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So quickly has Mayor de Blasio changed the political landscape in New York City that most observers have failed to comprehend the cumulative effect on the city’s wealth inequality. I have for the first time quantified the real financial impact of de Blasio’s initiatives on ordinary city residents, and it is nothing less than staggering.

Between mid-2014 and mid-2017, New Yorkers benefited to the tune of at least $21 billion — either in direct cash payments, or in the value of new city services they had not previously enjoyed, or in money de Blasio’s programs saved them from having to spend.

That, of course, is an estimated $21 billion, for when dealing with such huge sums of money, one can only make a ballpark estimate, but it is most surely a conservative estimate.

The universal pre-kindergarten program, for example, did not merely add an entire year to the school experience of every child; it also saved parents who utilized the program a full year of child care costs, which in New York City run an average of $12,500 for a 4-year-old child in a private program.

Thus, by the third year of the universal pre-K program, New York families had saved $1.4 billion in child-care expenses, according to calculations by the city’s Office of Management and Budget.

So, too, with the new law mandating five days of paid sick leave for all workers.

More than 500,000 city residents gained coverage under the expanded version of the paid sick leave law that de Blasio signed in March of 2014. By mid-2017, those workers had received nearly $500 million in benefits from their employers — none of which had been previously available to them.

The biggest single direct infusion of money, however, came from new labor contracts the city reached in swift and amicable negotiations with its own employees. Those contracts resulted by the middle of 2017 in more than $15 billion in wage hikes, back pay and benefits for some 300,000 workers.

Much of that money, needless to say, was then spent by those workers in the municipal economy, thus sparking what growth-machine advocates love to describe as a “multiplier effect.”

In my new book, I delineate in a half dozen other reforms that also resulted in huge expenditures, including one of the largest unreported wealth transfers from landlords to a city’s working class in modern U.S. history — three years of a neartotal freeze on rents for regulated apartments that occurred under de Blasio.

Ever since World War II, prices for a large portion of New York City’s private rental apartments have been determined by the Rent Guidelines Board, an obscure agency whose members are appointed by the mayor. New York rent regulations are in place to prevent price gouging by landlords because of a perennial acute scarcity of available rental units — vacancy rates were about 3% in 2014.

There are more than 1 million of these regulated apartments in New York City, including units in public housing projects, and for the bulk of them, about 841,000 units that are privately owned and that receive no government subsidies, the rent board determines each year how much landlords can increase the rent.

Public meetings of the board are always raucous affairs pitting tenants against landlords. Over the past two decades, the board has granted average annual increases of 3%, so that property owners had grown accustomed to the steady increase in their revenues. Under de Blasio, however, the board authorized astoundingly low hikes of just 1%, 0%, and 0%.

That change in policy alone represented an estimated dollar savings to tenants of more $2.1 billion over the first three years of the new administration.

The combination of those historically low rent increases, along with universal pre-K, paid sick leave and other de Blasio reforms thus amounted to an unprecedented multibillion-dollar improvement in the economic life of the city’s working-class and poor majority.

De Blasio is the most prominent example of the new progressive leaders who are directly challenging the “growth machine” model that has dominated urban America since the 1920s.

The sheer number of progressive changes in government policy launched by de Blasio and his allies in the council during their first three years in power can be difficult to grasp, but the impact of those reforms on the everyday lives of New Yorkers is undeniable.

Here are just a few examples:

Under former mayor Bloomberg, the privatizing of parkland for commercial ventures and huge investments in Manhattan parks such as the High Line, Randall’s Island and Hudson River Park became the norm.

De Blasio launched instead in 2014 a community parks initiative that has now earmarked $285 million in capital funds to improve more than 60 neighborhood playgrounds and small parks, and another $150 million to build new soccer fields and hiking trails in five major parks