Zohran Mamdani has ambitious goals for making housing affordable. Officials from the past two mayoral administrations say making those plans a reality will take tremendous management and strong relationships with the city council and Albany.

Apartment buildings in Queens at dusk. (Benjamin Kanter/Mayoral Photo Office)

Why is the rent so damn high?

It’s a question New Yorkers want their mayor to answer. Fed up with the high cost of housing, New York City Democratic voters powered Queens Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani to an upset victory in last month’s mayoral primary. 

He’ll now head into the general election on Nov. 4 against incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, Republican Curtis Sliwa, independent Jim Walden and possibly former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is still deciding whether to remain in the race on the independent line.

Mamdani’s campaign put affordability at the forefront. Housing, the largest expense in many household budgets, was the top issue for voters in some polls, and several told City Limits that housing affordability was one of their main concerns.

“People are struggling and every little bit helps,” said Michael Campos, 38, on the cost of housing. Campos works in a warehouse and ranked Mamdani first when he went to the polls in Prospect Heights on June 24.

Nearly every primary candidate had a plan for housing affordability. From building hundreds of thousands of new units, prioritizing income-restricted housing, pushing large-scale zoning reform, to building new neighborhoods on city-owned golf courses, there was no shortage of big ideas. 

Mamdani, now the Democratic nominee for mayor, called for a four-year freeze on rent in the 2.4 million stabilized units citywide, constructing 200,000 affordable apartments, and fully staffing city housing agencies.

“I love that there is ambition in his and many other plans. It’s clear that the number one issue is affordability,” said Maria Torres-Springer, former deputy mayor for housing under Mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent in November’s general election..

Housing officials from the past two administrations told City Limits that the mayor has significant agenda-setting power. But turning plans into reality is no cakewalk.

Mayors stretching back decades have struggled to get housing plans done in the nation’s densest city, where land is precious and building housing is increasingly expensive. “Housing is very complicated,” said Vicki Been, former deputy mayor for housing under Bill de Blasio’s administration, now with New York Law School and the Furman Center.

Almost any move on the mayor’s chessboard quickly entangles other institutions—like the City Council, the state legislature, and the governor—which can control or influence tax policy, land use, and budgets.

“A mayor is incredibly constrained compared to what I think people believe to be the case, being the mayor of the nation’s largest city,” said Been.

Here’s what the next mayor can do on day one, and what they may need a little help with.

People power

The mayor has direct control over who they appoint: to set rent for rent stabilized tenants, review land use applications, oversee NYCHA, and run city agencies that build housing.

Mayors have, “through [their] appointees, very strong control over housing policy within the city,” said Carl Weisbrod, former City Planning Commission chair and director of the New York City Department of City Planning during the de Blasio administration. 

“If you want world class results on your housing plans, you need world class talent,” added Torres-Springer.

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign has promised to appoint a Rent Guidelines Board that would freeze rent all four years, a move that some critics say undermines the independence of the board. Landlord groups, like the New York Apartment Association’s Kenny Burgos, questioned the legality of such a move on X.

But Mamdani and former Mayor de Blasio have maintained that rent freezes are within the mayor’s control, regardless of what the board’s economic analysis might say.

Members of the Rent Guidelines Board voting last week on rent changes for the city’s stabilized apartments. The mayor appoints the board’s members. (Photo by Adi Talwar)

NYU Law School’s Been emphasized that appointment is a powerful, but not unlimited, tool. 

“You have the enormous power of appointment and you have the power to try to persuade those people, but if they don’t vote the way that you want them to vote, your remedy is to fire them and to appoint somebody else. But that’s heavy handed, and it’s going to get attention. You have those powers, but you have to use them wisely,” she said.

To make meaningful progress on new development, particularly affordable housing, Torres-Springer said you need the “plumbing” of government to function. “You need the coordination and the cooperation of so many agencies so that an idea of a [housing] project goes from a kernel of that idea to actually being occupied by a real human being.”

“You’re a manager of an enormous, enormous corporation,” added Been.

In New York, housing (and particularly affordable housing) is expensive, and can take a long time to build. If a project requires zoning changes, it must also go through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), where community boards, borough presidents, the planning commission, and the City Council all weigh in and negotiate the changes, a process that can take months.

Mamdani has touted the importance of government efficiency as part of a broader platform to deliver affordability. “As someone who is very passionate about public goods, I think that we on the left have to be equally passionate about public excellence,” said Mamdani in an appearance on the “Plain English” podcast before the primary.

“Any example of public inefficiency is an opportunity for the argument to be made against the very existence of the public sector,” he added. “And so to truly make the case time and time again that local government has a role in providing that which is necessary to live a dignified life, you have to ensure that every example of the government’s attempt to do so is one that is actually successful.” 

Making that government apparatus work “entails a maniacal focus on execution,” said Torres-Springer. “In New York you don’t get credit for effort. You get credit for fixing what’s broken and for scaling what works.”

Money makes the (housing) world go round

When it comes to securing public money for housing projects and programs, the mayor sets the table with their policies, but needs the help of the City Council and the state legislature to make them a reality.

“These executives and legislative bodies do operate in some degree of tension, even in the best of times,” said Weisbrod.

The mayor sets the agenda when it comes to the operating budget (which controls housing programs) and the capital budget (which finances the construction of new housing). “But both budgets have to be ultimately approved by the City Council,” said Weisbrod.

That can introduce complicated tradeoffs. “The mayor—everybody—says that they want affordable housing, but they also want libraries and schools and parks and all of those other things,” said Been.

As deputy mayor, Been recalls being confused when the de Blasio administration put out a budget proposal with cuts to libraries. “We have to… go through this dance because we have to be able to satisfy the City Council. We’ve given to their projects, but then they get a lot of pressure from the libraries, and then we can then take some back from what they got in order to give to the libraries.”

The mayor also sets policy priorities for agencies—whether they focus on housing production, preservation, or homelessness. “Once the budget is passed, then [the mayor] has enormous control over how it’s actually spent,” said Weisbrod. 

The state, meanwhile, controls key tax incentives, like 485x, where developers get a tax abatement in exchange for affordable units—essential given the high costs of building housing, experts say. 421a, the predecessor of 485x, was used to produce 68 percent of new units from 2010 to 2020, according to the Furman Center.

Mamdani’s plan calls for major capital investments in housing: borrowing $100 billion in bonds up from the $30 billion the city has already pledged. That may require asking the state for permission to borrow $70 billion in municipal bonds, above the city’s current debt limit.

Separately, he hopes to raise revenue for programs through an increase in corporate taxes and on the 1 percent. That would require getting the governor and Albany on board.

Gov. Kathy Hochul expressed an openness to work with the presumptive democratic nominee on X last week. But she remained skeptical about tax increases as she faces reelection next year.

“If it gives you sticker shock, it’s because our housing crisis is really acute, and it’s going to take really dramatic action,” said Torres-Springer.

New housing under construction in Harlem in 2020. (Photo by Adi Talwar)

Land use scars

The mayor has power to activate city-owned land in the five boroughs.

But broader changes to where the city can build housing, and how much it can build on any given parcel, require extensive review by the public and collaboration with the City Council. And ultimately the city’s land use powers are limited to what the state permits it to control.

Weisbrod was encouraged to see growing consensus among candidates that the city needs to produce more affordable housing, leveraging public capacity and also the private sector through zoning changes.

Housing officials say working with the private sector is essential to getting anything built. “Government can’t do it alone, either. There aren’t enough dollars,” said Torres-Springer.

Mamdani changed his tune on leveraging the private market in housing construction in an interview with the New York Times that caught the eye of many housing wonks.

“I clearly recognize now that there is a very important role [for the private sector] to be played, and one that city government must facilitate through the increasing of density around mass transit hubs, the ending of the requirement to build parking lots, as well as the need to upzone neighborhoods that have historically not contributed to affordable housing production—namely, wealthier neighborhoods,” Mamdani said.

Eric Adams administration’s City of Yes, passed in January, allowed more housing density in neighborhoods across the city. “I’m hoping that what made the City of Yes possible and the rezonings that have been approved is not a flash in the pan,” said Torres-Springer.

But City of Yes showed that zoning reform is no easy task. As City Limits reported in January, what began as a proposal to spur 108,000 new units was chopped down to 82,000 as it moved through City Council review, with powerful councilmembers carving their own districts out from some of the changes. 

Further complicating matters, Mayor Adams was then facing a corruption indictment from the Department of Justice (the case has since been controversially dropped). 

The final City of Yes deal included a pledge of $5 billion for new housing, infrastructure upgrades and tenant protection measures—$4 billion from Mayor Adams and $1 billion from the state. 

“It required a very smart, strategic, nuanced political strategy, and set of partnerships with people in the City Council and with the governor to get it over the finish line,” said Torres-Springer.

Sometimes zoning changes are initiated by private developers, who want to rezone a particular parcel. Other times, the mayor and city agencies initiate larger neighborhood rezonings, as the Adams administration has done in the Bronx, Atlantic Avenue, Midtown South, and Long Island City. But they almost always ignite local resistance.

It’s something Mayor Adams’ Charter Revision Commission, in its initial findings, wants to tackle, with several proposals to speed up the process for approving and building housing.

In addition to streamlining ULURP, it takes aim at an informal City Council practice that has held up housing production in the past: member deference. Under the norm, the Council won’t push through a land use issue unless the local councilmember is on board.

Those negotiations between the city, elected officials, and local groups can be complicated. Sometimes, as Been recalled, it requires getting the state involved. For example, if there’s a rezoning and the local community wants to secure improvements to a state-owned park in the deal, it means calling up Albany.

“I just don’t think people understand how interwoven it all is, and you’ve got to be negotiating on all of those different fronts,” said Been. “The mayor is beholden to the state in so many ways.”

Those extensive negotiations create many veto points. Sometimes they result in tangible benefits for the community, like more affordable units. But other times they slow the pace of housing construction to a crawl.

“Every project that has to go through the land use process you can either see the best of our politics in New York or the worst of it,” said Torres-Springer.

The next mayor will likely have to navigate fundings cuts from the federal government. (Official White House photo by Molly Riley)

Fretting over the Feds

New York City is heavily reliant on the federal government to fund rental assistance, building repairs, homelessness programs, and more. NYCHA is particularly vulnerable, as it gets 75 percent of its funding from the federal government and has faced decades of disinvestment already.

“The better that relationship with both the president and the Congress, the better,” said Weisbrod. “But as we’re seeing, and as we’ve really seen over the sweep of my last 50 years, the federal government, irrespective of party or ideology or personality, has in some areas just totally withdrawn from housing policy.” 

Congressional Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill,” which narrowly passed the house Thursday, sharply cuts medicaid and SNAP assistance, programs that are essential to addressing homelessness. The cuts mean that the state might have to fill holes in the safety net, possibly at the expense of housing and homelessness programs.

“Fundamentally, this is an issue of money,” said Weisbrod, emphasizing that strong leadership matters most in times of crisis and budget shortfalls. “It’s always easy to say we’ll do more with less, but really what it means is, can we use our less more efficiently, as opposed to really doing more, because in the housing area, money is the driver.”

More cuts, proposed in President Donald Trump’s budget for the next fiscal year and being considered by Congress in the coming months, would change the way New York gets money for housing, allocating it via a block grant rather than through the subsidy programs that currently support hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.

Should that come to pass, a good relationship between the next mayor and Albany will be even more important.

“If the states are getting the federal money, and it’s the states who are deciding how to allocate that federal money, then you know you really have to be able to get along with your governor,” said Been.

While it won’t be easy, experts hope the momentum around housing policy brings tangible results under the next administration.

“I think a path-breakingly diverse coalition made their preferences known [Primary election] night. That’s the type of support and coalition building that makes politics easier for anyone,” said Torres-Springer.

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Patrick@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

The post What NYC’s Next Mayor Can (And Can’t) Do About Housing Affordability appeared first on City Limits.

BRUSSELS (AP) — The president of the European Union’s executive branch, Ursula von der Leyen, faces a no-confidence vote this week linked in part to text messages she exchanged with a pharmaceutical boss during the COVID-19 pandemic.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen walks in the Town Hall Garden at Aarhus Town Hall, Aarhus, Denmark, Thursday, July 3, 2025. (Ida Marie Odgaard/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)

EU lawmakers will debate von der Leyen’s future at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, on Monday in the European Commission president’s presence, and vote on a censure motion on Thursday. The commission proposes EU laws and supervises whether those that enter force are respected.

No-confidence votes are rare in the European Parliament, and von der Leyen is expected to win comfortably, but the censure motion is another sign of discontent with the former German defense minister and her backers.

Supported by a small group of hard-right members of parliament, the motion contains a mix of allegations against von der Leyen including text messaging with the boss of vaccine maker Pfizer, misuse of EU funds and interference in elections in Germany and Romania.

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“This is a list of backbenchers, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s friends. They’re anti-Ukrainian and anti-EU,” Daniel Köster, a spokesperson for the European People’s Party — the largest political group in the assembly — said on Friday.

The commission chief is a member of the EPP, which Köster said “will unanimously vote against this.”

Other groups are using the debate to criticize von der Leyen, They believe she is trying to bypass the parliament to act more quickly. The second biggest political group, the Socialists and Democrats, said the censure motion is a result “of the EPP’s irresponsibility and the double games.”

The threat of a parliamentary censure motion in 1999 forced the European Commission — led at the time by Jacques Santer from Luxembourg — to resign over fraud, mismanagement and nepotism allegations.

When police removed four photographs by Sally Mann from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in early January, Marshall K. Harris, a former NFL player-turned-local artist, wasn’t surprised. Local politics had been shifting to the right recently, especially since the election of conservative firebrand Tim O’Hare as Tarrant County judge in 2022. Furthermore, a nationwide cultural shift toward right-wing censorship, evident in activist book-banning efforts across Texas in the past few years, had been further invigorated since the reelection of President Donald Trump in November.

Harris wasn’t shocked either, when the photos—much-lauded and long-controversial 1980s pictures of Mann’s young children nude—were held as evidence for more than three months in what may be the most significant police investigation of a museum art show in the United States since 1990. 

Instead, what amazed Harris was the silence that predominated across the Fort Worth art scene surrounding the matter. 

Harris, who was a standout defensive end at Fort Worth’s Texas Christian University before his four-year NFL career, is one of few outspoken voices in an art community on edge in the face of an ascendant right-wing political force. “For an institution like the Modern to be caught in this situation, and then everybody goes silent?” he told me in February. “Everybody. You can’t talk to anyone. And I sort of wonder if me opening my big mouth puts me at risk of reaction. Nobody wants to say anything to possibly get themselves in any trouble.”

The photographs, seized by police in early January and finally returned to the museum in April after a grand jury declined to issue indictments in the case, are from Mann’s Immediate Family series, which includes both nude and clothed images of her children growing up on a remote Virginia farm. The photos removed from the Modern include a shot of the torso and genital region of Mann’s approximately 6-year-old son after eating a Popsicle that dripped down his naked body, and another wider shot of Mann’s approximately 8-year-old daughter jumping naked onto a picnic table. Mann’s three children are all now in their 40s or deceased; they were involved as adults in selecting Immediate Family nudes for inclusion in Mann’s memoir, published in 2015. 

THE PHOTOS IN IMMEDIATE FAMILY HAVE DRAWN CONTROVERSY SINCE MANN FIRST SHARED THEM WITH THE PUBLIC IN 1992.

The photos were dogged by controversy in the ’90s, and they still make some viewers uncomfortable today. But they have also become part of the mainstream canon of American photography, admired by many as beacons of autobiographical art. 

Mann did not respond to requests for an interview for this story. Nor did the Gagosian Gallery, which loaned the photos to the Modern. The Modern has said very little beyond noting that the works in question “have been widely published and exhibited for more than 30 years in leading cultural institutions across the country and around the world.” Other Fort Worth museums, city council members, and several artists with work in the same exhibition as Mann’s photos all ignored or declined requests for interviews. Most remarkably, city police refused to release any information pertaining to the investigation, arguing, among other reasons, that “records of alleged or suspected abuse or neglect of a child are confidential.”

As details failed to trickle out, members of the Fort Worth arts community shared gossip, looking for answers, and mostly came up empty. “I’m trying to get a better handle on it, but every single employee at the Modern has been told not to talk about this at all,” said Wesley Kirk of the nonprofit Support Fort Worth Art. “I’ve been surprised that Kimbell and Amon Carter haven’t been speaking up, because this sets a bad precedent.” 

Kimbell Art Museum, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth form a trinity of world-class, well-endowed art museums in the heart of one of the most conservative big cities in the United States. Until recently, this had not led to public confrontations. 

“I’ve lived here for 40-something years, and I’ve seen all sorts of things at those museums that some people would consider inappropriate and others would not,” said Lauren Saba, proprietor of the Fort Works Art gallery. “I hope this is an isolated incident.” Saba noted that, in November 2024, her gallery ran an exhibition of provocative art called “Ban This Show”—including a video titled “God Save Abortion” by Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot—and received no pushback. 

Yet it’s difficult to consider the events at the Modern as entirely isolated. In October, Amon Carter’s exhibit “Cowboy,” which promised to “disrupt the homogenous ideal of the cowboy as a White, cisgender American male and showcase the diverse manifestations of this figure across communities,” shut down without explanation and reopened a week later with a trigger warning. The show featured images of naked men swimming together and men in cowboy getups partner-dancing and kissing.   

The origin of the police-led art heist lay in a public backlash stoked by local conservative media, institutions, and politicians. Sharayah and Scott Colter, respectively the communications director and CEO for the Danbury Institute, a religious-rights group with Baptist roots, went to see the Mann photos in December at the Modern after an article in a right-wing news outlet, the Dallas Express, called the works pornographic. The Colters, upon seeing the photos for themselves, were horrified. 

“It was even worse than we imagined,” said Sharayah, who splits time between Dallas and Washington, D.C. “We did not even take pictures of it, because we don’t want that kind of content on any of our devices. It’s really obscene material. It definitely does not belong in a museum. It should never have been taken in the first place. And yes, I do believe it belongs with the police.” The Danbury Institute then gathered around 20,000 signatures for an open letter invoking Biblical principles to call for the Modern to remove the Mann nudes.

Colter said she didn’t know how the Fort Worth police investigation came to be. She credited the Dallas Express—a nonprofit outlet that repurposed the name of a defunct Black-owned paper and routinely promotes the causes of its publisher, GOP megador and hotelier Monty Bennett—which published a series of alarmist articles by Carlos Turcios preceding the police investigation.

Colter also praised Bo French, leader of the Tarrant County Republican Party, and Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare for being early to comment on the issue. Before the police action, O’Hare told the Dallas Express that the photos “should be taken down immediately and investigated by law enforcement for any and all potential criminal violations.” In an email, French told me that Mann’s photos “could even be construed as child pornography.” He was particularly critical of text describing Mann posing her children “naked, moody, and in suggestive situations” to “evoke an edgy, dark side of childhood” that appeared on the wall at the Modern.

“That should repulse everyone except perhaps the most vile degenerates,” French said. 

An unidentified person walks across the main entrance of The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in December 2002. (AP Photo/ Donna McWilliam)

Some in Fort Worth see O’Hare’s hand in the investigation. Kirk said an incident like this would not have happened before O’Hare won office as county judge two years ago. Indeed, O’Hare has taken a hardline approach on far-right pet issues. During his tenure, he’s pushed to withhold funding from groups helping at-risk children over their views on LGBTQ+ issues, agitated for restrictive voting laws to benefit Republicans, and shown a draconian streak by ordering the removal of a pastor from a public meeting for speaking over his allotted time. Since his days as the young mayor of suburban Farmers Branch, complaining about undocumented immigrants to national media like CNN and pressing for “Chili’s-type restaurants”  rather than more authentically Mexican establishments in town, he’s displayed a gift for knowing which issues will rally conservative support. 

But a county judge is an executive position in the county government, analogous to the mayor of a city. O’Hare has no formal role in law enforcement. 

It remains unclear who or what pushed the Fort Worth Police Department (FWPD) to pursue an investigation with no clear precedent among successful criminal prosecutions. Since the photos were returned, an additional baffling detail has emerged: FWPD spent $7,000 on travel to New York City to investigate “critical leads” pertaining to Mann’s photos, which are already among the best-studied and most-discussed works in U.S. contemporary art.

The photos in Immediate Family have drawn controversy since Mann first shared them with the public in 1992. A New York Times Magazine article that year questioned Mann’s fitness as a mother. A Wall Street Journal editorial went further, calling for the photos to be censored. The uproar played an important role in bringing the work to a wider audience. That exposure, in turn, attracted a stalker to Mann’s youngest daughter, causing difficulties for Mann’s family for years.

The frightening trade-offs of this sort of expression—now the sort of thing that all parents must consider in the era of social media—are enough to make many viewers queasy. “Mann’s a very controversial figure,” Saba said. “I think if you poll 10 moms, you get a half-and-half reaction.” 

Mann has often been in the position of having to defend her art. Her stated impetus to make what she calls her “family pictures” was a mix of motherly adoration and deep fascination with her children’s private world, growing up on the same family farm where Mann herself had spent her childhood. “In the pictures of my children I celebrated the maternal passion their bodies inspired in me—how could I not?—and never thought of them sexually or in a sexual context,” she wrote in her 2015 memoir, a portion of which was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine. 

In the memoir excerpt, Mann recounted being shocked and disoriented by the ’90s-era backlash. She was distressed when the Wall Street Journal published a portrait of her unclothed daughter with black bars censoring her nakedness—additions that Mann said “mutilated her innocence” and made the work appear scandalous. (The Dallas Express, in December, replicated the Journal’s approach when publishing Mann’s photos.)

It’s unclear how FWPD could have expected that this criminal investigation would result in conviction. The First Amendment’s protection of free expression is very broad, explained Lee Rowland, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC). Two narrow exceptions are carved out for obscenity and child pornography. But Mann’s work does not qualify as either.

Under a 50-year-old ruling in Miller v. California, an expression must lack any serious artistic, literary, or scientific value to qualify as obscenity. It’s basically impossible for a work of art hung in a museum, selected by trained curators, to be seen to lack such value. “For someone of Sally Mann’s stature and longevity, the idea that her work and photography has no value does not even meet the laugh test, and it certainly doesn’t meet the test for obscenity,” Rowland said.

A separate legal test for child pornography depends on showing a child in a sexual activity or in a way intended to arouse the viewer, Rowland added. Just depicting nudity is not enough to fail this test, under U.S. code and 40-year-old precedent in New York v. Ferber.

“It’s very important that the definition of child pornography remain narrow and tethered to those realities, for the simple reason that child nudity is a completely natural and rather massive part of childhood existence, and it is widely celebrated as a cultural matter,” Rowland said, pointing to the many depictions of nude baby Jesus over the centuries. “Child nudity itself may be challenging for some people, but [it] is widely culturally accepted as a natural and non-sexual part of growing up.”

Throughout American history, police have steered clear of dictating what should and shouldn’t be allowed in museums—apart from a single incident in 1990 when employees of Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center were prosecuted (and eventually acquitted) for displaying photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, including nude adults in BDSM poses and two nude images of children. 

That episode came at the peak of a previous era of culture war, which may now be on the point of breaking out anew. Then, as now, sexual identity played a shadowy role in the right’s censorious fervor: Mapplethorpe was gay, having died of AIDS a year before the exhibition. The original Dallas Express article decrying Mann’s photographs also alerted readers to photos in the Modern show depicting LGBTQ+ content, including an autobiographical video about parenthood by queer and nonbinary artist Jess Dugan.

“It’s almost like Tim O’Hare is reading a script written by Jesse Helms 30 years ago,” observed Natalie Zelt, a postdoc at the University of Texas at Austin who leads a collaborative scholarly project on the history of photography curation called “Framing the Field.” Helms was a Republican U.S. senator who used Mapplethorpe, among other controversial artists, as a wedge to change the way the National Endowment for the Arts funded artists. This summer, the Trump administration has made major cuts to the endowment’s programs, an assault on the institution not seen since Helms’ era.

The police investigation in Fort Worth may be over, but its effects could be long-lasting in the local museum and art scene. Multiple locals and experts expressed concern that the city’s museums would be more hesitant to show any work that might offend political officeholders or activists—or put board members and donors in jeopardy. Elizabeth Larison, director of the Arts & Culture Advocacy Program at NCAC, worried that such an outcome “reduces the display of art to the lowest common denominator.” 

Regardless of the courage of museum officials, big-name artists may not want to or even be allowed by insurance companies to bring their expensive works to a town where an overzealous police department could seize them for extended periods on thin legal pretense. “Artists of that caliber, they’re going to look at the Fort Worth area with some skepticism,” warned Harris, the ex-NFL player. “Like, ‘Do I even want to enter into that fray?’”

On the other side of the equation, right-wing censors are emboldened and looking beyond the city limits. Rowland described a push across several GOP-controlled states, including Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma, to beef up obscenity laws. “There is a real concerted effort to change the definition to apply effectively to all images of nudity—not just children,” she said. In the Texas GOP platform for 2024, the first item on the “criminal and civil justice” agenda calls for changes to the penal code to broaden obscenity enforcement.

In the December 26 article on Mann’s photos in the Dallas Express, GOP state Representative David Lowe, who represents part of the Fort Worth area, was quoted promising legislative action this year. “It is crucial that our legal framework leaves no room for predators to misuse the realm of art to display child nudity,” he told Turcios. “Should any loopholes exist, we are prepared to address and eliminate them in the upcoming legislative session in Texas.”

In March, Lowe introduced a bill in the Texas House of Representatives which would have created a mechanism for civil penalties against museums that display “certain obscene or harmful material.” The measure never got a hearing, but, as Texas Republicans continue to push the envelope on culture-war issues, it’s easy to imagine it returning soon in some form.

In other words, what started in Fort Worth this January could soon affect museums across Texas, and perhaps eventually elsewhere in the country. Silence may not be enough to forestall it.

The post Can a Great Museum City Survive the Censorious Right? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By HOLLY RAMER and AMANDA SWINHART, Associated Press

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — After six 12-hour shifts milking cows, José Molina-Aguilar’s lone day off was hardly relaxing.

On April 21, he and seven co-workers were arrested on a Vermont dairy farm in what advocates say was one of the state’s largest-ever immigration raids.

“I saw through the window of the house that immigration were already there, inside the farm, and that’s when they detained us,” he said in a recent interview. “I was in the process of asylum, and even with that, they didn’t respect the document that I was still holding in my hands.”

Four of the workers were swiftly deported to Mexico. Molina-Aguilar, released after a month in a Texas detention center with his asylum case still pending, is now working at a different farm and speaking out.

“We must fight as a community so that we can all have, and keep fighting for, the rights that we have in this country,” he said.

Members of Migrant Justice, a community group advocating for migrant farmworkers’ rights, hold a rally outside the Vermont Statehouse in Montpelier, Vt., on Friday, June 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Amanda Swinhart)

The owner of the targeted farm declined to comment. But Brett Stokes, a lawyer representing the detained workers, said the raid sent shock waves through the entire Northeast agriculture industry.

“These strong-arm tactics that we’re seeing and these increases in enforcement, whether legal or not, all play a role in stoking fear in the community,” said Stokes, director of the Center for Justice Reform Clinic at Vermont Law and Graduate School.

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That fear remains given the mixed messages coming from the White House. President Donald Trump, who campaigned on a promise to deport millions of immigrants working in the U.S. illegally, last month paused arrests at farms, restaurants and hotels. But less than a week later, the assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security said worksite enforcement would continue.

Such uncertainty is causing problems in big states like California, where farms produce more than three-quarters of the country’s fruit and more than a third of its vegetables. But it’s also affecting small states like Vermont, where dairy is as much a part of the state’s identity as its famous maple syrup.

Nearly two-thirds of all milk production in New England comes from Vermont, where more than half the state’s farmland is dedicated to dairy and dairy crops. There are roughly 113,000 cows and 7,500 goats spread across 480 farms, according to the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, which pegs the industry’s annual economic impact at $5.4 billion.

That impact has more than doubled in the last decade, with widespread help from immigrant labor. More than 90% of the farms surveyed for the agency’s recent report employed migrant workers.

Among them is Wuendy Bernardo, who has lived on a Vermont dairy farm for more than a decade and has an active application to stop her deportation on humanitarian grounds: Bernardo is the primary caregiver for her five children and her two orphaned younger sisters, according to a 2023 letter signed by dozens of state lawmakers.

Wuendy Bernardo, foreground center, a migrant dairy farmworker at risk of deportation, is greeted by Migrant Justice staff member Will Lambek, left, outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in St. Albans, Vt., on Friday, June 20, 2025. Lambek led a rally in support of Bernardo as she reported to the office for an appointment. (AP Photo/Amanda Swinhart)

Hundreds of Bernardo’s supporters showed up for her most recent check-in with immigration officials.

“It’s really difficult because every time I come here, I don’t know if I’ll be going back to my family or not,” she said after being told to return in a month.

Like Molina-Aguilar, Rossy Alfaro also worked 12-hour days with one day off per week on a Vermont farm. Now an advocate with Migrant Justice, she said the dairy industry would collapse without immigrant workers.

“It would all go down,” she said. “There are many people working long hours, without complaining, without being able to say, ‘I don’t want to work.’ They just do the job.”

Ramer reported from Concord, N.H.