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Michael Bloomberg is a selfmade Upper East Side multibillionaire, a product of and a true believer in the free market capitalist system. For most of his adult life, Bloomberg has seen government and politics as necessary annoyances, worlds populated by hacks and riven with inefficiencies.
Bill de Blasio is a financially stressed middle-class Park Slope parent, a man who fantasizes about moving the city closer to socialism. For most of his adult life, de Blasio has been on the payroll of the government or of politicians, and he sees the public sphere as the average man or woman’s indispensable equalizer in a rigged game.
For 12 years, the city’s most powerful elected official was also one of its wealthiest. Now we’re on the verge — barring an upset of greater magnitude than Donald Trump beating Hillary Clinton — of being governed for eight years by one of America’s proudest lefties.
Excuse many New Yorkers for asking: So what?
For all the polar biographical and philosophical differences between our most recent and our current mayor, this fact remains: Millions of New Yorkers could have settled down for a nap in November 2013, and awakened four years later to find much of city life unchanged.
Rents are still rising in many neighborhoods; the public school system is still underserving thousands of kids; homelessness is still a plague; and, much more happily, crime rates and unemployment figures are still plummeting.
“For all practical purposes, four years ago de Blasio ran against Bloomberg,” says Joseph Viteritti, a professor of public policy at Hunter College and the author of “The Pragmatist: Bill de Blasio’s Quest to Save the Soul of New York.” “It wasn’t against Bill Thompson or Christine Quinn, really. They were promising what looked like Bloomberg lite, but de Blasio was talking about economic populism as very much a reaction against Bloomberg.”
So, after promising transcendent, transformative change, has de Blasio failed to deliver a radically different and noticeably fairer city? Or, beyond the stark contrasts in worldview and rhetoric, has he turned out, as mayor, to be more like Mike than anyone expected?
Okay: de Blasio has indeed pushed New York in a more progressive direction, redirecting attention and major policy benefits away from the city’s elites, who had enjoyed Bloomberg’s affections for more than a decade, and toward New York’s struggling class.
Bloomberg tried to kill City Council bills raising the minimum wage and creating paid sick leave; de Blasio didn’t just heartily endorse those proposals, but enlarged their dollar amounts and eagerly signed them into law.
He has doubled the number of new and preserved subsidized housing units. De Blasio wrangled backto-back annual rent freezes for 200 million rent-stabilized tenants.
And perhaps you’ve heard: the city now has universal pre-kindergarten for 4-year-olds.
Those and other revisions — the long overdue settlement of contracts with city workers a big one — have enabled a $20 billion transfer of wealth, by the calculation of former Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez in his book “Reclaiming Gotham.” As mayor, de Blasio has