City Limits

City Limits

Anne Hidalgo’s mayoralty illustrates the limits of local responses to national and international problems like housing and climate change. Without wider coordination, even the most successful mayor’s reach can only extend so far.

Since becoming mayor of Paris in 2014, Anne Hidalgo has transformed the city. Paris is greener, easier to cross on a bike, more pedestrian friendly. Large swaths of land that were once given over to cars are now open to people on foot, most notably the banks of the Seine. Parks have expanded, trees have been planted. Hidalgo has pushed forth a wide range of plans in order to fulfill her vision: new social homes, better healthcare, new monuments to women forgotten by history. Her push for social housing and against gentrification has won her praise around the world. This summer, the Seine opened up for public swimming, a decades-long project finally achieved.

This sense of constant—and often very delayed—change has earned Hidalgo regular grumbling from her Parisian constituents. Visible transformation around the city means construction sites wherever you go. Sidewalks are truncated, roads closed. Even projects that have wrapped up leave behind debris and uncollected material. Navigating this construction can often be confusing and frustrating, especially for those who move in a wheelchair or have to push a stroller. Regular debate surrounds the mayor. Her right-wing opponents often claim that she is ruining Paris; a campaign called Saccage Paris (Ransacked Paris) collects images of particularly ill-fated projects. The city’s debt, which has doubled under her tenure, has also raised hackles. But even the people who complain about Hidalgo have voted with their feet. The number of cyclists, helped by clean lanes and financial support for electric bikes and bicycle repairs, increased by 71 percent between 2019 and 2022.

Despite these positive changes, something is not quite right. Paris’s population has been decreasing by an increasing rate, now almost 1 percent a year. Classrooms have closed for a lack of students. Families are increasingly moving out. If Paris is so great, why are people leaving?

For New Yorkers looking at a Mamdani mayoralty, there’s a particular lesson in Paris. The city has indeed become cleaner, more agreeable, and easier to move around in. The city’s politics are far to the left of France’s; Paris has often stood against the anti-immigration sentiment that has taken hold of the state.

And yet Hidalgo’s success also shows the limit to what a single mayor can do to promote progressive policies. Because Paris is a city that is not well-connected to the rest of the region...