Bill de Blasio Needs to Get to Work
It isn’t too late for the mayor to deliver for New York City.
In 1972, Mayor John Lindsay came home to New York in April after winning just 7 percent of the vote in the Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary, the stench of failure following close behind.
“He came back with his tail between his legs,” said Jay Kriegel, who served as Mr. Lindsay’s chief of staff.
Back home, things weren’t much better than they’d been on the campaign trail. Residents who once saw Mr. Lindsay as the great liberal hope had begun to reject him. “Large numbers of voters have given themselves over to a passionate, irrational hatred of the man, and feelings so deep are contagious,” Richard Armstrong wrote in The New York Times Magazine.
Nearly half a century later, Mayor Bill de Blasio finds himself an equally lame and similarly disaffected duck. The mayor, after an anemic presidential bid, has returned to a city weary of his mayoralty.
The clearest reflection of this is seen in the polls. In November 2014, toward the end of his first year in office, nearly 50 percent of voters approved of his job performance, while 36 percent did not, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. In recent years, his support has fallen significantly. A Siena College poll released on Sept. 17 found that Mr. de Blasio had a 33 percent favorable rating among New York City voters, compared with a 58 percent unfavorable rating.
Part of the problem is the sense that the mayor, who has spent much of this year traveling, prefers being elsewhere. For New Yorkers this is not only insulting, but inconceivable.
It is not too late for Mr. de Blasio to turn things around, though. Two years is a long time to be mayor; it’s an eternity of New York minutes. Ask anyone what they’d do with two years to run City Hall, and they’d have lots of ideas.
What’s more, Mr. de Blasio is blessed with an economy that could turn big ideas into policies that would fundamentally transform the lives of more than eight million people.
To address homelessness and the high cost of housing, the mayor should set aside more apartments in his housing plan for supportive housing, and for people with less income. About 40 percent of the 135,437 apartments built, financed or preserved as affordable so far under the plan have been earmarked for extremely low or very low-income residents. That’s up to $53,350 in income for a family of four, or up to $37,350 for an individual.
Another idea: Change the housing plan to make sure it doesn’t worsen racial segregation in the city. One report released this year found that the mayor’s plan compounded residential segregation patterns in the city by giving preferences for affordable housing to those who already live in a neighborhood.
Or how about aggressively pressing forward on a $24 billion overhaul of the city’s decrepit public housing system? A plan to help pay for those repairs by building mixed-income housing on Housing Authority land has stalled.
Simply fulfilling his promise to close the jails on Rikers Island would be a major achievement. So too would a successful campaign to overturn a state law that keeps the disciplinary records of police officers, firefighters and corrections officers secret, known as 50-a.
Hizzoner could also spend the next two years aggressively working to desegregate the city’s public schools — the tiny number of black and Hispanic students in the city’s competitive public high schools is especially galling. Hard work? Sure. It’s also a long-term project that will require support in Albany. But there’s plenty that the mayor can do on his own to help black and Hispanic students enter other top high schools, and to integrate the schools in the earlier grades, where black and Hispanic children are vastly underrepresented in gifted and talented programs.
If Mr. de Blasio is looking to leave his mark on the physical footprint of the city, he could back a proposal to rebuild a crumbling section of highway along the Brooklyn promenade by covering it with parkland. Department of Transportation officials under Mr. de Blasio had initially proposed a $3 billion-plus plan that would have closed the promenade for years and temporarily replaced it with a six-lane highway. The communities surrounding the promenade balked, and have offered far better solutions.
If he still wants to make New York America’s “fairest” big city, as he promised in his 2017 campaign, the mayor might consider taking on property tax reform. Homeowners in some of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods pay little in property taxes, while renters and others bear a greater burden.
One bright spot is a $100 million effort Mr. de Blasio unveiled this year to transform the city’s public hospital system by focusing it on providing primary care, particularly for low-income and undocumented New Yorkers. If the plan succeeds, that would be something to celebrate.
Another bright spot is his plan toinvest more heavily in ending pedestrian and cyclist deaths by redesigning New York roadways. Adding more protected bike lanes is a good place to begin. Rethinking the city’s car culture entirely would be even better. To that end, it was exciting to see the city ban most passenger cars from 14th Street, a central crosstown artery, to help speed buses along.
This mayor is capable of doing so much more.
While Mr. Lindsay had been drained by the presidential campaign, he was able to rebound because he loved being mayor. “He loved the job,” Mr. Kriegel said. “The city gave him energy. He thrived on the city.”
In his final years as mayor, Mr. Lindsay fought to secure more state funding for city schools and used the office’s powerful bully pulpit to wage a campaign against illegal guns. He was also a constant presence in the city at events big and small.
In his inaugural address in 2014, Mr. de Blasio said he planned to create what former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia called, “government with a soul,” government that never forgot the people it was elected to serve.
“We’ve one got one chance to get this right,” Mr. de Blasio said on that frigid day. “Let’s seize it.”
Don’t throw away your chance, Mr. de Blasio.
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