between $73,166 and $150,325 a year, there’s a lottery for a new $2,000 one-bedroom at 89 Murray Street in Tribeca.

So there's this thing. It's called a mayoral's race. Heard of it? Any idea who's running? If you can name a single candidate, you're an outlier—55 percent of the New Yorkers we asked couldn't. That's one of the take-home messages from our Race to Gracie Mansion 2013 street polling project: very low awareness of the upcoming election. Only one candidate approaches broad name recognition, and it's not for his policy smarts. Browse the full results here, and tell us who you plan to support. Not sure yet? Keep reading Politicker for up-to-the-minute mayor's race news.

With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir

Christine Quinn

(William Morrow, 256 pp., $24.99)

City Council speaker and mayoral candidate Christine Quinn insists that her new memoir—conveniently timed for release just as voters are starting to tune into the election—is intended to be personal, not political.

The volume provides an intimate account of Ms. Quinn’s childhood on Long Island, including how she coped with her mother’s losing battle with cancer, her struggles with bulimia and alcoholism, and how she became the city’s second most powerful elected official and potentially its first female and openly gay mayor.

Poignant and touching at times and marked by Ms. Quinn’s signature brash humor, the book offers insights into the forces that shaped her outsized personality—as well as giddy details of her headline-grabbing 2012 wedding, including her search for the perfect dress (thwarted at one point by the discovery that Khloé Kardashian had walked down the aisle in her first pick, prompting Ms. Quinn to “dramatically” take to the bathtub and give her fiancée the silent treatment).

But that gushing makes the volume all the more disappointing to political readers looking for insights into Ms. Quinn’s time as speaker, including her controversial decision to overturn term limits and her relationship with the current mayor—which are all but overlooked.

The memoir also feels repetitive and hastily written. (Sample sentence: “I’d be the first one there and the last to leave, which is my philosophy of work. I believe that you should be the most prepared person in the room, and the first to arrive and the last to leave ...”) It gives the impression that this is nothing more than the latest political calculation in Ms. Quinn’s master plan. —Jill Colvin

Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns

David Margolick

(Other Press, 400 pp., $28.95)

The greatest war novel that you’ve probably never heard of was written by John Horne Burns, who served behind the lines in North Africa and Italy during World War II. The Gallery, published in 1947, is a gritty, unromantic portrait of the Allied occupation of Naples. Gore Vidal called it “the best book of World War II.” William Zinsser wrote that it was “the proto-Vietnam novel.” Paul Fussell referred to it as “an extraordinary contribution to American literature.”

Mr. Burns, who was gay, was a proud but altogether unhappy man; he liked to use the majestic plural in his ribald and highly entertaining letters, which animate David Margolick’s often dreary and deeply researched biography of this now mostly forgotten man. (It takes its title from a word in Mr. Burns’s invented vocabulary meant to denote homosexuality.) “It is a long job on the war in Italy,” Mr. Burns wrote of The Gallery, “and is, I fear, at least as good as War and Peace.” He never made good on the promise he held, however, following up with two clunkers; he died a sad, drunken expatriate in 1953.

With the cooperation of Mr. Burns’s family—who long denied his homosexuality and “shut down Burns scholarship”—Mr. Margolick is the first biographer with full access to Mr. Burns’s wonderful letters. This book is a well-rounded portrait of an enigmatic man, but you finish it wanting more—hoping, perhaps as I did, that someday those letters will be published in full. A collection like that might very well be Mr. Burns’s last great work. —Matthew Kassel

Last night, New Yorkers came together to mourn the death of 32-year-old Mark Carson, a gay man who was shot in the head this weekend in Greenwich Village; the victim of an alleged hate crime. Crowds gathered at the LGBT Center on West 13th and marched to 8th Street and Sixth Avenue, the location of the shooting, where a rally/vigil was held to memorialize Mr. Carson and express the outrage of the city's denizens.

The Speaker and mayoral hopeful announced yesterday at a newsstand near City Hall that the Council will propose a bill to amend a little-known city regulation that limits the price of items sold at newsstands. Ms. Quinn’s new bill will raise the limit from $5 to $10.

Currently, newsstands may only sell snacks, beverages and other products priced less than $5, though cigarettes, high-priced newspapers and magazines, prepaid MetroCards and calling cards are exceptions to the rule.

“This legislation will allow New York City's iconic newsstands to sell more products, thereby expanding consumers' access to more of the products they want and need,” Ms. Quinn said.

This regulation applies only to newsstands regulated by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, not food carts or trucks, newsstands and convenience stands in subway stations or street vendors who sell cheap knock-off sunglasses and handbags.

Supporters of the new legislation, which will be officially introduced at a City Council meeting on May 22, said the higher limit could help keep newsstands in business.

“This will help newsstands stay in business by giving them items they can sell and make some money on,” Robert Bookman, counsel to the NYC Newsstand Operators Association told Crain’s New York. "It's to allow these other items which you can't sell for $5 anymore, a decent umbrella that will work for more than one rain, or a tourist guide.

Mr. Bookman also told Crain’s that there are currently 300 newsstands in the city, which is down from the 1,500 that populated the city decades ago.

Of all the fun new items newsstands might be able to sell soon, including camera batteries and headphones, Ms. Quinn remarked that higher quality umbrellas might be the biggest draw.

“The $4 umbrella of 2002 isn’t the same as the $4 umbrella of 2012-13,” she said. “The $4 umbrella in 2013, you’re lucky if it’s going to get you to the corner.”

Angelina Jolie. (Photo credit: Patrick McMullan).

Mayoral candidate Christine Quinn, in an attempt to "try to soften her often rough-edged political image," according to The New York Times, called up and gave The Grey Lady a big scoop: as a young woman, she struggled with bulimia and alcoholism.

But despite Ms. Quinn's best efforts to win the news cycle, she couldn't have known that she was up against Angelina Jolie, who unveiled big news of her own in an Op-Ed, that also ran in today's Times, discussing her decision to undergo a preventative double mastectomy. Ms. Jolie wrote that she possesses a gene, BRCA1, that puts her at a high risk for ovarian and breast cancer.

Both women gave a similar reason for going public with their struggles.

Ms. Quinn said she decided to discuss her challenges in the hopes that others will benefit, though the Times also noted her efforts to "build a campaign that draws heavily on her personal appeal to women."

“Until you stop hiding things, you’re hiding things, and hiding things is not healthy,” Ms. Quinn told the Times. “I just want people to know you can get through stuff."

Ms. Jolie wrote that she hoped her story would help other women facing similar medical decisions.

"On April 27, I finished the three months of medical procedures that the mastectomies involved. During that time I have been able to keep this private and to carry on with my work," Ms. Jolie wrote. "But I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience."

The superstar actress's revelations blazed across Facebook, Twitter, the tabloids and the Times' own most-read lists.

Seems that news cycles, like political races, are unpredictable.

Christine Quinn at the Loebs' home.

Last Monday, five NYC power couples—and one real estate tycoon—opened their homes for dinner parties as part of the Parties of Your Choice Gala for the Women’s Campaign Fund, a night that began as a politically charged reception but slowly morphed into a cross between Million Dollar Listing and MTV Cribs.

“Our research shows that as soon as you talk about a woman’s appearance and what she’s wearing, she loses 12 points,” Siobhan “Sam” Bennett, president and CEO of the Women’s Campaign Fund, told the Transom at the opening reception at Christie’s. “Even if you also say great things about her, like Obama’s comment about Kamala Harris, she drops like a stone.”

Meanwhile, a giggly Christie’s auctioneer paused the bidding on a tour of the capital with Tuisi Gabbard to tell the current bidder, “I love your dress! It’s very cute!” apparently not having received the memo.

There was no mistaking artist Peter Max’s West 65th Street studio, our first stop of the night: colorful pastel paintings of everyone from MLK to Brooke Shields lined the wall, along with a photo of the $100 million plane he painted for Continental Airlines. “I don’t mean to sound like I’m bragging, but I find that people are a bit mesmerized when they come here,” said his wife, Mary Max.

The Transom wondered whom Ms. Max would be voting for in the upcoming elections.

“There’s a woman running for mayor, but I’m not voting for her,” she said, leading us past a life-size pastel blue statue of a cow, before turning to scold her vegan husband, who was picking at some nuts and berries: “Can we not eat right now?”

Our conversation then turned to an underpublicized female reproductive rights issue: “There is a serious lack of knowledge about how much dairy cows are abused. They’re constantly impregnated. I wouldn’t want to be impregnated all the time. They become a milk machine.”

(MSNBC’s Krystal Ball, who is pregnant with her second child and had emceed the reception at Christie’s, could likely relate, having told New York magazine that on her daughter’s first night home she nursed “for, like, eight hours.”)

In stark contrast to the clean, open space of the Maxes’ studio was the Loeb townhome—well, one of their five homes—on East 72ndStreet between Park and Madison, which Christine Quinn initially thought was a museum when she passed it by, nearly an hour late.

A gold-lacquered elevator led to six different floors, none of which was left uncovered by some sort of busy, decorative pattern with gold-leaf undertones. The hostess, Marjorie Loeb, said her involvement with the WCF was initially unintentional.

“I became involved by accident six dinners ago. My sister-in-law originally volunteered and she didn’t have enough room, and it’s, like, important,” she explained.

Would Ms. Loeb be voting for any of the women running this year, the Transom wondered?

“Not that I know of yet. Although, Christina [yes, Christina!] Quinn will be here, so I’ll get to meet her and see what I think,” she said.

When Ms. Quinn finally arrived, she told the room that they need someone in office who doesn’t accept no for an answer and has the tenacity to get things done. “There’s no other business in the world where you keep your job when you don’t do anything,” she said.

“That’s not true,” Michael Loeb interjected, suddenly materializing beside the Transom and making no attempt to speak in hushed tones. “There are plenty of jobs like that.”

A very good-natured little dog named Nugget kept trying to bound up the Persian-carpeted steps to join the party but was ushered back down by various guests. In all fairness, he was severely underdressed in a simple knit orange sweater.

With only time for one more stop, we headed next to Eric Hadar’s home on East 65th Street, which he described as having been “all black lacquer and [looking] like a catering hall in Great Neck,” when he arrived in 2002. Mr. Hadar brought in designer Muriel Brandolini to create an Oriental-style vibe throughout the apartment. An aquarium divides the dining room, which is decorated with colorful rugs, lots of bamboo and bird sculptures.

“I’ve traveled extensively in Southeast Asia and have always been drawn to the décor. I think it’s calming,” Mr. Hadar said.

He was slightly less involved in that evening’s dinner planning, though. “Oh boy, you know, I have no idea what we’re eating or drinking,” he said.

Turned out: eggplant, lasagna and grilled vegetables.

According to The Observer’s account, the rebellious politicians may defy the speaker’s wishes by bringing measures she opposes to a floor vote. One member, Peter Vallone Jr. of Queens, has actually begun the process. He wants to bring two bills to a floor vote despite Ms. Quinn’s opposition. In order to achieve that goal, he needs the support of seven colleagues for a parliamentary procedure known as a motion to discharge. That maneuver, if successful, would force a bill out of committee and send it to the full Council for a vote.

The speaker of the City Council has extraordinary power over legislation, as Mr. Vallone knows better than most. His father, Peter Vallone Sr., became the first speaker in the Council’s history in 1986—before him, the Council’s top banana bore the title of majority leader, while the City Council president served as the body’s presiding officer. (The Council president’s office was abolished in the early 1990s.)

Every speaker since the elder Mr. Vallone has had the power to kill legislation simply by assigning it to a committee and letting it die of neglect. But in one of his first acts as speaker, Mr. Vallone allowed a gay rights bill to come to the floor for a vote despite his personal opposition to the measure. The bill, which outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation, passed with ease.

In a similar vein, Ms. Quinn announced that she will allow a vote on legislation that would make it easier for people to sue the Police Department if they believe they have been racially profiled. Ms. Quinn opposes the bill, a sensible position, but she has decided not to let it linger in committee.

That decision has emboldened colleagues like Mr. Vallone. But the discharge option is the equivalent of open warfare against the Speaker—not the sort of battle a mayoral candidate wants to fight. It’s one thing for the speaker to allow a vote on her terms. It’s quite another to force a bill to the floor, as Mr. Vallone and others are contemplating.

This mutiny in the making is bound to affect the mayoral race. And Ms. Quinn’s skill in addressing the situation will speak volumes about the kind of mayor she might make.

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio unveiled his housing platform today in Williamsburg, where housing prices have nearly tripled since 2004.

Until now, Bill de Blasio's housing platform has mainly consisted of sniping at frontrunner Christine Quinn. But no longer: this afternoon Mr. de Blasio announced measures he would take mayor to curb what he calls the "full-blown crisis" of affordable housing. (Old habits, though, do die hard: Mr. de Blasio did take another shot at Ms. Quinn, saying, "Letting the real estate industry keep calling all the shots with our affordable housing policy isn't going to deliver what working people need"—an allusion to her tax credits-for-affordable housing plan, which seems cribbed right from REBNY and Steve Ross's proposals back in 2011.)

Mr. de Blasio started out, as all candidates do, with a promise for the number of affordable housing units he'd create: 100,000 "new affordable units," plus preservation for "nearly 90,000" others.

As a comparison, Ms. Quinn called for the construction of "40,000 new middle-income affordable apartments." In 2005 Mayor Bloomberg wanted to build 92,000 units and preserve 73,000 by 2014, but the number of new units was revised downwards to 60,000, with the balance shifted to preservation. In 1985 Ed Koch promised 250,000 new or renovated affordable units over ten years, but only delivered 150,000, the vast majority of which were renovations.

But it's once you get past Mr. de Blasio's headline number that things start to get interesting. He calls for "mandating [that] developers include affordable housing in large development" (we used to have a name for this: rent control), which he says will be responsible for half of his 100,000 new affordable units.

He also calls for investing $1 billion from the city's public pension funds in affordable housing—an interesting proposal, but one that would put city workers' retirements in jeopardy if this not-highly-remunerative investment doesn't pan out.

Beyond that, he also has some ideas for how the government can ease constraints on private builders and landlords—a sop to the real estate industry that he decried earlier if you want to be uncharitable about it, or a recognition that the market also has a role to play in creating affordable housing, to put a more generous spin on it.

His first idea piggybacks onto something that Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has already gotten behind: legalizing basement apartments and "granny flats" in places where they are currently illegal—namely, the outer boroughs. "Housing experts estimate there are about 100,000 illegal units throughout the city," City Limits reported back in 2010, unregulated and prone to building and fire code violations, "housing as many as 500,000 New Yorkers," with the largest concentration of illegal units in Queens.

(In his press release he mentions bringing them into the "the legal, rent-regulated system," but his press secretary clarified to The Observer that he would only seek rent controls for units developed through city programs; the rest would simply be brought into "the legal system, like we did with lofts several years ago.")

His second idea is to allow development rights to be transfered "not just to adjacent properties, but within a neighborhood, in order to encourage more affordable construction." As it is now, neighborhood-wide transferable development rights only exist within special areas, like around the High Line. Allowing easier air rights transfers across the city—with the vague "affordable construction" caveat—would certainly make it easier to build, though it would also raise the ire of NIMBYs the city over.

Mr. de Blasio also includes a number of other housing issues in his plank, from "closing the vacant land tax loophole" to "launching a national coalition of mayors and governors to secure more federal investment in affordable housing."

Though given the secular decline in federal involvement in housing over the past few decades, we wouldn't hold our breath for that last one. For better or worse, housing is New York City's problem now.

Ms. Quinn did not present a plan to expand New York City's subway system.

New York City mayoral front-runner and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn unveiled her mass transit agenda this morning. While she emphasized increased control for the city's next mayor, Ms. Quinn had no new ideas.

Her headline proposal is to take control of the MTA back from the state. But taking over the MTA is a tall order, and to do it, she'll need to prove that she has better ideas about how to run it than the state.

So does she?

Ms. Quinn presented three concrete transit proposals—bringing Metro-North service to Penn Station with new stations in the Bronx, ten new Select Bus Service lines in the outer boroughs and increased ferry service.

The first proposal, to bring Metro-North service to Co-Op City, Parkchester, Morris Park and Hunts Point, with additional stops on Manhattan's West Side, is something that has been planned for the MTA's next capital plan anyway—nothing new here.

As far as we can tell from her plan, she would leave the MTA's regional railroads—Metro-North and the Long Island Railroad—as the the same bloated and inefficient services that they are today. With the same sky-high labor costs—commuter railroads in the Northeast have clung to as many as half-a-dozen employees per train, whereas other countries and cities on the west coast have pared staff down to rapid transit levels—new Metro-North service under Ms. Quinn's plan is likely to be just as infrequent and expensive as it is now, reducing its usefulness for New Yorkers who already have cheaper, albeit slower, options. (Absent as well from her platform was any mention of labor reform on New York City's subways, despite issues like one-person train operation being at the heart of the MTA's negotiations with its union.)

Ramped up Select Bus Service service—otherwise known as "bus rapid transit," which speeds boarding with a fine-enforced honor system and gives buses their own dedicated lanes—is the meatiest part of her proposal, but this idea is hardly original—she merely puts a number (ten new lines) to the Progressive Caucus's plan for "a city-wide network of bus rapid transit lines that connect the boroughs." Her four-year timeline is a welcome improvement from the MTA's current snail's pace roll-out, but given Ms. Quinn's emphasis on public review as council speaker, it's unclear if she could roll this out as quickly as she'd like to.

Ferry rides are scenic, but there's a reason that New York started replacing them with subways in the 19th century.

Furthermore, the reasoning behind improved bus service hints at the elephant in New York City's transit room: astronomical subway construction costs.

"Subways cost roughly $1 billion per mile to construct," she said in her speech. "Bus rapid transit—just $1 million a mile."

For one, Ms. Quinn should check her facts. The Upper East Side segment of the Second Avenue subway clocks in at $2.7 billion a mile, and the 7 train extension is over $2 billion a mile—and that's without the much-needed stop at 41st Street and 10th Avenue, which would cost another half-billion, at least.

But more importantly, using the high cost of subway construction in New York City—much higher than in peer cities like Tokyo, Paris or even London—as an excuse not to build any more lines ("I'm a little bit on the fence about finishing the Second Avenue subway," Ms. Quinn joked, saying that her father has vowed not to die before it's finished) is an admission of defeat.

Select Bus Service on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn, for example, is a good start (and something the MTA is already planning), but these high-ridership corridors are crying out for full-blown subway service—first planned over 80 years ago. Better bus service in the outer boroughs would be nice, but Ms. Quinn said nothing about the higher-capacity Triboro RX rail line that many transit advocates have been pushing.

As for ferries, they are essentially a 19th century mode of transit, with no hope of making a dent in the city's transit needs outside of a few places like Staten Island and the Rockaways. "In just 18 months," Ms. Quinn said of East River ferry service, "it’s already served over 1.6 million riders." As a comparison, the Lexington Avenue subway line carries 1.3 million riders each day.

New York is fundamentally a rail-oriented city, and Christine Quinn apparently has no plan to add to this infrastructure, or even make more efficient use of existing lines, aside from the Metro-North plan the MTA is already working on. Buses and ferries are all well and good, but Ms. Quinn is going to need to do better if she wants to give the city back its subways.