The de Blasio record
New York City’s mayor looks poised to make a run for president, which means Democratic primary voters may soon get a closeup of someone we have gotten to know well. De Blasio will campaign as a man who turned what he called “a tale of two cities,” in which the rich live ever more comfortable lives while the rest of us claw to get by, into a far fairer place.
More than 400,000 people in the five boroughs live in New York City Housing Authority developments; that means city bureaucrats, and ultimately the mayor, are directly responsible for the living conditions of a population nearly four times the size of South Bend, Ind., where Pete Buttiegieg is mayor.
De Blasio has let thousands of residents go without heat or hot water, failed to effectively combat mold and broken elevators, and falsely certified to the federal government that officials had conducted lead inspections even as his administration was aware of more than 800 children in those developments who had tested positive for elevated levels of the poison in their blood.
Meanwhile, the number of homeless people sleeping in shelters in New York City has risen from 53,615 when de Blasio became mayor on Jan. 1, 2014, to 63,615, a record high, today.
De Blasio will campaign as a public-school parent who led the nation’s largest governmentrun K-12 system.
As they did under Mike Bloomberg, most objective indicators, from test scores to graduation rates, show student achievement in the district getting moderately better under his leadership. De Blasio deserves great praise for creating universal pre-K, and now 3K, giving thousands of families free, high-quality early education for their youngsters.
But de Blasio has been hostile to innovative
charter schools providing solid alternatives to families most desperate for them, and his massive $780 million strategy to turn around struggling schools mostly failed to do that.
De Blasio will campaign as a criminal-justice reformer, and here, he gets unalloyed credit. New York City has become even safer under his watch, continuing a historic decline in violence and mayhem that began under Rudy Giuliani and kept going under 12 years of Bloomberg.
That de Blasio oversaw this decline while dialing back mass stopping, questioning and frisking of young men, mainly of black and Latino young men, violating their rights and aggravating tensions between police and the people they serve, is remarkable.
De Blasio will campaign as a man who can convince swing voters he will watch over their tax dollars with care. But under his stewardship, a five-year period during which inflation has risen just 7%, New York City’s budget has risen 25%.
De Blasio will campaign as a man of integrity and transparency. What he will not discuss on the campaign trail, but what continues to haunt him, is the fact that he put a “For Sale” sign on the steps of City Hall when he set up a campaign fund that solicited contributions from businesses and others seeking favors from government, then gave those individuals and interests concierge service.
And he attempted to keep secret communications with political advisers who also had business before his government, asserting a baseless designation that they were “agents of the city.”
De Blasio will campaign as someone who gets the job done. He now jets around the country boasting about a badly unfinished record rather than tending to the city he was elected to lead.