THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLUES
A huge failure in NYC, de lusional de Blasio thinks he should be prez
IT’S been astonishing to watch Bill de Blasio still prancing on the national stage, to hear his delusional musings on a 2020 presidential run and of his announced trip this Friday to the key primary state of New Hampshire, all while he remains unwilling to acknowledge this truth: For most of us, New York City under his mayoralty has become aggressively unlivable.
It’s the same defiance we’re treated to on his weekly WNYC “Ask the Mayor” segments, exchanges that even the smart, affable host Brian Lehrer can’t always salvage.
Callers who dare to challenge de Blasio are almost always told the same thing: They are surely well-meaning, just woefully misinformed.
De Blasio is painfully verbose and always right. Even if you are living the very dreaded experience you are calling about — you’re wrong.
Take this question from last week, a Staten Island caller asking de Blasio if he would reconsider the administration’s proposed homeless shelter at 44 Victory Boulevard — a location, this caller said, already inundated with drug addicts and loitering.
“I was just out west,” de Blasio said, ever lofty, ever out of touch. In LA, San Francisco and Seattle, he said, he witnessed the “horrible, painful, overt large-scale homelessness, tents, encampments, things that we would never in a million years accept here.” Oh, really? With typical superciliousness, de Blasio went on to chide this caller — and by extension us, the listeners — for such ignorance.
The homeless in question, said the mayor, are “not the stereotype you might have had in the past of single males who have mentalhealth issues or substance-misuse challenges . . . I want everyone to understand, when we say ‘ homeless,’ these are our neighbors, these are folks who oftentimes the bottom fell out of their household budget.”
“Is that a family shelter, per se, for that location?” Lehrer asked. “As opposed to single men or women?”
“I have to find out the composition of that one,” de Blasio said.
THE week before, de Blasio dismissed a caller concerned that her apartment building in The Bronx was going to be offloaded by the city through a thirdparty transfer, rendering her and her neighbors homeless. The mayor began with one of his most-used openings:
“I know your question is from the heart,” de Blasio said, “[but] I disagree 100 percent with the way you’re interpreting thirdparty transfer and what I’ve said . . . so with deepest respect for you” — another meaningless go-to — “it’s just across-theboard I want to say [sic] I disagree with the characterization.”
But leave your information, he was sure to add, so his crack team could follow up.
Arrogant, short on details, full of big-sky ideas, promoting himself as the boldest of progressives among otherwise milquetoast Democrats — fully ignoring fellow New Yorker and new standard-bearer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — this, America, is our ignominious mayor.
To be fair, he has a couple of achievements. He launched, amid great skepticism, the biggest pre-K program in the United States. Crime stats are down.own. Yet, as with the disconnect between the mayor and his WNYC listen-listeners, the current perception of life in the city doesn’t track with the numbers.
Over the past few weeks alone, a family on the Upper West Side was bound and robbed inn a brutal home invasion, one of three re-reported in the same time frame. A 20-year-old man was shot to death on a busy Elmhurst subway platform — several timeses in the face — on a Sunday afternoon by an MS-13 gang member. A woman waiting for her Lyft in Williamsburg was slashed in the face by a mugger who said she wass pretty.
THEN there are de Blasio’s in-institutional failures. During the arctic freeze twoo weeks ago, thousands of NYCHA residents went without heat or hot water — a routine occurrence on the coldest days of the year.
As The Post exclusively reported, 12 apartment buildings on the Upper West Side now employe private security, paid for by residents, to combat the area’s overwhelming homeless population. So does Union Square’s Zeckendorf Towers. As one longtime resident told The Post: “Thee homeless problem in Union Square since de Blasio came into office has been absolutely awful.” (According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 91,897 New Yorkers experi- enced homelessness last year, a 2.7 percent jump from the year before.)
And lest we forget, there’s de Blasio’s installation of special receptacles for junkies, ostensibly to keep our parks clear of hypodermic needles. In December, The Post reported that stats from the program’s first six months showed 66,000 needles littering park grounds. One addict, who openly injected himself in St. Mary’s Park on a recent Thursday morning, said that the bins were akin to the administration’s blessing.
“They’re giving us permission with that box,” Javier Martinez said. “Kids don’t come here. They don’t build anything for them like a playground. If they don’t want us doing drugs, why are they putting the boxes here?”
That’s to say nothing of the epically failing subway system, which, as of last week, was leeching a pungent gas smell along the beleaguered L line — a key artery that may or may not be shutting down. Amazon may or may not be moving in. Congestion pricing has made cabs and Ubers — the only real option when your subway line suddenly goes down — even more expensive for working New Yorkers.
Yet to hear de Blasio tell it, he’s the patron saint of the 99 percent. It’s a fiction all too easy for anyone outside the metro area to believe, because the national media either don’t know enough or don’t care to push back.
NOT since David Dinkins has New York City felt so neglected — but at least his neglect felt benign. De Blasio just oozes contempt for dealing with the inner workings of government, for grinding it out on any level. To do so might interfere with his naps, his workouts, his national and international trips to raise his profile. He has so much more to do than actually run his own city.
This is to say nothing of his hypocrisy. In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, a mayor whose federal PAC, per Politico, has raised money from real-estate developers and corporate entities, who has no shortage of crooked donors, who has spent taxpayer money on nongovernment-related travel and, as Crain’s reported, used $2.6 million in city funds to pay a campaign-related le-
gal bill, had the temerity to write this: “I won [the New York City mayoral] race in 2013 because . . . we put forward a clear, populist message: New York City was a tale of two cities, with unacceptable levels of inequality that have to change.” That inequality has only gotten worse under de Blasio. Just getting from Point A to Point B — taking your kid to school, getting to work on time or feeling any sense of control over your daily schedule, really — now seems the province of those with access to a helipad. We are second only to San Francisco in cost of living; the average “modest” twobedroom here rents for nearly $4,000 a month. Increasingly the city feels dirtier and more dangerous. You feel it in the swell of the mentally ill and homeless, now so emboldened, it’s not un- common to see, as I did a few weeks ago, a full-on encampment set up in the back of one subway car during the day. Or for panhandlers — often too clean and welldressed — to not so much ask for money as demand it, or for women to beg in busy subway stairwells with their babies or small children. You feel it in the gridlock, the sudden street and shop closures, the endless accommodations for bicyclists above all, the inability for this administration to manage minor inconveniences.
Remember those six inches of snow back in November? That somehow brought the greatest city in the world to a standstill — airports closed, cars abandoned on the George Washington Bridge, thousands of commuters stranded at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and Penn Station? Roads went unplowed. Children were stuck on freezing school buses for hours.
The mayor, typically, wouldn’t take responsibility. “I don’t think it’s fair to say the city agencies could have stopped all of this,” he said. “I’m not going to do that because I think that’s just too convenient.” T HIS is the real Bill de Blasio, the one we saw in e-mails released last year through an NY1 and New York Post Freedom of Information request: a narcissistic snowflake who refuses to take criticism or responsibility of any kind. Stupid enough to put, in writing, his wish for The Post and Daily News, rightfully hard on him, to fail.
Even the left-leaning New York Times isn’t duly reverential.
One 2015 exchange explains, perhaps, why Hizzoner recently published in, of all places, The Washington Post. “It just dawned on me,” de Blasio wrote, “how totally f--ked up it is that the Times has turned down the only two op-eeds I’ve offered in 16 months, both on very weighty topics.”
Yet so far he’s proven only that his ambition outstrips his ability. Now in his second term, he remains certain of his declarations yet vague on specifics. To this question posed by Lehrer about the city’s one-month deadline to repaint nearly 3,000 NYCHA apartments housing children: “You said they could do it . . . How many painters is that doing how many apartments per day? Do you know?”
“Um, I’m not an expert on painters and the shifts it will take,” the mayor said.
Lehrer next asked about the stated timeline for getting all the lead paint out of NYCHA housing. “Twenty years,” Lehrer said. “Twenty years?”
“I don’t have all the legal definitions in front of me,” de Blasio said. Besides, he was prepping for an appearance later that night on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” where he would be treated like a substantive candidate with a real shot at 2020. After all, as de Blasio explained on Maher’s show, he’s going to give every New Yorker health care, plus a guaranteed living wage and two weeks paid time off. No worries that he hasn’t executed it at home — he’s going to keep failing upward, promising to pay for such policies on a nationwide scale, because he knows better than everyone else.
“There’s plenty of money in the United States of America,” he said. “There’s plenty of money in LA, there’s plenty of money in New York City. It’s just in the wrong hands. That is the reality.” According, that is, to Bill de Blasio.