DeB grudgingly admits homeless ‘missteps’
Mayor de Blasio listed his management of the homelessness crisis as the biggest “disappointment” of his eight years running the Big Apple, though critics have a longer list.
The mayor offered the response during a Friday appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” when asked by host Joe Scarborough what “do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment and what do you consider to be your biggest disappointment?”
“The thing I’ve struggled with — I’ve been honest about it, Joe — and we finally are making some profound progress, but it’s homelessness,” de Blasio said.
“I’m happy to say that after some absolute early misunderstandings and missteps on my part, that I’ve owned up to, we’ve found some strategies that are working much better to get people off the streets,” he claimed. “Our shelter population has gone down greatly, it’s much lower than when I took office.”
De Blasio said his biggest accomplishment was his universal prekindergarten program — which rolled out during his first year in office — and his recent efforts to expand the availability of child care and early education for 3-year-olds.
Hizzoner offered the answer as he eyes a possible 2022 bid to unseat Gov. Hochul in a likely Democratic primary battle in June.
It’s just one aspect of his management of City Hall amid the coronavirus pandemic that’s come under sharp scrutiny as he eyes a possible run for higher office. Those include:
▪ The complex of city-run lockups on Rikers Island experienced a weeks-long operational meltdown that left staffers and lawmakers calling for state and federal intervention;
▪ Shootings and homicides are still running at nearly double their pre-pandemic rate;
▪ City streets recorded the highest level of traffic-related deaths in nearly a decade as enforcement plunged, despite de Blasio’s muchtouted Vision Zero initiative.
▪ And parents have complained about poor communication and uncertainty in the lead-up to schools reopening this year and the last.
De Blasio’s answer on MSNBC echoes a response that he provided to a similar question in 2018 as he traveled the country eying a longshot bid for the White House, which spectacularly imploded.
“The thing I am most frustrated with — and I have to say it’s a failure because we’re not where I wanted us to be — is on homelessness,” de Blasio told an audience at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin on Sept. 28, 2018, when asked by a reporter from another newspaper what his biggest failure had been as mayor.
“I thought we were implementing some of the right policies and now look back and say we were missing pieces of the problem entirely, just weren’t seeing the whole picture and were too slow to make the adjustments that we had to make,” he added.
There were 45,544 people in city shelters on Sept. 28, the most recent day for which figures are available — down substantially from the all-time high of 61,415 in January 2019.
Experts point out that the dramatic drop in the city’s shelter population came amid the coronavirus pandemic, as state and federal moratoriums halted all evictions for more than a year.
“The de Blasio administration inherited a homelessness crisis that was out of control,” said Councilman Stephen Levin (D-Brooklyn). “The dramatic drop has been due to the eviction moratorium.”