January 25–February 1, 2016 Issue
Bill de Blasio Is New York’s Most Progressive Mayor in Decades—Is That Enough?
As opposition mounts, the solution to de Blasio’s problems might lie in even bigger, bolder interventions.
by Jarrett Murphy
Twitter
The Nation
The Nation
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (Bebeto Matthews / AP)
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. (Reuters / Lucas Jackson)
As the gears of federal government have ground to a halt, a new energy has been rocking the foundations of our urban centers. From Atlanta to Seattle and points in between, cities have begun seizing the initiative, transforming themselves into laboratories for progressive innovation. Income inequality, affordable housing, climate change, sustainable development, public health, participatory government—cities are tackling them all, bringing new urgency to some of the most vital questions of the day.
As the gears of federal government have ground to a halt, a new energy has been rocking the foundations of our urban centers. From Atlanta to Seattle and points in between, cities have begun seizing the initiative, transforming themselves into laboratories for progressive innovation. Income inequality, affordable housing, climate change, sustainable development, public health, participatory government—cities are tackling them all, bringing new urgency to some of the most vital questions of the day.
When Bill de
Blasio emerged from the City Hall subway station a few minutes before
his inauguration two Januarys ago, he wore a smile and a crisp suit. On
his right were his wife, son, and daughter. On his back were two
narratives destined to define his first 24 months in office.
One
was “A Tale of Two Cities,” de Blasio’s campaign critique of an
increasingly unequal New York, characterized by rising rents, swelling
homeless shelters, and racially skewed policing. The other was the
notion that as a liberal mayor with little executive experience, de
Blasio was doomed to mismanage the city into a return of “the bad old
days.” He’d won the 2013 race because of the former and despite the
latter; the two narratives represented the lenses through which his
performance as mayor would be viewed by friends and foes—and not just in
the five boroughs. With anxiety over income inequality coloring the
political mood well beyond the city’s borders, de Blasio was anointed by
The Nation and others as the standard-bearer for a new progressive
movement.
The hype meant high stakes. If de Blasio succeeded, he
could help create a new national consensus around leftist policies. If
he failed, John Lindsay would no longer be the person to whom hapless
mayors were compared.
Midway through his first term, de Blasio
has alternately fulfilled and frustrated his friends’ hopes and his
enemies’ scorn. He has racked up substantive policy victories, like
universal pre-kindergarten, Vision Zero traffic-safety improvements, a
hugely popular municipal-ID program, and a rent freeze for many
rent-regulated apartments, and he has taken aggressive stands on the
minimum wage, climate change, and mental-health services. But few of his
allies seem satisfied with the pace of reform or his ability to
articulate a progressive vision, and the mayor has alienated some with
his plan to rezone low-income neighborhoods.
As a manager, de
Blasio has often defied the predictions of ineptitude: His budgets
continue to run surpluses, Pre-K for All’s rollout was remarkably
smooth, and he has steadily and responsibly worked through a massive set
of overdue labor negotiations left by his predecessor, Michael
Bloomberg. But these feats have been overshadowed by missteps: egregious
lateness during his first year, pettiness with the press, unseemly ties
to lobbyists, and premature efforts to take on a national role. These
foibles delight his critics and terrify his allies, who see not just his
reelection prospects, but the broader opportunities for progressive
change, suffering with each snafu.
In many ways, the de Blasio team has tried to rejigger well-known policy options rather than imagine new ones.
Given de Blasio’s background as a campaign operative, the biggest
surprise of his mayoralty so far has been the strategic blundering. The
local backlash to his housing proposals suggests a political radar that
needs recalibration—fast. And de Blasio has consistently been
outmaneuvered by Governor Andrew Cuomo. It’s not the mayor’s fault that
Cuomo—a political warrior of uncommon ruthlessness—seeks to belittle him
at every turn, but de Blasio seems incapable of ducking any of Cuomo’s
jabs. The biggest surprise of the past two years might be that Bill de
Blasio has proven to be a better mayor than a politician.
That’s
not necessarily good news, since de Blasio is in a predicament that only
a skillful pol can escape. He bears massive expectations, faces strong
enemies, wields only limited powers, and is supported by often-hesitant
allies.
Through more than a dozen interviews with social-justice
advocates, The Nation has found that there’s a lot for the mayor to be
proud of—and much for him to figure out if he wants to transform the
city from a symbol of extreme stratification into a model of equity.
HOUSING
Highlight: During his first full fiscal year in office, the city
created more affordable apartments than in any prior year: 20,325 of
them, enough for 50,000 people.
Lowlight: As of December, there were almost 58,000 people in the city’s homeless shelters.
Faced with one of the most extreme affordable-housing crises in the
country, the de Blasio administration has rightly treated the issue as
its biggest policy test. In May 2014, it announced a $41 billion plan,
hailed by the mayor as the “most ambitious” in the country, to build or
preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing over the next 10 years. The
plan far outstrips Bloomberg’s efforts and is certainly “ambitious.”
The problem is that earlier, smaller, but similar plans failed to stave
off a huge loss of affordable units in the city. In many ways, the de
Blasio team has tried to rejigger well-known policy tools rather than
imagine new ones.
City Hall’s prescription for the housing crunch
is, for the most part, “more”: more market-rate housing and more
affordable housing, with the former sometimes subsidizing the latter,
all toward the goal of a denser, more equal city. Through tax breaks and
so-called inclusionary zoning, this approach can produce affordable
housing. The question is whether it can generate enough to offset the
impact of the market-rate development on which it depends.
Past
experience makes many communities wary of this approach. Because of
federal-subsidy rules, “affordable housing” rents tend to be set for
households more affluent than those that actually exist in the targeted
neighborhoods—a problem that the administration has tried to mitigate
but can’t altogether solve. And the mayor’s plan—which would offer
particular incentives to developers of affordable units in places like
East Harlem and Flushing—strikes some as a dangerous trade-off, inviting
in the very type of real-estate investment that has already made other
neighborhoods unaffordable.
“I’m very dubious of the entire
enterprise,” says Michael McKee, a longtime tenant-rights advocate and
treasurer of TenantsPAC. “I just don’t think you can plop down that much
market-rate housing in a neighborhood like East New York and not
trigger more displacement.” Last fall, a vast majority of the city’s
community boards rejected two big zoning-rule changes key to de Blasio’s
housing vision, setting up a costly showdown early this year, when the
measures reach the City Council. The mayor has tried to improve existing
affordable-housing policy options like 421-a, a property-tax break, but
he hasn’t attempted to fundamentally change the policy menu. One
housing expert says that de Blasio “is not using all the tools at his
disposal” to “try to change the paradigm between the real-estate
community and the city.”
De Blasio has had clear success—and bucked the paradigm—in protecting
the city’s 1 million–plus rent-stabilized tenants, getting the Rent
Guidelines Board to order a record-low 1 percent hike for one-year
leases in 2014 and an unprecedented freeze for those leases in 2015.
This was “a very big deal,” in McKee’s view. But de Blasio’s call to
lock in more protections via pro-tenant reforms in Albany was largely
ignored by state legislators and Governor Cuomo last spring, repeating a
dynamic that has defined much of his mayoralty. “We feel good about the
work the administration did supporting the rent laws,” says Katie
Goldstein, executive director of the New York State Tenants and
Neighbors Coalition. “The real issue…is the governor.”
De
Blasio’s efforts to respond to the homeless crisis he inherited have
been similarly stymied. An uptick in the number of homeless people
living in the streets sparked a political uproar last summer (and led to
troubling police crackdowns), spurring a shake-up at the city’s
homeless-services agency in December. But the administration has also
launched eight rental-subsidy programs to move people out of shelters
and into their own apartments. Jeff Foreman, policy director at Care for
the Homeless, notes that the de Blasio administration has spent
millions more on prevention and also agreed to create 15,000
supportive-housing units. But the funds necessary to bring these
programs to the needed scale have not been forthcoming from Cuomo.
Meanwhile, thanks to the federal government’s long-standing
disinvestment policy, the city’s public-housing developments remain
mired in a fiscal crisis, leading the mayor’s team to propose
controversial steps—such as allowing the private development of
mixed-income housing on land owned by the New York City Housing
Authority. Still, Vic Bach, a public-housing expert at the Community
Service Society of New York, or CSS, credits de Blasio with ending the
practice of charging the housing authority for police services, and for
committing $300 million in capital funding to fix roofs. “Compared to
the previous mayor or mayors, he’s paid a lot of attention to NYCHA’s
financial needs and concerns,” Bach says.
ECONOMIC EQUALITY
Can the mayor trust enough in his vision to be truly bold? Can his
allies trust him enough to give him the room he needs to be reelected?
Highlight: Within months of taking office, de Blasio signed a law mandating sick leave for up to 500,000 workers.
Lowlight: The rate of people living in poverty hasn’t budged, remaining at 20.9 percent.
De Blasio chose a formidable enemy when he railed against economic
polarization on the campaign trail. Not only is inequality partly the
result of global changes in trade, the use of technology, and the value
of education—forces difficult for any city government to resist—but the
de Blasio administration faces strict limits on how much redistribution
it can affect, giving the mayor little power to reset relations between
the 1 percent and the rest of us.
Yet de Blasio has used what
power he has to significant effect. He signed a sick-leave bill into law
and used executive action to expand living-wage provisions. “I would
give him good grades on certain things,” says CSS policy expert Nancy
Rankin. “On the paid-sick-days expansion, he did a robust outreach
effort on enforcement,” while universal pre-K is “not only important for
early-childhood education but immediately provides quality childcare
for people trying to work, and it creates a lot of good public-sector
jobs.” In mid-December, de Blasio announced that he was granting six
weeks of paid parental leave for nonunion city workers—a bold step
toward a more humane workplace.
The mayor stunned just about
everyone when he appointed Steven Banks, a Legal Aid lawyer who’d spent
his career suing the city over punitive welfare policies, to run its
welfare agency. The city’s cash-assistance caseload, which bizarrely
shrank during the Great Recession, has now risen modestly. Banks is also
committed to ending the controversial Work Experience Program and to
revising other harsh relics of welfare “reform.” “We didn’t even think
that something like Steve Banks being named commissioner was possible,”
says the leader of one economic-justice organization. “He has been
fulfilling our hopes.”
The bad news for de Blasio has come from
the governor’s mansion. The mayor’s pre-K program was supposed to be
funded by a dedicated tax on the rich, but Cuomo blocked it. When de
Blasio advocated allowing the city to set its own minimum wage, Cuomo
shot that down, too. But after a scare from the left in the 2014
gubernatorial primary—a threat that de Blasio helped neutralize—Cuomo
began pushing for economic policies very similar to the ones he’d mocked
the mayor for, like a higher minimum wage. Although the governor will
never give de Blasio credit for the shift, he likely deserves some.
POLICING
Highlight: Police encounters under the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program
have fallen from 21,187 in the third quarter of 2013 to 4,747 in the
third quarter of 2015.
Lowlight: Of the roughly 148,000
misdemeanor arrests in the city during the first nine months of 2015, 87
percent involved people of color.
De Blasio’s come-from-behind
victory wouldn’t have happened without the commercial featuring his
teenage son Dante talking about the New York Police Department’s
stop-and-frisk program, a policing strategy that enabled cops in the
Bloomberg years to stop astronomical numbers of people—mostly black or
Latino—who were rarely found to be doing anything wrong.
Police
reform was always risky territory for de Blasio. Right-wing critics
wagered that crime would explode under his watch; if it did, he would
certainly fail to be reelected. The left, angry about NYPD policy since
the Giuliani administration, had steep expectations for what a
progressive mayor ought to deliver. In the end, de Blasio tried to
please both: While vowing to end stop-and-frisk abuses, he chose to
shore up City Hall’s law-and-order credibility by bringing back Bill
Bratton, a champion of “broken windows” policing, to run the NYPD.
Two tempestuous years later, neither side is satisfied. Seizing on a small increase in violence, the right is threatening to support former police commissioner Ray Kelly as a mayoral candidate, while some on the left are unimpressed by the huge drop in stop-and-frisk numbers amid continued high levels of misdemeanor arrests, which disproportionately affect people of color. “The problem is that there’s been no significant change,” says Robert Gangi, executive director of the Police Reform Accountability Project.
Donna Lieberman, who heads the New York
Civil Liberties Union, credits de Blasio for protecting civil liberties
during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2013, and for making initial
moves to scale back a racially skewed school-discipline system. “The
mayor has certainly matched the rhetoric that was critical of
stop-and-frisk abuse with a dramatic reduction in stops…. The city is,
despite the tabloid effort to portray it otherwise, safer than ever,”
she says. “But the racial disparities in arrests remain a problem.”
For community activist Mark Winston Griffith, the “broken windows”
rhetoric linking misdemeanors to violent crime has created a framework
that de Blasio cannot escape. “With Bratton there…[they] are still
wedded to ‘broken windows,’” he says. “As long as [the policy] is in
place, you’re going to have not just tensions but abuses.”
EDUCATION
Highlight: In its second year, Pre-K for All registered 65,504 children.
Lowlight: The racial gap in math proficiency remains wide. On the 2015
state tests for grades 3 to 8, 56.7 percent of white students performed
at grade level, compared with 23.7 percent of Latinos and 19.1 percent
of blacks.
When de Blasio announced his goal, at the peak of the
mayoral campaign, to bring universal pre-K to New York City, most of his
challengers greeted it as either a curiosity or a stunt. Yet Pre-K for
All is now a fact of city life, enrolling “more students than in the
entire school district of Boston,” according to City Hall. “That was a
huge lift,” says Zakiyah Ansari, advocacy director at the Alliance for
Quality Education. “His real commitment and willingness to put all his
force behind it, that was a big feat…but it was something he was really
committed to.”
De Blasio’s universal pre-K success and his
appointment of a seasoned educator as schools chancellor—unlike
Bloomberg, who twice picked education novices—have earned praise from
veteran education-policy expert Diane Ravitch. “He actually is trying to
improve the public schools, not demolish them,” she says. Among the
better programs de Blasio has created are Renewal Schools, targeting
low-performing schools for interventions, and Community Schools, which
use school buildings to deliver a range of services to low-income
neighborhoods.
Not everyone is content with the mayor’s
performance. Education advocate Leonie Haimson says that de Blasio “made
very specific promises around issues like reducing class sizes,
expanding the school capital plan, more transparency in terms of the
budget, more input for parents”—promises that, she argues, have yet to
be fulfilled. Other allies contend that his response to criticism over
racial disparities and extreme segregation has been flat-footed.
Some of the mayor’s loudest critics can be found in the charter-school
industry. With Cuomo on their side, supporters not only beat back the de
Blasio team’s early decision to reject a handful of charter
applications for space in public schools; they also won a new state law
essentially forcing the city to give them as much space as they want. De
Blasio was further humbled in 2015 when his control of the school
system was renewed for just one year— unlike the multiyear deal twice
given to Bloomberg.
For many, de Blasio’s skirmishes with the
charter-school industry are emblematic of a wider problem with his
record on education. His allies feel that he has failed to link all of
the programs he wants to advance—as well as his skepticism on
charters—to a comprehensive philosophy. “He was in a position to create a
model of progressive school reform,” says Pedro Noguera, a
distinguished professor of education at UCLA. “Mayor Bloomberg gave us
one model; [de Blasio] came in saying he was going to do it differently.
But he never explained how.”
ENVIRONMENT
Highlight: The administration has committed to reducing New York City’s carbon footprint by 80 percent of 2005 levels by 2050.
Lowlight: Despite setting a “zero waste to landfills” goal, the city
recently inked a 20-year, $3.3 billion deal to haul trash to landfills.
The night de Blasio was elected, I spoke with an environmental activist
who confessed to anxiety. Compared with Bloomberg, the mayor-elect had
said almost nothing about environmental policy during the campaign.
Since then, however, de Blasio has been extremely vocal on such issues,
adopting a far more aggressive greenhouse-gas reduction target and
wedding his push for social equality to the goal of a greener city in a
vision document called OneNYC, released last Earth Day. Mark Dunlea, an
activist on the 350 NYC steering committee, says the mayor “does deserve
some credit on climate change, though Hurricane Sandy…the People’s
Climate March, and the pope’s visit created pressure for action.”
However, Dunlea sees him stopping short of bold action—for example, by
avoiding specific commitments to wind power in renewable-energy plans,
or by calling for a study before divesting the city of all fossil-fuel
stocks. But Dunlea adds that de Blasio “does deserve credit for…
addressing environmental justice,” and proposes some overall letter
grades: A-minus for vision, B-minus for execution. Those are more
generous marks than others would give, but the consensus seems to be
that Bill de Blasio still believes in the right things. The doubt is
over his delivery.
At his midterm press roundtable, de blasio
proudly pointed to his achievements: “At this level of play and at this
volume, there’s going to be mistakes. My job is to make fewer and fewer
mistakes.”
New York City has more than 4 million registered
voters, but fewer than 800,000 cast their ballots for de Blasio. The low
turnout indirectly validated his rationale for running, suggesting that
vast numbers feel shut out not just from the economy but from
politics—a different take on “A Tale of Two Cities.” New York City’s
democracy is faltering, partly because trust in government has
evaporated. This lack of trust touches us all and is de Blasio’s most
dangerous enemy. Can the mayor trust enough in his vision to be truly
bold? Can his allies trust him enough to give him the room he needs to
be reelected and buy time to make real change?
Haimson is disappointed but not done. “I think he has time to recoup,” she says. “It’s not like anyone is giving up.”
Start Making Sense: Rahm Emanuel Must Go
Rick Perlstein on the Chicago mayor
by Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener
January 7, 2016
The Nation
The attempt to cover up the police killing of Laquan McDonald in Chicago ought to end Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s career, says Rick Perlstein, who reviews Rahm’s life in politics going back to the Clinton era and Obama’s first term.
Start Making Sense is hosted by Jon Wiener and co-produced by the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Start Making Sense Twitter Start Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, featuring lively conversations with the writers, activists, and artists who shape the week in news, hosted by Jon Wiener. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher and SoundCloud for new episodes each Thursday.
Jon Wiener Twitter Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation.
by Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener
January 7, 2016
The Nation
Hundreds of people march on Christmas Eve demanding that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel resign. (Rex Features via AP Images)
AUDIO LINK:
The attempt to cover up the police killing of Laquan McDonald in Chicago ought to end Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s career, says Rick Perlstein, who reviews Rahm’s life in politics going back to the Clinton era and Obama’s first term.
Start Making Sense is hosted by Jon Wiener and co-produced by the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Start Making Sense Twitter Start Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, featuring lively conversations with the writers, activists, and artists who shape the week in news, hosted by Jon Wiener. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher and SoundCloud for new episodes each Thursday.
Jon Wiener Twitter Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation.
