Bill touts wins in News chat
MAYOR DE BLASIO’S vision for a second term looks a lot like his first one.
But as he confidently outlined plans to stay the course on major initiatives like his affordable housing program, expanding pre-K to 3-year-olds, and meeting ambitious goals on crime and literacy, he acknowledged there were things from term one he wishes he’d done differently.
The mayor talked through his first four years and his hopes for the next four in a sitdown with the Daily News Editorial Board.
“The simple message I’ve been putting forward is this is your city,” de Blasio told The News Tuesday. “What it means is to build a fairer dynamic in this city, to build on what we’ve done over the last four years and continue to deepen it.”
Asked about regrets, he said he had a few, beginning with how his administration has handled the homeless crisis.
Shelter census numbers were topping 60,000 before he began rethinking his approach.
“Obviously, I’m not happy with where we stand on homelessness,” he said, admitting that it was late in the game when he decided to broaden outreach to street homeless and shift away from the use of “cluster site” apartments and commercial hotels.
“We did that wrong, and I take full responsibility for taking so long to put together a holistic plan,” he said. “That’s on me and my team. We did not figure out that that was essential to fixing the overall situation.”
In February de Blasio proposed Turning the Tide, his plan to stop using cluster sites, shift away from emergency placement of the homeless in hotels and build 90 new shelters. He now faces likely neighborhood opposition to new shelters as he moves his plan forward.
He admitted that fixing this problem is one of his most daunting challenges.
“To end homelessness in New York City, I don’t know how and when that happens, and I look certainly around the country I think this has happened tragically in a lot of cities,” he said. “On homelessness, I think we’re talking about a long war, and people should be honest about that.”
The mayor’s plan includes a promise that all communities targeted for new shelters will get a 30-day notice, but since then he’s given only 24-hour notice before placing homeless individuals in neighborhood hotels. That’s infuriated communities where he may want to later place permanent shelters.
Nevertheless the mayor said he has no choice because, he said, hotels are used only for last-minute emergency placements, so prior notice is impossible.
“I would love to give more notice if I had the notice to give,” he said.
De Blasio also reflected on a notable blown deadline — to finish construction through the Build it Back Hurricane Sandy recovery program by the end of 2016. With the end of 2017 nearing, some people still aren’t home.
While the program began under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the mayor said its slow progress in his term, too, is on him and his team — though he doesn’t regret putting forward the goal, saying it “jolted the bureaucracy into action.”
“If I could do the whole thing over again — and I have very few regrets, honestly — if I would do the whole thing over again, one of the things I would have most wanted to do is to have the presence of mind to say wait a minute,” de Blasio said. “Do we even want to continue this model?”
Asked if he had regrets over his relationship with police, de Blasio said he’d given it a lot of thought.
“You know, I’ve played that tape over and over in my mind. I think the broader answer is no,” he said, citing in the first six months good progress even with some of his biggest critics in uniformed unions.
Rank-and-file cops turned their backs on the mayor at the funerals for two officers slain in December 2014, just weeks after protests in the streets over police brutality. The mayor said he still thinks the venue was inappropriate for the officers’ reactions — but he wished he’d known more about what cops had heard from protesters.
“I think what I did not understand until much later was some of the individual protesters were saying truly vile and inappropriate things to the officers,” de Blasio said. “What I wish I could have done was understand that better and spoken to that better. I think officers need to hear how unacceptable that was to me, because it was.”
The mayor — who ran on a “Tale of Two Cities” message in 2013 with promises to launch the popular pre-K program and reform policing — has yet to unveil new cam-