Bill de Blasio and the Decline of New York City By John Podhoretz • *******
The next mayor will have to contend with a legacy of wreckage
New York City is shrinking. Or rather: It was shrinking. Quite a while ago. Then it started to grow. Then it grew dramatically. But after eight years of Bill de Blasio as mayor, it is contracting once again, as the economic and population surge that took the city from the slough of despond to new heights over the course of four decades has been reversed. This is not the result of COVID. It is the result of a disastrous mayoralty and the ideas, prejudices, and idiocies that have animated it. De Blasio’s legacy as he prepares to leave office is just that: a city in decline.
Bill de Blasio has governed with a potent mix of old and new — the bad old and the horrible new. He has pushed wretched new ideas that have blighted the education system and poisoned the streetscape. And he has revivified incompetent policies driven by ideological priors — ideas so long discredited that their failure had been forgotten and had to be experienced yet again by young New Yorkers who weren’t alive when the city was nearly destroyed by them and were therefore unable to heed the warnings of those of us who did live through their nightmarish implementation.
To tell the story of de Blasio’s New York, we need to go back to the city’s great devastation.
In 1970, 7.9 million people lived in New York City. Ten years later, that number had dropped by a staggering 800,000. Over the course of the ’70s, residents voted with their feet and got the hell out of Dodge — fleeing an increasingly lawless and chaotic municipality whose feckless authorities stood by and let the place fester and rot.
This unprecedented depopulation was the consequence of a budgetary free fall that led the city to the verge of bankruptcy in 1975 — a managerial catastrophe that wreaked havoc on garbage collection, public safety, schooling, even on the grass in its parks. Its leaders, Nathan Glazer once quipped, stopped doing the things they knew how to do (like picking up the garbage) and started trying to do things no one knows how to do (like ending poverty). The expansion of social-welfare programs came at the expense of the prosaic quotidian tasks necessary if any city is to be livable.
Here’s just one example. In his book The Fires, Joe Flood tells the story of how Mayor John V. Lindsay (whose time in office ran from 1966 to 1973) sought to redirect city money so that he could spend it on social programs. He hired the RAND Corporation to study the city’s fire department: “NYC-RAND’s goal was nothing less than a new way of administering cities: use the mathematical brilliance of the computer modelers and systems analysts who had revolutionized military strategy to turn Gotham’s corrupt, insular and unresponsive bureaucracy into a streamlined, non-partisan technocracy.”
Using RAND’s efficiency experts and their findings as fodder and justification, Lindsay’s people closed dozens of fire stations because of supposed redundancies. Meanwhile, the department’s inspectors stopped ensuring the good working order of the city’s hydrants. The result: Enormous swaths of the Bronx burned down in the 1970s because there were no nearby fire trucks to put out the fires and no water in the hydrants when they did show up.
The staggeringly dark popular-culture portrayals of New York in the 1970s — Death Wish, Taxi Driver — didn’t feel excessive. They felt like documentaries. In 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, subway hijackers demand $1 million for the safe return of their hostages. “This city doesn’t have a million dollars!” shouts the mayor. It was a joke, but it was no joke.
New York pulled itself out of its trough in part by electing in Ed Koch, in 1977, a mayor who rallied the city’s animal spirits over the course of a twelve-year tenure and in part owing to the explosion in Wall Street transactions set off by the bull market that began in 1983. The once-empty city coffers filled up again, and so did Gotham itself. More than 7.3 million people were counted in the 1990 census, a 3 percent increase over ten years.
Two astonishing changes altered the city’s fortunes. First, the three-decade crime surge was ended and a historic drop in crime rates eventuated, with previously unimaginable attendant benefits. Streets and parks and mass transit became safe again. And the streets that had come to look dull, old, and dirty instead came to sparkle with life and beauty and cleanliness. Second, the roaring economy turned Wall Street and the wealth it generated into the city’s ATM. In 1982, the city collected $1.3 billion in personal income taxes. By 2020, that number was $13.76 billion — a staggering tenfold increase, far exceeding the rate of national GDP growth. The city’s budget in 1982 was $15.6 billion. In 2020: $94.3 billion. Both budgets were balanced.
Between 1990 and 2000, New York’s population grew to 8 million — a 10 percent increase that brought the number back to 1970 levels plus a bit more for good measure. This was not supposed to happen. When cities start heading downhill, they are usually like boulders. St. Louis was the fourth-largest city in America in 1900, with nearly 600,000 people. Between 1950 and the present day, it lost more than 60 percent of its population and today is home to fewer than 300,000. That’s what normally happens when cities go into decline. New York’s recovery was historically unprecedented.
And that recovery built on itself. The New York renaissance that began with the election of Rudy Giuliani in 1993 and continued through the end of Michael Bloomberg’s three-term mayoralty two decades later was literally that. When babies were born in New York City, parents stayed if they could afford to instead of fleeing because they had to. An aging city suddenly turned younger. Areas that had lain fallow were reborn. Despite, or perhaps because of, the 9/11 attacks and the surge of citizen pride that accompanied them, the 2000s saw still more people flowing into the five boroughs. Half a million souls, to be exact; the population rose to 8.5 million.
New York might have been the most expensive city in the country to live in, a bastion of income inequality and every other sin of wealth that the young people who flooded to hipster Brooklyn to eat food twice as expensive as they would have paid for it anywhere else found time to worry over on their blogs — but as their presence indicated, it was the place to be.
And what of the decade dominated by Bill de Blasio’s eight years as mayor? When he leaves office in January 2022, the population of New York City will likely be around 8.25 million. He will not only leave office with the city in far worse shape than it was when he became its chief executive in 2014; he is the key cause of its renewed depopulation.
By almost every conceivable benchmark, even his own, de Blasio has failed. Take crime. Critics predicted that under his leadership, crime would skyrocket, and for a while it looked like we would have to eat our words as the crime rate continued to fall. In July 2019, de Blasio announced with great fanfare that the city had booked 40,000 fewer miscreants into jails that year than in the year he took office.
“The safest big city in America is ending the era of mass incarceration,” he said proudly. “For decades, we’ve been told we can only arrest and imprison our way to a safer city. Under my administration, New York City has proven that’s not true. Instead, we can keep fathers at home and kids in school and get even safer.”
By the end of 2019, the murder rate had risen by 7 percent, with other violent crimes also increasing at a comparably modest rate. Then, in 2020, everything went south. Shootings increased by 97 percent (that is not a typo), the homicide rate by 44 percent, the burglary rate by 42 percent, and the number of car thefts by 67 percent.
A year into his mayoralty, the city found itself awash in street dwellers, many of the newer indigents apparent opioid addicts who had moved into the city because it was an easy place to panhandle and because word had gone out that vagrancy would be tolerated. De Blasio accused the everyday New Yorkers who complained about the piles of garbage on Broadway and elsewhere of “fearmongering,” even as he increased spending on homelessness.
As usual, when you subsidize something, you get more of it — and in 2020, nearly 21,000 individuals were sleeping nightly in public shelters, an all-time high. When the vagrants are not in the shelters, they’re on the streets, sleeping or raging or rampaging, degrading the daily life of the city’s working residents and their children.
Education is de Blasio’s greatest shame. He has spent his mayoralty consumed with the notion of making “equity” the signature issue in the city’s public schools. He began by waging a war on charter schools, a war that was in part personal — he had had a long-running feud while serving on the city council with Eva Moskowitz, who left politics to start and run the stunningly successful Success Academy system, and wanted to destroy her. But he also loathes the notion that competition is the only way to improve public schools and is offended by the results that charters like Success Academy have shown.
He was prevented from running the Success Academy charters out of business by Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose psychopathic rage against any politician near his ambit who gets press attention led him to go for de Blasio’s jugular on this issue. But de Blasio has continued to do everything in his power to assert the primacy of equity over excellence and leveling over achievement. Though he poses as a tribune of the poor, his efforts to destroy both the city’s gifted-and-talented programs and the existence of eight selective high schools to which students gain entry by taking a single test have been a poisoned dagger aimed at the heart of one of the city’s least affluent groups: working-class Asian immigrants who push their children hard to excel in school so they can rise out of their struggling circumstances.
Whatever the damage done to the city by the pandemic, and it was substantial, it was nothing next to the depredations of Bill de Blasio.
That we would reach the end of de Blasio’s years in office this way was sadly predictable from the way he began his tenure in 2014. From the outset we were told, by de Blasio and by his fans on the left, that this was to be no ordinary mayoralty. There were ecstatic levels of expectation that de Blasio could, should, and would transform American politics at the national level. Bob Master, a union official, put it this way in the pages of The Nation just days before the mayor took office: “De Blasio will have an opportunity to chart an entirely new direction for municipal social and economic policy — forging policies explicitly designed to intervene in the economy and make it work better for the millions left behind during forty years of trickle-down.”
That was quite the messianic endorsement for a local politician of no particular distinction who found his footing amid a shockingly uninteresting and sedate 2013 Democratic primary field once the leading candidate, Anthony Weiner, proved psychotically unable yet again to resist the surpassing temptation to send naked pictures of his junk to women he had encountered on social media. He did so in part because the second major candidate besides Weiner, Christine Quinn, came under mysterious attack from a heavily funded super PAC whose sole issue was (I’m not kidding) ending horse-carriage rides in Central Park. De Blasio won an overwhelming victory, without question — but nobody voted. Democratic primary turnout was a staggeringly low 24 percent. Only 17 percent of eligible voters citywide participated in the November general. (He got 35,000 fewer votes in his 2017 reelection than he received in his 2013 win.)
Nonetheless, Master saw fit to declare, “His success or failure will have national ramifications.” And you know what? Maybe it did. It was certainly his own record that led potential 2020 Democratic presidential-primary voters to laugh de Blasio out of the race four months before a single vote was cast. And it may in part have been the example of what unbound progressive politics could do to a place like New York City that led ordinary Democratic voters in the 2020 primaries to leap into the arms of Joe Biden. New York was the most salient example of a local governmental approach that might be attempted on a national level by Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Biden quickly became the only serious choice for Democratic voters alienated by the ambitions of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party whose tribune de Blasio had promised to be when he took office.
The Nation’s excited anticipation of de Blasio’s regime was understandable, since he had already begun to speak about himself and his goals for his office in ways designed to make any good American leftist think he had died and gone to Cuba. On this point, and not to digress, but I can’t help it: As a young man de Blasio himself had been an ardent supporter of the Cuban puppet regime in Nicaragua, delivering food and medicine in 1988 to the soldiers who, on behalf of the Sandinistas, fought anti-Communist rebels. Then, in 2019, speaking to striking Hispanic workers in Florida while running for president, de Blasio shouted, “Hasta la victoria, siempre!” — a Che Guevara slogan. In Miami.
Befitting The Nation’s hopes, de Blasio’s inaugural speech set an astonishingly grandiose tone. “We recognize a city government’s first responsibilities: to keep our neighborhoods safe; to keep our streets clean,” he said. “But we know that our mission reaches deeper. We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love.”
Remember I told you that one of the most important issues in the 2013 primary was horse-carriage rides? Recall as well that turnout was astoundingly low. Add to this the fact that de Blasio’s key campaign theme had been ending the NYPD’s gun-seizure policy of stop-and-frisk. The moment that changed his fortunes was the release of a blockbuster commercial about police interactions with young black men starring de Blasio’s biracial teenage son, Dante. These are the things that really mattered when it came to getting him elected. But then, like the rebel in Woody Allen’s Bananas who announced, after becoming the president of his banana republic, that the national language would now be Swedish, Mayor de Blasio told the city and the world that he was going to use the powers of his office to . . . end inequality.
And not only that. “Today,” he boomed, “we commit to a new progressive direction in New York. And that same progressive impulse has written our city’s history. It’s in our DNA.” De Blasio loves to speak about New York City in this way. “New York has always been the center of progressive America,” he said on his hundredth day in office. “We weren’t sent to City Hall to change New York’s character. You sent us here to restore New York’s proud legacy as the progressive city.”
New York has never been the “center of progressive America” and has no “proud legacy as the progressive city.” It was Chicago in the late 19th century that pioneered the kind of early union activism that de Blasio likes to lionize. Later, in the opening decades of the 20th century, it was the state of Wisconsin, not New York City, that offered itself up as the working model for progressive governance. And for good measure, most leftist thinking since World War II has been a product and by-product of universities and university towns.
New York is not easily categorizable. It is a solidly Democratic city that went 75 percent for Clinton in 1996, and nearly 80 percent for Gore in 2000 and Obama in 2008 — all during years in which its citizens were happily governed by popular Republicans. Since the consolidation in 1898 of the five boroughs into the megalopolis we know today, the city’s leadership has seesawed between machine politicians (particularly Tammany Hall’s), hapless reformists nauseated by machine corruption, and skilled maneuverers (like Fiorello La Guardia and Robert Wagner) who were able to split the baby. And then there were the occasional sports, surprising anomalies like Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani. The city’s practically minded electorate has always seemed allergic to utopian fantasies. Over the six decades before de Blasio took office in 2014, the city was ruled for 44 of those 60 years by four men — Wagner, Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg — who openly distanced themselves from conventional leftist ideology.
Leftists have been a part of the New York cultural landscape since the turn of the 20th century, without question. But it was not until the last few years that they have come to dominate the city’s political and social life. Before the advent of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most left-wing New York politician was a seven-term congressman from East Harlem named Vito Marcantonio, a Communist fellow traveler who served mostly in the 1940s and whose historical obscurity should give you a sense of how flaky and unimportant he was (and he was originally elected as a Republican!).
The true story of Gotham is a tale of complex and ever-changing ethnic, religious, racial, and social mixing — all of which has taken place in direct proximity to the wealth incubators and seed investors of the world’s largest economy. Aside from Wall Street, for much of the 20th century the most powerful mediating institution in the city wasn’t a labor union; it was the Catholic Church. And the most important nonpolitician in political life was Cardinal Francis Spellman. But the picture was far more variegated than that. At mid century, New York was a majority-Catholic city that was also home to the largest Jewish population in the world (more than 2 million people, or around 25 percent of the city’s population). Today, New York still maintains the most complicated ethno-racial mix in America: It’s 26 percent black, 26 percent Hispanic, and 12 percent Asian, with whites making up around 35 percent.
All this is to say that New York, the largest city in America and one of the largest in the world, is a city of particularities. It has an eccentricity about it that has never been reducible to any political buzzword like “progressive.”
Progressives hate particularity for the same reason they have a problem with patriotism: They are committed not to America’s advancement but to humanity’s. Typically, they cite the word “patriotic” only in conjunction with their passion for protest, as though the only reason to love their land is the permission it gives them to trash it. Borders cannot contain their passion for redesigning people and custom.
Bill de Blasio has taken this universalist principle and applied it in an interesting new way. He wants to subsume the story of New York within the broader mythology of leftism. His insistence on this false history, and his determination to impose an ideological framework on a peculiarly anti-ideological city, is the key to understanding why — despite his two terms — New Yorkers have never cottoned to the guy. And the feeling is mutual. He shares the progressive’s conundrum: He loves humanity in theory but he’s clearly not so crazy about people.
And he is the first mayor of New York City who seems to dislike New York City. It’s not just that he believes the city is a font of injustices, from what is (in his view) the unfair distribution of private incomes to the supposedly brutish behavior of its police (at least when he wasn’t running the joint) to the putatively money-grubbing conduct of its landlords to the mulish determination of local parents to seek a better education for their children by whatever means are at hand — whether that’s a gifted-and-talented program, or a charter school, or a selective high school where placement is determined entirely by the score on a test administered to whoever wants to take it. I mean, when you look at Gotham in this way, what’s there to like, really?
The most notable thing about de Blasio as a public figure is that he evinces almost no interest in the city’s traditions, quirks, and folkways. He plays no role in the life of the city, is never to be seen at local restaurants or attending the billion cultural events that take place on an hourly basis, or much of anywhere outside the unremarkable Park Slope gym to which he seems so fetishistically attached that he had his security detail drive him eleven miles every day to and from Gracie Mansion to work out on its machines.
He does not root for the city’s teams; indeed, he has stubbornly insisted on remaining a Boston Red Sox fan, which is a little like marrying into the Hatfield clan and then revealing that you’re a McCoy. Then there’s his bizarre discomfort with the civic rituals that have always been a special feature of the city’s public life. He has spent his mayoralty skipping out on them — the Columbus Day parade in the Bronx (2014), the Puerto Rican Day parade (2019), and, of course, the St. Patrick’s Day parade. He claims he avoids the latter owing to its supposed homophobia, but his habit of playing parade hooky in general seems more of a piece with his disdain for the city’s century-long embrace of ethnic particularism.
It’s the particularities that give New York its unique character — an indelible quality that inspires a fierce loyalty among its residents. New Yorkers have a kind of locally sourced patriotism you see maybe in Texas and hardly anywhere else. As John Updike once put it, “The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”
Most mayors are cheerleaders for their cities; it’s part of the job description. But there’s nothing like a New York City mayor’s drinking deep of the myriad pleasures offered up by the five boroughs to give you a sense of New Yorkers’ local-patriotic fervor and passionate attachment to their city — why they cram into vastly smaller spaces than they might be able to live in elsewhere and put up with the inconveniences that come with living cheek by jowl with twice as many people as the next-largest city in America.
It was ever thus. Jimmy Walker, the colorful and corrupt chief executive in the 1920s, dominated the nightlife during Prohibition, traveling nightly from one speakeasy to another. The legendary Fiorello La Guardia loved the opera — indeed, loved it so much he incepted a “people’s” opera company and installed it in a gaudy Shriner’s temple he saved from the wrecking ball and turned into the New York City Center. Michael Bloomberg was one of the most generous donors to the city’s arts establishments, from museums to theater companies, and though it started as an affectation to show he was not just a billionaire disconnected from the people, Bloomberg clearly came to love his daily subway rides from his Upper East Side manse to City Hall. Rudy Giuliani loved opera too. And the Yankees. And going to tapings of Saturday Night Live. And Ed Koch? He adored everything about New York. Every. Single. Thing.
New York is not in de Blasio’s blood, and he doesn’t want it to be. He came to the city at 27, fresh from his visit to Nicaragua, and his apparent determination not to drink deep of New York’s pleasures seems driven by the same ideological fervor that undergirded his not so youthful love of communism. He is driven instead by a conviction that the city itself is unjust and in need of moral and spiritual repair only he and his ilk can provide. No bread and circuses for Bill de Blasio — at least, not in public.
He does not like old-fashioned melting-pot ethnicity, but he likes newfangled racialism. And using it cleverly helped get him elected. In 2013, a friend of mine asked him how he planned to run against Bill Thompson, the well-liked city comptroller who had come shockingly close to beating Bloomberg in the 2009 election. Thompson was the sole black candidate in the race. No, de Blasio told him. I’m the black candidate. Married to an African-American woman and the father of two children with her, de Blasio pitched himself as the guy who knew from the experience inside his own household how difficult it is to be black in New York. “If his ‘Tale of Two Cities’ campaign theme turned off the city’s elites, he swept the emerging majorities, winning among communities of color and the city’s young white liberals,” wrote David Freedlander in New York magazine.
The very term “communities of color” is an indication of the sea change in political perception de Blasio represents. It’s one of his favorite phrases; I think it appears in more of his public comments than any other. It is, of course, an implicit effort to join African Americans and Hispanics in a grand coalition of grievance and need whose members can be spotted on sight. But, boy, does the word “Hispanics” (or “Latinos,” or “Latinx,” or whatever) have to do a lot of work here. These are people who don’t have all that much in common. The lion’s share of the city’s Hispanics is of Puerto Rican origin, and therefore American citizens from the get-go — as opposed to the Dominican and Mexican immigrants who together make up only two-thirds their number. According to an NPR poll in 2014, only 20 percent of Puerto Ricans in the continental United States still speak Spanish, so most of the city’s “Hispanics” don’t even share the same language.
The accurate way to think about these groups, again, is as ethnicities, not as a racial entity. In this, they join the “whites” of New York City, who would not have been recognized as “white” for most of the history of this country. Use the term “Caucasian” in New York and you’re talking not about Mayflower WASPs, who make up fewer than 1 percent. You’re talking about Jews (12 percent) and Italians (9 percent) and Irish (8 percent) and Germans and Greeks and Poles. I often think of my Yiddish-speaking milkman grandfather, who came to America from the Pale of Settlement as a teenager in the 1910s and lived the rest of his life in Brooklyn — imagine the shock on young Julius Podhoretz’s face had a fortune-teller informed him that one day he would be thought of as having shared a “race” with President Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller!
De Blasio and the progressives need the “communities of color” alliance to give them strength in numbers. This is how they advance their case for redistributionist economics and a rebalancing of political power in ways that truly favor not the communities themselves but rather the broad ideological goals of so-called community organizers who leverage the self-proclaimed leadership of their subgroups. He has brought many of these organizers into city government, where they have acted more than a little bit like inmates running the asylum.
And so have de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray. He “empowered” her campaign to put mental-health issues at the forefront of the city’s social-justice efforts with a program called ThriveNYC. All in all, more than $800 million has gone into ThriveNYC, an astonishing total for a single initiative. And it has been an abject failure, so much so that the program has been quietly rebranded and shoved inside another city department in preparation for de Blasio’s departure from office.
In the words of Stephen Eide in City Journal, “Instead of hiring more social workers, psychiatrists, and psychologists, the initiative focuses on drawing non-mental-health providers into the behavioral-health system. Examples include cops (CIT training), ‘School Consultants’ (who instruct parents and kids where they can find services in the community), and the public (Mental Health First Aid training). It’s still not clear how many separate programs make up ThriveNYC, but the original count was 54, which the administration touted, as though an initiative with dozens of programs is better than one with just a few.”
What you see in Thrive is what you see in de Blasio entire. He throws money at things. The money rains down on the city’s activist sector. He claims he has achieved revolutionary change and glorious results — but there are no credible statistics to back up his claims. That’s because he doesn’t need statistics. He has achieved a different set of results, the ones he really wanted: He has created a new class of government veterans — progressives with experience, who can leverage their time in the de Blasio administration in pursuit of their transcendent aims. He has helped build a new kind of machine, a leftist ruling class.
His likely successor, Eric Adams, is giving interviews in which he is all but guaranteeing he will follow not in de Blasio’s footsteps but rather in those of Bloomberg, Giuliani, and Koch — resolutely anti-ideological and focused on achieving results that will convince New Yorkers there will be a second renaissance. But the next mayor will have to contend not only with de Blasio’s legacy but with the army of progressives he empowered over his eight years in office. That army will be at the ready to fight back on behalf of the noxious ideas that are causing New Yorkers to vote with their feet and get the hell out of Dodge once again.
— This essay was sponsored by National Review Institute.
.
Comments are closed.
