Fareed Zakaria: Blue Cities Are Failing

Adriana Stone 0 1 min read

Fareed Zakaria: Blue Cities Are Failing

Even CNN hosts can have a reality check. Fareed Zakaria did just that. He called out what happens when one-party rule in big cities keeps expanding programs without fixing results.

Zakaria started with New York and Zohran Mamdani. He called the situation “a prime example of a problem Democrats seem unwilling to confront.” That’s blunt. It’s also accurate to the argument he laid out.

He didn’t stop there. On Los Angeles he pointed to raw numbers. He noted the city’s homelessness budget for fiscal year 2025-2026 is roughly $950 million. That’s one year. And the outcomes? The LA Homelessness Services Authority reported homelessness rose 9% countywide and 10% within the city in 2023. A 2024 AP report found homelessness surged by 70% countywide since 2015 and by 80% within the city.

Zakaria put the problem plainly: “Blue cities are out of control,” he said, “promising more, spending more, delivering less, and pushing off the fiscal problems to some future day.” He asked the question many city leaders won’t: “What is the theory of good government here?”

His follow-up line was sharp: “If the answer is keep adding programs, the city will keep producing unaffordability, because unaffordability is what happens when government becomes a machine that grows faster than the society it governs.”

Those lines cut to the core. You can’t throw money at broken systems and expect them to magically work better. You need accountability. You need clear goals. You need results.

Consider another jarring comparison Zakaria mentioned: Zohran Mamdani’s proposed New York City budget being bigger than Florida’s entire state budget. Yet Florida is growing, and people are moving there. Cities like New York and Los Angeles keep adding costs and complexity. People notice.

This isn’t a call to gut services. It’s a call to stop rewarding dysfunction. If cities keep governing as if the only job is to announce new entitlements, they’ll keep producing unaffordability and decline. Zakaria’s comments are a rare rebuke from someone on cable CNN — and they deserve attention.

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