Whether it is blocking Amazon HQ2, or the disastrous handling of the pandemic (If NY was its own country it would have had one of the highest per capita nCov2-mortality-rates of all industrialized nations), or the deteriorating security situation – decades of one-party rule leave behind a dysfunctional, rotten, place.
All of those failures where known to happen in the moment the root-cause policies were enacted. Dysfunctional places enact them inspite reality's warnings, because by now reality is a white supremacist.
The subway-cars can become a place to forni- and deficate for the homeless for weeks, making it unusable for citizens. But critique cannot make a dent, becaue it is guilty by association.
That's why even if tax-payers flee the place day by day, its institutions must defy that reality. Insitutions like the NYT are a major part of the city's dysfunction. They are to blame, thus you see such rediculous articles getting "past the editors".