In his populist campaign for the Mayor of New York in 2013 Democrat Bill de Blasio’s central promise was to address the colossal inequalities between rich and poor in the city of 8.8 million inhabitants and, after the 12 Years of Billionaire Michael Bloomberg at the helm, end “the tale of two cities”.
Eight years later, after two terms that come to an end with the arrival of the new year and waiting for the passage of time to establish a legacy that will be inevitably marked by his management in the last two years of the pandemic, what remains with De Blasio is a story of two mayors: the one who has made some of the progressive politics who promised and who, at the same time, awakens deep antipathies, even in those who voted for him. To put it as David Freedlander has crudely written it in the magazine New York: “New York voters liked what he did. In the end, they just didn’t like him. “
Achievements
On the side of the achievements of De Blasio the most monumental has been the establishment of the universal free preschool education for four-year-olds, a model that he has also implemented for three-year-olds and which for now has given almost no cost access to early education 100,000 minors. The model has arrived on the agenda of the president, Joe Biden.
On that side is also De Blasio, who lobbied for the State to approve a minimum wage of $ 15 per hour, included in the law paid maternity and sick leave, has created or maintained 200,000 affordable housing units, helped 2.3 million New Yorkers by freezing increases in regulated rents and provided free legal assistance so that tenants could fight evictions; the mayor who created the IDNYC program who gave identification and opened the doors to services to immigrants and other people without documents and under whose mandate poverty in New York it has been reduced, from 20.5% in 2013 to 17.9% in 2019 and from 47.2% to 40.8% in the case of those who live little above that threshold.
Shadows, failures and controversies
Next to the lights of the progressive agenda implemented in a city that has seen its budget go from the 70,000 million dollars that Bloomberg had to more than 100,000 million this fiscal year, in addition, there is shades. 70% of New York schoolsAccording to a study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project released this summer, they are still “intensely segregated” in racial and socioeconomic terms.
De Blasio’s drive for affordable housing, according to a report by the Community Service Society, met the needs of less than 15% of those most at risk in New York for homelessness. His nine projects of requalification of zones, focused until the recent approval affecting Soho and Noho in more modest neighborhoods, have encouraged the gentrification and the real estate speculation. And the scandals and mismanagement shakes the municipal agency responsible for subsidized housing, which accumulates a bill of 40,000 million dollars in pending repairs and was placed under a federal supervisor in 2019 for its crises.
Failure with the ‘homeless’
On that negative side of the scale, in addition, there is De Blasio of unfulfilled and controversial promises. His biggest failure, by his own admission, has been failing to alleviate the homelessness problem, It has gotten worse, especially in the case of adult men. By 2018, before the pandemic hit New York and made the situation even worse, more than 63,000 people were dependent on the shelter system, 19% more than in 2014.
But also the neighborhoods that are deserts from public transport or green areas, the troubles at Rikers jail, storms over proposals like eliminate education programs for the brightest students or the slow progress of the city’s protection projects against storms and floods of a mayor who, yes, has implemented some outstanding measures of fight against climate emergency, including the disinvestment in fossil fuels from municipal pension plans or a law that obliges to cut emissions in large buildings and under whose mandate the bike as a means of transportation.
The police and the governor
De Blasio has had the ability to make the powerful NYPD department so uncomfortable as well as those who bet on his promises to reform it. His arrival at the Gracie Mansion led to a radical reduction in the use of the controversial practice of “stop and frisk” that put in the target especially blacks Y latinos (fired during the Bloomberg term to a peak of almost 700,000 arrests in 2011 and that by 2019 had dropped to 13,400).
Following his critical comments about the death at the hands of the Eric Garner In 2014, the murder of two policemen faced the wrath of the uniformed men, who turned their backs on him at the officers’ funeral and in the case of a union leader, they even accused him of having “blood on his hands”. But last summer, with national protests following the assassination of George Floyd, became defensive in the face of aggressive repression of protesters.
With the one who until summer was governor of the state, he also Democrat Andrew Cuomo, the relationship has been rivalry And till enmity, something that has had consequences in legislative and budgetary actions and that turned the initial response to the pandemic into a sad spectacle of confrontations and egos.
Skin matter
El lovelessness toward De Blasio it is also a matter of skin. Beyond the dark shadows of dubious ethics actions in fundraising (for which he has not been charged), his image has become cartoonish, he is often ridiculed and he is seen and defined as a problematic manager. In the magazine New York People who have worked with him have defined him, from anonymity, as stubborn, “brutally unpleasant with people” and “arrogant.” And while his brief run in the last Democratic presidential primaries was a disaster, the possibility that he now aspired to lead the state government in Albany looms strongly.
It will persecute him, as he has done in the mayor’s office, what Juan Manuel Benítez, producer, director and presenter of Pura Política on the local news channel NY1, points out as his “Little charisma” and his “poor communication skills”, something that he himself De Blasio It has been recognized.
Benítez, however, believes that “to make a fair balance of your management the perspective of time is required, even more so when the last two years have been marked by the pandemic and its most negative effects, such as the rise in crime rates after having recorded historical casualties with it “, and thinks that” some of his most popular measures could restore his image in the future.
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Much less positive is the analysis of Kenneth T. Jackson, professor of history and sociology at Columbia and editor of The Encyclopedia of New York City. In an email he makes a comparison with Michael Bloomberg, who became mayor at the beginning of 2002 when New York had just been a victim of the attack on the World Trade Center and “the future of the big city was confusing at most” but left leaving the transformed city. “In contrast,” says the historian, “the city was at its peak when De Blasio took office in 2014 and is not doing so well at the end of 2021. Needless to say more,” he says.
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