New York Is Falling Behind Madrid, and I’m Looking at Apartments There

I’ve lived in America since 1990, and for years we lived in Chicago. In 2013 we bought an apartment in Manhattan, while Michael Bloomberg was still mayor. The building was still going up, so we moved in a year later, in 2014, the same January Bill de Blasio took over the city. He served two terms, eight years. Then came Eric Adams, whom I know personally; in my view he’s a decent man but a poor manager. Now the mayor is Zohran Mamdani, and I think he’s a disaster for New York, but that’s a separate conversation.

I love America, and I love New York and Chicago. Over the last 20 years America has changed a lot, and New York has changed completely. I just came back from Madrid, where Spain is run by a socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez. I want to compare the two cities honestly: what I don’t like in New York, what I like in Madrid, and what we can do about it.

Noise, smells and old streets

Start with the smell. In New York and Chicago marijuana is legal now, and you smell it everywhere. I live on Madison Avenue, in the middle of Manhattan, and it feels like someone is smoking on every block. In Madrid and Málaga I didn’t smell it once.

Second, New York is always being dug up. The infrastructure is very old, and instead of being rebuilt properly it gets patched over and over, so the city is constantly loud. The buses on Madison make a terrible racket. When I moved in, the noise drove me crazy, until I put in double windows, the way I once did in my apartment on Tverskaya Street in Moscow. Here hardly anyone knew about them, and I ended up showing them to my neighbors. In Madrid the buses are electric and quiet. I didn’t ride the metro there, but people told me it’s clean and pleasant. You know what the New York subway is like. Mamdani promises free buses, but anyone who doesn’t want to pay already rides for free, and nobody throws them off.

And then there are the sirens, fire trucks and police, all the time, even on an empty street with no lights to run. I don’t know why they do it, but it drives me up the wall. Madrid, at least in the parts I walked through, is a calm and fairly quiet city. If you live there and think I’m wrong, tell me.

What the center of a city says about its government

The center of Madrid is clean, and so, for that matter, is downtown Chicago, much cleaner than Manhattan. I live near the Plaza Hotel, which is the center of New York and in a way the center of the world. Around it you find a mess of pedicabs, fake designer bags sold right at the corner by the entrance, food carts, loud music from speakers, and horses. I posted a short video of it on Instagram and YouTube. If a city can’t keep its own center clean, the fish rots from the head. My own few blocks are fine, because there’s nothing there for tourists, but two blocks away the chaos starts.

Central Park is wonderful on weekdays. I rollerblade there. A few days after I got back, we walked through the wooded part in the middle of the park, and there were homeless people on bench after bench. I used to rarely see that. I understand they have to be somewhere, but that’s the city’s job. People from all over New York come to Central Park on weekends because it’s a pleasure, and it won’t stay one if it turns into a shelter. Madrid has a big, beautiful park too, and I didn’t see anything like that there.

Style, restaurants and noise on the street

People in Madrid dress with style, everywhere. I used to notice that in Paris. My wife and I went to Paris about four times a year, and it was our favorite city, but there are so many tourists now that it’s hard to enjoy. Madrid is no worse than Paris for style. In Milan there’s Via Montenapoleone, but that feels like a show; in Madrid stylish people are everywhere.

Restaurants in Madrid have interiors, a sense of design. In New York people mostly go to a restaurant to eat and leave, and owners don’t invest much in design. Many places now tell you that you have 90 minutes before the next party. I haven’t seen anyone limit your time like that in other countries. In the neighborhoods I’m talking about, Salamanca and Recoletos, restaurant prices are maybe 20% lower than in New York, and sometimes the same. You can find cheap, perfectly good restaurants in New York too, and I may make a separate video about them, but today I’m talking about comfort and looks.

The day after I got back I walked down Madison on a Saturday. It was 22 to 24 degrees Celsius, and people were very well dressed, many of them tourists. The problem is that in New York, right next to them, there are people sleeping on the sidewalk, and many of them are mentally ill. You’re walking along, and suddenly someone next to you is howling. Spain has homeless people too, but nothing like this number.

One more thing. Abroad you can always spot Americans, and not only by their breakfast outfits that look like pajamas. They talk very loudly, as if they had to shout over the presses on a factory floor. I don’t think it’s about education; it’s a habit. I don’t go into other people’s gardens with my own rules, but I’m allowed to say what I don’t like, and you’re allowed to disagree.

Why every store in America has a guard now

In the ’90s, when I started doing business and traveling, I wanted to buy things. We came from the Soviet Union with one pair of jeans and one pair of shoes. In the boutiques of Rome, Milan, Paris, Madrid and Barcelona there were guards everywhere, and I was surprised, because in America there were none. Now I don’t see guards in the boutiques of Milan, Paris or Madrid. I see them in every store in America.

The reason is that in many places stealing goods worth less than a certain amount, somewhere around $900 to $1,000 depending on the state, stopped being treated as a serious crime. A thief gets picked up, questioned and released, and goes back to steal again. I’ve made videos about this many times. So stores hire guards, because what’s the point of having a business if someone can walk in and rob you with no consequences? I don’t mean the big chains. I mean small, family-owned shops.

People pay taxes for schools and infrastructure, but above all for their safety. If the state can’t protect even your business, what are you paying for? I respect the police. But after the calls to defund the police, budgets were cut, pay stayed low, and many good officers left. Mamdani used to support defunding the police too, and the NYPD is now in conflict with him. I didn’t see many police officers in Madrid or Málaga, but the ones I saw looked ready to do the job.

Why pay taxes if you get robbed and nobody protects you?

All my life, even back in the Soviet Union, I’ve tried to depend on the state as little as possible. You can’t run away from the state anywhere. But some states squeeze you, and others leave you alone.

Why I went to a real estate agency in Madrid

About six months ago my wife and I took the subway because of traffic. Across from us sat a woman with a girl of about 12, who was peeling an orange and dropping the peels on the floor of the car. It made me furious, and I told my wife I was going to say something. She said don’t, because if you tell someone not to litter, they’ll call you a racist. That’s where America has come: tell a thief he’s a thief, and you risk being called a racist. So I keep quiet, and I’m on edge.

On my third day in Madrid I went to a real estate agency. They’ll send me listings, and maybe we’ll buy something there to spend part of the year. Spain has a socialist government, but life there is clearly calmer, more comfortable and cheaper than in New York or Chicago. It isn’t that cheap, though, and I know life in Spain isn’t easy for the people who live there. I’m looking at it as a visitor.

Why does everyone still want to come to America, from Europe and from the former Soviet Union? Because American salaries were always two, three or four times higher than in Europe, and they still are. But the cost of living here has gone up enormously. America used to offer both: life that wasn’t too expensive and much higher pay. It has lost that advantage. So my feelings about America are mixed.

Please don’t take this as saying New York is a dump. There are dirty neighborhoods and good ones. The problem is that even in a good neighborhood, someone who isn’t in his right mind can walk up to you and do anything. We all know what happened to a young Ukrainian woman on a train. Tell me in the comments whether you see the same thing where you live.

Originally published as a video on my YouTube channel on 20 May 2026. Watch on YouTube