Mayor de Blasio came into office on the first day of 2014 with big dreams and bigger promises. He planned to take on all the major issues of New York City, transforming it from top to bottom.
The mayor, limited by law to only two terms, has a little less than 18 months left before he leaves office, and economic pressures mean that he won’t have a lot of room to throw his elbows around, fiscally speaking. So it’s worth taking a look at how his performance has stacked up against his promises.
Ten minutes after he was sworn in by Bill Clinton that bitterly cold morning, newly minted Mayor de Blasio announced, “We recognize a city government’s first responsibilities: to keep our neighborhoods safe; to keep our streets clean; to ensure that those who live here — and those who visit — can get where they need to go in every borough.”
In retrospect we can say that maybe he shouldn’t have led with those particular promises, though hindsight is always 20/20 … especially in 2020. Safe neighborhoods? Depends where you live. Homicides are up 24 percent this year over last, and parts of Brooklyn and Upper Manhattan have seen shootings rise by a factor of 5, 10 or even 20 in some precincts.
Clean streets? That’s a good one. Ask the residents of 49 Chambers St., who begged the city to clear out the City Hall Park encampment — and the accompanying filth, human waste and graffiti — for weeks before the mayor was finally shamed into doing something. But the whole city is dirtier than it has been for many years.
As for getting where you’re going … not if you need to take the subway late at night. The system that never sleeps now goes beddy-bye at 1 a.m., mainly as a last-ditch effort to clear out the homeless people who otherwise colonize the trains as a rolling annex to the city’s shelter system.
But what about the mayor’s other promises?
Inequality: De Blasio swore to undo the “two cities” that he said divided New York into haves and have-nots. According to one study, income inequality is slightly worse now than when he took office.
Unemployment is high now because of the lockdown, which we can’t pin on the mayor. But as part of his equality push, de Blasio imposed a series of employer-based social mandates, from paid sick and vacation days to rules on worker scheduling. While those may be good from a worker’s perspective, they are making it much harder for Gotham’s small businesses to rehire out-of-work employees. Grade: D
Homelessness: After increasing spending on homelessness by at least double, you’d think things would be better. Wrong: Homeless people are camped out everywhere you look in Manhattan, and the shelters are crammed full. Grade: F
Mental Illness: The mayor made helping the mentally ill a marquee project, and assigned his wife the job of rethinking how we handle the issue. But ThriveNYC became an expensive boondoggle built around peer counseling and hotlines for anxious people, while people with untreated serious mental illness continue to cycle in and out of jail. The problem goes ignored. Grade: F
Grading de Blasio’s total performance, we have to factor in everything — good and bad. If we were going to be indulgent, we’d cut him some slack over the pandemic, which wasn’t his fault. But by the same logic, he shouldn’t get credit for the lucky first six years of his administration, when a rocketing stock market flooded the city with revenue, which he spent as fast as he could. All in all, he gets a D+.
This piece originally appeared at the New York Post
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Seth Barron is associate editor of City Journal. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post