Ana Champeny, vice president for research at the Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog group, said that the country is due for a recession based on historic trends.

Since 1945, U.S. economic expansions have lasted an average of roughly five years. More recently, however, the post-Great Recession expansion beginning in 2009 lasted more than 10 years — the longest in history.

Champeny argued that the mayor needs to make strategic cuts now given the pain a recession could impose on the neediest New Yorkers.

“You don't want to wait until you're in the midst of a recession and you suddenly need to cut $2 billion in spending next month,” she said.

Before the pandemic, the levies had climbed by about 6% a year on average, driven by rising property values. That helped finance new programs and services, as well as keep up with rising labor costs, said Ana Champeny, the vice president for research at the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan budget watchdog and research firm.

Council members who might have the fortitude to defy protesters tend to agree with them. Blame shared ignorance: Some lack private-sector experience, don’t understand housing economics and have no memory of New York City in decline.

Until the late 2000s, projects were widely cheered for creating jobs, tax revenue and places to live. Now they are accused of displacing people, destroying culture and raising rents. It’s amazing any rezonings get approved. About 40 percent of them don’t, according to a new Citizens Budget Commission report.

The agency, which oversees state-chartered banks as well as investment firms and insurance companies, is on a hiring spree.

“We are hiring and promoting like mad,” DFS Superintendent Adrienne Harris said earlier this week during a talk before the Citizens Budget Commission, a New York City-based government spending watchdog group.

The city’s workforce is made up of 337,294 people, according to Citizens Budget Commission data for the fiscal year that began in July 2021. In 2019, nearly 60% of the workforce were women, and more than half were Black and brown women, according to the report. Last year, the council’s Pay Equity Report concluded that civil service titles “are often segregated along racial lines.”

That could leave many families who are banking on child care and early learning for their 3-year-olds without subsidized options, according to budget watchdogs and organizations that represent preschool providers.

“The concern is really, if you’re offering a service that’s gonna be expected to be recurring, you need to tie down funding for it,” said Ana Champeny, vice president for research at the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan budget watchdog nonprofit.

The watchdog group the Citizens Budget Commission urged the city to avoid any more “money-losing expansions,” and even cut the lowest-ridership services to get costs under control.

But CPC Chair Dan Garodnick said the roughly 700 income-restricted apartments in the proposal are no drop in the bucket for a city in need. New York City’s residential development has failed to keep pace with population growth, with less than 0.2 units added to the city’s housing stock for every new job created between 2010 and 2018, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, which recently issued another report condemning the pace and expense of the city’s land use process. New York City’s overall apartment vacancy rate for apartments priced below $1,500 is less than 1 percent, according to the city’s latest housing survey.

New York’s financial regulator plans to unveil its planned climate risk guidance in the coming weeks that will focus on how banks can manage the operational risks posed by rising temperatures and increase in extreme weather events.

The New York Department of Financial Services’ guidance, whose early plan was first announced in February, would focus largely on banks and independent mortgage lenders’ “operational resiliency” and how they will be affected by climate change, said New York Superintendent of Financial Services Adrienne Harris on Tuesday.

New York’s guidance will focus less on the transition risks financial institutions face as the world moves to switch from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources. The guidance’s emphasis will allow the DFS to avoid some of the political rancor that climate change discussions can cause, Harris said in a discussion with the Citizens Budget Commission in Manhattan.

Adams last week asked city agencies to reduce spending by 3%, but to do so without cutting services. However, going forward, further spending reductions while also prioritizing critical programs will be part of balancing the city's budget, according to Citizens Budget Commission, a non-partisan watchdog organization.

ed before the mayor is a cast of increasingly hostile counterparties who look askance at austerity and question the timing of his cost-cutting effort. They include labor leaders eager to settle new, more generous contracts, and a City Council that is aggressively reconsidering its earlier approval of recent cuts to the city’s education budget, and whose support for the mayor’s November budget cuts is far from assured.

However, Andrew Rein, president of the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission, said the mayor’s budget cuts are an important first step.

“Even without a recession, the mayor is facing a really tough fiscal challenge. The recession will make it much, much, much more,” Mr. Rein said.

As of this summer, the city government’s overall job vacancy rate was 7.9 percent — roughly five times higher than in recent years, according to the most recent data from the Citizens Budget Commission. Nearly 25 percent of jobs at the Buildings Department remain empty. The Parks Department has had trouble hiring entry-level staff, information technology workers and lifeguards.

New York City has seen new housing production fall far behind other major cities such as Seattle and Washington, D.C., in the past decade, according to a Citizens Budget Commission study.

The study pinned the slowdown on, among other factors, restrictive zoning rules, out-dated building codes and a "distortionary, opaque, and inequitable property tax system" that taxes multifamily buildings at a higher rate than similar multifamily housing.

All those factors have helped lead to a shortage of affordable housing within the city, which now has the ignominious distinction of having the most expensive rent in the nation.