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With plans for a Coney Island Business Improvement District, Mayor Mamdani might do something right

Coney Island has the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel, an ocean beach and a boardwalk, the famous restaurant Gargiulo’s, lots of new housing — and now, thanks to a rare stroke of economic sanity by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, its own Business Improvement District.

All it needs next is a little luxury. Lest you think I’m howling for “gentrification,” I am, at least up to a point. We don’t want Balenciaga on Mermaid Avenue.

But the neighborhood needs the shopping options and services available in every other middle-class district. Think Target, TJ Maxx, Ulta. The reason they don’t exist there now is that the city has done little or nothing to establish a middle-class community, as it’s beholden instead to woke “affordability” dogma.

It’s why residents must travel miles to find a good retailer other than the CVS pharmacy on Neptune Avenue. Except for the basic-services PureGym on West 8th Street, wellness-seekers are left to jog on the decayed boardwalk that’s studded with holes and splinters.

It would be a welcome stroke of irony if the soon-to-be-formed BID helps to accomplish what our “democratic socialist” mayor most dislikes: real-world economic development that benefits the middle class.

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Coney Island, romanticized for its early twentieth-century golden age, has come a long way since its late twentieth-century squalid condition.

Crime has fallen dramatically. Rezoning passed in 2009 spurred a slow but steady residential development boom. More than 3,400 new apartments have been created and thousands more are in the pipeline. The city and state invested $750 million  to improve long-neglected sewers, streets and other infrastructure, and........

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