New York is a state, county, and city, but the money comes from the city. Not much of why it works makes logical sense. Manhattan is small, crowded, expensive, and stuffed with rats, cockroaches, and weirdos. There is rent control, which no one seems to mind, and then people exploiting loopholes in rent control, which no one minds except property owners, but since they are corporations everyone hates them even though nearly everyone in the city works for a corporation.

Regardless, I lived there and worked there, and most of the people were great. Like in California, where I coast-hopped back and forth pre-pandemic. In both states, all of the good things and the weird things you hear are probably true. That doesn't mean they share much else in common. Both are heavily dominated by the same political, for example, but a San Francisco progressive and a New York liberal don't share a lot of the same values. 

Their approach to the post-pandemic future is as distinct as the guys running the states. Whereas creepy Teflon Governor Gavin Newsom faces a recall because he wants vaccinated people to wear masks everywhere and pay new taxes while everyone who knows vaccines work leaves for Texas, New York Governor and alleged creepy sexual predator Andrew Cuomo wants people to come back from the Hamptons and Florida and wherever and stop teleconferencing in. He urged private employers to “say to your workforce, ‘By Labor Day, everyone is back to the office.’ We need that volume to support the restaurants, the shops, the services… We know what we need, and that is it.” 

Why only private employers? Where in the name of science does that make sense? It doesn't, but as a Democrat he is beholden to unions, which means government employees are going to be exempt from a lot of rules politicians heap on everyone else.
California leadership is no less goofy. A week after Newsom said, “The answer to the Delta variant is vaccination. We don’t need masking. Just get vaccinated" he is saying his own political appointees are saying we still need to go to restaurants, but with masks on, flipping them up and down between each bite regardless of the reality that doing such is useless hygiene theater - the first time the mask comes down it is on the slope to being pointless.