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Commentary By Fred Siegel

50 Years of Hope, Change and Despair in New York City

Culture, Cities, Cities, Culture Poverty & Welfare, Tax & Budget, New York City, Culture & Society

Squint at Bill de Blasio and see John Lindsay, the city’s last great progressive hope, elected 50 years ago.

The two tall men don’t just share height and heal-the-city ideologies; they rode into office in stunningly similar ways, making grand promises to attack what they insisted were major crises and offering themselves as five-borough mini-mes of locally popular progressive Presidents.

As a candidate, de Blasio feasted on media coverage, especially in the New York Times, about New Yorkers being left behind and the supposed crisis in police-minority relations in Bloomberg’s New York. There were problems, yes, but no crisis.

“Trafficking in exaggeration... de Blasio vowed to help close the income gap and to reduce the homeless population, which he blamed on his predecessor’s indifference.”

Lindsay, an architect of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, had his own ginned-up crisis, thanks to the New York Herald Tribune, the house paper of the city’s once significant liberal Republicans.

As in 2013, the city was in good shape in 1965, with low unemployment amidst an economic boom. But the Trib ran an extended series on imminent decline, “New York City in Crisis.” Under the subtitle “New York, Greatest City in the World – And Everything is Wrong With It,” it began:

“For the poor, the aged, the Negro, the Puerto Rican, and the blue-collar worker . . . York is a nightmare – a hopeless city… For the young and the middle-class white and Negro, New York has become a terrible place to live because of unsafe streets, poor schools and inadequate housing… And even for the wealthy — those who can afford the best — the air pollution, the traffic-clogged streets and the violence have come to outweigh the delights.”

The crisis of 1965 was comparative. Liberal politicians like Lindsay believed Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had worked out scientific answers to our great social problems, so that the city should be judged not by its own past but by what it could be if men of vision were given the power to remake it.

In the series, which cleared Lindsay’s path to City Hall, he vowed to get New York “going again.” Instead, he oversaw as mayor (and with the editor of “New York City in Crisis” soon joining his administration as a top aide) the city’s decent into the very catastrophe the Trib had imagined.

In the midst of an economic boom, crime exploded. Instead of reforming what had, in fact, been the best big city school system in America, he left it in tatters. He promised to better incorporate African Americans but left the city polarized.

Cut to 2013, when candidate de Blasio offered his own story of a city in crisis, presenting the city’s long-standing (some might say inevitable) class divisions as a “tale of two cities.” Trafficking in exaggeration, both of the city’s problems and his ability to fix them, de Blasio vowed to help close the income gap and to reduce the homeless population, which he blamed on his predecessor’s indifference. He pledged to save the New York City Housing Authority and even keep ailing and inadequate hospitals from failing.

Holding the far-left land in the Democratic primary, he just cleared the bar needed to avoid a runoff. Then he claimed a huge 50-point win in the mere formality of the general election, with a record-low 22% of voters showing up. Still, he claimed that as a progressive mandate, with the Times echoing and amplifying his boast.

“Despite his “two cities” talk, de Blasio has taken Gotham’s Wall Street-driven prosperity as a given — as necessary, in fact, to fund his pricey programs.”

In office, de Blasio has been tangled up in campaign rhetoric that was equal parts gloomy about the supposedly sad state of the city and wildly optimistic about his own ability to cure all alleged ills.

Despite his “two cities” talk, de Blasio has taken Gotham’s Wall Street-driven prosperity as a given — as necessary, in fact, to fund his pricey programs.

But even with that money still coming in, the homeless problem has grown worse on his watch. NYCHA continues to suffer from neglect. The hospital he vowed to save has been reduced to an emergency care facility. And the stop-and-frisk policies he hollered at had already been effectively ended during Bloomberg’s last two years in office.

To his credit, de Blasio has given Bill Bratton, his extraordinary police commissioner, leeway to maintain broken-windows policing that so far has kept crime down.

The underlying problem de Blasio and Lindsay share is that, in reaching to extend the mantle of Presidents who themselves overreached, they tried, as mayoral opponent William F. Buckley warned in 1965, to straighten the “crooked timber of humanity.” Government, let alone local government, can do no such thing.

With de Blasio’s approval numbers now plunging as New Yorkers across class, race and party lines disapprove of his frequent out-of-town trips to spread his progressive gospel, he needs to key in on prosaic problems — providing services and alleviating taxes — or risk sinking as low as Lindsay did by his final year in office. Then, 60% of New Yorkers said City Hall was working poorly, and just 9% said it was working well. Not one person said “excellent.” A few years later, as the city sputtered, the Times memorably called Lindsay “an exile in his own city.”

De Blasio should look in the mirror, and heed that warning.

This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News.

This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News