>I am sympathetic to a perspective that says this is not the responsibility of a mayor of a single city... But also; who else is going to do it?

With a population of 8.5 million if NYC was a state it would be the 13th largest so I'm quite all right with the city going beyond the normal purview of a city government.

And if it were a country, it would be the 10th largest economy in the world and the 105th most populous