THE LAST DAYS OF NEW YORK

Table of Contents to Last Days of New York: a reporter's true tale of how a city died by Seth Barron Introduction Past is prologue: all of de Blasio’s fumbles and misallocations of resources created a weak city that would be especially vulnerable to a major crisis. Section One: De Blasio the Man and his Rise Chapter One Who is Bill de Blasio? This chapter treats his biography, and delves into the family history of the man who legally changed his name as an adult not once, but twice inspired, he has said, by the experience of reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. His paternal grandfather Donald Wilhelm was the personal secretary of Herbert Hoover—the same president whose name de Blasio condemns constantly—and interviewed William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. The chapter examines the marriage of de Blasio’s parents, who were both implicated in the postwar investigations into Communist influence in public affairs. De Blasio’s early life as a radical socialist included solidarity work with the Sandinista regime of Nicaragua, which he visited. His work in the Dinkins administration exposed him to a cauldron of racial animosity during the Crown Heights riots.  His marriage, to a black lesbian seven years his senior, became the basis of his later political appeal, when he used his family—especially his son—as a constant feature of campaign literature. De Blasio worked for two figures who would become important later in his career: Hillary Clinton and Andrew Cuomo. His complicated relationship with both of them would affect his mayoralty. Chapter Two De Blasio’s rise to power cannot be understood without reference to the formation of the Working Families Party (WFP), a local political party that took advantage of New York’s unique “fusion” voting system, whereby candidates can occupy multiple ballot lines. The WFP was the creation of labor and housing activists, and funded by major unions, including public-sector employee unions. The party had some successes, but by the 2009 election had created a Byzantine financial structure, with a complex network of associated entities, and even a for-profit arm to perform campaign work, ostensibly for non-affiliated candidates. Scandals emerged following the 2009 election suggesting rather strongly that the WFP engaged in rampant violation of campaign finance laws, essentially coordinating campaign work among its slate of candidates in conjunction with consulting firms—and ostensibly unrelated independent expenditures made by major unions. This corruption came to full flower in 2013 when de Blasio won the mayoral election, and is essential to understanding the many scandals that dogged his administration, and his mercenary approach to politics generally. Section Two: Spend Every Dime Chapter Three This chapter begins with de Blasio’s first inauguration, on New Year’s Day, 2014. The mayor inherited a city that had rebounded from the 2008 financial collapse in relatively good health, buoyed by federal bailouts and Michael Bloomberg’s steely control of city finances.  The new mayor pledged to end the “tale of two cities” that he claimed divided New York into haves and have-nots and to make New York the “fairest big city” in the nation. Equity—not opportunity—would be the guiding principle of his administration. At the time of his accession to City Hall, de Blasio installed a key ally, Melissa Mark-Viverito as the speaker of the city council. An extreme leftist, Mark-Viverito would facilitate de Blasio’s firm control over budgeting and legislation, enabling him to expand spending and hiring at breakneck speed. Chapter Four Over the last six years of unsurpassed prosperity driven by a booming stock and property market, tax revenues flowed in, and de Blasio spent every dime, rewarding his friends and the essential constituencies—unions, community groups, property developers—that ensured his election and facilitated his dealings. The mayor was never required to budget, in the sense of choosing between competing priorities, but was able to expand spending at greater than three times the rate of inflation, and to hire tens of thousands of city employees for the powerful public-sector unions that formed his base. A key illustrative section details de Blasio’s dedication to the idea of a “Millionaire’s Tax,” a special supplemental tax on the highest earning New York residents. De Blasio initially demanded this tax as a means of paying for universal pre-Kindergarten. After the state government agreed to fund pre-K, de Blasio revived the tax in order to build housing for senior citizens. After that idea failed to catch on, he declared that the tax was necessary in order to fix the subways. Ultimately, all these projects were just excuses to impose a tax. Upon assuming office, one of the first measures de Blasio took was to settle a contract dispute with the powerful United Federation of Teachers, which represents more than 118,000 educators. Bucking their post-recession demands for a large pay raise, Bloomberg left the teachers without a contract for four years, though under state law they still received seniority-related healthy “step” raises. De Blasio immediately negotiated two 4 percent raises, retroactive to 2008. The cost of these raises, almost $4 billion, was too much for the city to cough up all at once, so they would be paid out in lump sums over the next eight years. The city is still paying for work done 12 years ago. Voices of caution warned that, when a downturn came, the city would be ill-prepared, with barely enough in its “rainy-day fund” to pay for more than a few weeks of operations. Mayor de Blasio dismissed these objections, and insisted that his budgets were fair and responsible. He did put some money aside, but largely to cover future retiree health-care costs, liabilities that the city is obligated to pay, but not obligated to account for now. Section Three: Education Chapter Five From the beginning of his administration, Mayor de Blasio pursued a two-pronged offensive on New York City schools. He sought to end what he called “segregated schools,” and—mostly at the behest of the teachers union—he waged war against the successful charter school movement. New York City public school students are 70 percent black and Latino. So it is not surprising that many individual schools are more than 90 percent black and Latino. As in every school district in the country, an “achievement gap” exists between these students and their white counterparts. Mayor de Blasio and his Department of Education hold it as a core value that the cause of disparate achievement is old-fashioned segregation—what some officials call “apartheid schooling.” Mayor de Blasio has pursued a radical, equity-based restructuring of the city’s school system—which educates 1.1 million pupils—based around the idea that proximity to white students will improve black and Latino performance, because white families are hogging resources. But in fact, NYC schools are among the most richly-funded in the nation, and schools with higher need, based on poverty and other factors, receive more money, not less.  The way this debate has played out has caused significant schisms among the well-heeled neighborhoods where there are enough white residents to even make trying to achieve racial parity a plausible project. Parents who have complained about having their children shuffled around as part of a social engineering campaign have been called racist by the Chancellor, and advised to take part in “implicit bias” training, which teachers are mandated to attend. Chapter Six A flash point arose around the admission standards to the system’s elite high schools, which require a high score on a standardized test as the sole criterion for entry. The number of black and Latino students who achieve a high score on this exam is extremely low, and Mayor de Blasio and activists have cast this in terms of racism, specifically white racism. But it is Asian students, who come from comparably poor, often immigrant backgrounds, who have driven up the cutoff score for admission to the specialized high schools, which are widely seen as a path to success for talented youth. The de Blasio administration is committed to dismantling this system, arguably destroying the value of the schools, because the disparity of results on the standardized admission test is prima facie evidence of racism. Chapter Seven At the same time, the city’s network of charter schools has proven to do an excellent job of educating almost exclusively black and Latino kids from poor neighborhoods, producing test results among the best in the entire state, including all-white wealthy suburbs. Instead of looking to the charter sector for answers to improve education for all students, de Blasio—at the express behest of the teachers’ union, which demands a monopoly on education tax dollars—has fought to limit charters or shut them down. In sum, de Blasio has approached public schools, which account for tens of billions of annual spending, as a vehicle to promote divisive equity-oriented goals that serve a larger Progressive agenda of “dismantling white supremacy,” rather than as a means of educating New York’s children. Section Four: Quality of Life, Homelessness, and the Mentally Ill Chapter Eight Perhaps no area of life in New York City has seen as much degradation under Bill de Blasio as the quality of street life, which has become dirtier, rowdier, and more dangerous. This owes directly to policies pursued by de Blasio in the name of equity. Crime in New York City used to be very high, with more than 2,000 homicides in 1990. Through an intense, data-driven policing effort, as well as the application of the “Broken Windows” theory of criminology, low-level and major crime declined radically under mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg, creating a virtuous cycle of community improvement that bore generational fruit as New York City grew more prosperous, and thousands of lives were saved. Hard left anti-incarceration advocates long decried the supposedly racist policing practices of the NYPD, ignoring the fact that crime is concentrated in particular neighborhoods and communities, and that the perpetrators of major crime are disproportionately black. These activists promoted a narrative of “occupation” of black neighborhoods by a militarized police force, even though the residents of those neighborhoods are the primary victims of violent crime, and are the first to call for a greater police presence when assailed by disorder. De Blasio backed and signed a major package of legislation that effectively decriminalized a host of “minor” quality of life crimes, including public urination, marijuana possession, public drinking, and hanging out in parks at night. Later, this relaxation of civil norms was expanded to include subway fare evasion, long a key means of snaring people with outstanding criminal warrants, and people carrying illegal guns. This effort paralleled a general move to reduce the number of people in jail, and was accompanied by extensive propaganda that the NYPD systematically arrests and jails black and Latino New Yorkers for non-violent offenses, or “crimes of poverty,” like turnstile jumping. But in fact, the number of people arrested and jailed in New York City has been declining for years, and almost everyone on Rikers Island is jailed for a serious, usually violent offense. Furthermore, Rikers is largely populated by repeat offenders, and their average age is around 37. Chapter Nine At the same time, street homelessness has become a much more entrenched problem in New York City. Despite doubling the amount of money spent directly on homeless services—to $2 billion annually—the shelter system is rife with complaints of waste, corruption, and insanitary and unsafe conditions. Thousands of homeless people, often with serious mental illness, roam the streets and subways. Loath to force mentally ill people into treatment, despite the nation’s most robust legal resources, de Blasio has been content to allow sick people to fend for themselves. The nadir of his rule occurred when the subways—which had always run 24 hours a day, as the symbol of the “city that never sleeps”—were shut down at night during the height of the pandemic, ostensibly for “deep cleaning,” but really because they had become an unofficial annex of the homeless services department. De Blasio had lost control of policing and social services to such an extent that hundreds of homeless people had to be forcibly dislodged from the subways, because they otherwise wouldn’t leave, and they were scaring off legitimate passengers. Rather than address the problem of serious mental illness, the mayor poured hundreds of millions of dollars into ThriveNYC, a “mental wellness” initiative that became his wife’s pet project. Thrive used valuable resources encouraging anxious or depressed New Yorkers to breathe mindfully, get things off their chests, and an eye out for signs that their neighbors might be stressed out. ThriveNYC emphasized the need to end the “stigma” around mental illness, but the seriously mentally ill, who are stubbornly difficult to treat and pose an actual danger to themselves and others when they are not compliant with doctor’s orders, do not suffer from stigma. Decriminalization, decarceration, and a failed mental illness policy have returned the streets of New York City to the proverbial “bad old days.” Crime is creeping up as police, increasingly vilified, take a hands-off approach to disorder. Drug sales, random street and subway crime, and hate attacks are back. In his reckless pursuit of a “fair city,” Bill de Blasio has fractured the civic calm upon which New York City’s prosperity and normalcy depend. Section Five: Corruption in Consultant City Chapter Ten: Perhaps the most corrosive, insidious aspect of Bill de Blasio’s two terms of office is the legacy of pay-to-play cronyism that now defines city politics. This chapter runs through his litany of scandals: the Campaign for One New York PAC; his 2014 effort to work around the campaign finance system by directing donors to give money to county committees instead of politicians; the Rivington House scandal, whereby a powerful lobbyist was able to get a deed restriction lifted on a nursing home so it could be sold for enormous profit; his association with multiple people who pled guilty to federal charges of bribing him, while he eluded prosecution; his purchase of slums at an inflated value from connected insiders. Throughout all of these scandals and investigations, de Blasio stuck to the principle that he “obeyed the letter of the law.” But, the chapter concludes, staying within the letter of the law is tantamount to violating the spirit of the law. It’s a low ethical bar that de Blasio has set, and one that will be difficult to ever elevate. De Blasio became beholden to a coterie of “consultants” who operate between the cracks of lobbying law. These consultants work for political parties, candidates, unions, and corporations. They help decide who should run for which seat, manage campaigns, raise money, and negotiate deals and legislation. At one point, Mayor de Blasio argued that five of his consultants were effectively “agents of the city,” and thus his communications with them were protected, intra-governmental discussions exempt from disclosure. In a very real way, politicians in New York City work for their consultants, who organize their funding, and who are typically owed money by previous campaigns. The rise of the consultant class is an untold story, and its entrenchment in our politics is perhaps de Blasio’s most degrading legacy. Now that we are in a major crisis, we no longer have the democratic institutions to help pull ourselves out. Section Six: The Road Ahead Chapter Eleven: This concluding chapter offers some hope for recovery from Bill de Blasio’s squandered mayoralty, including: A square focus on fighting crime and preserving order so working people feel safe in their neighborhoods and going about their business. Overhaul of contracts with municipal workers with a recognition that the party has ended; the city cannot afford to pay 100 percent of retiree health benefits forever, for example. Fixing the subways to ensure that the spine of commerce is preserved. Expansion of choice throughout the school system. Full use of all legal means to ensure the seriously mentally ill receive and maintain compliance with treatment Conclustion New York City faces a tough road back. As many as a million jobs have been lost and may never return. The future of tourism, Broadway, live music, sports, and dining are in question. Retail, already shaken, could be wiped out. Will office workers return to their buildings, and will companies continue to locate in Midtown, if commuters don’t trust the trains and subways? The city needs strong, courageous leaders who are willing to buck entrenched and special interests to overcome the deep culture of corruption and entropy that has infected our political class. Last Days of New York: a reporter's true tale of how a city died is an autopsy of the de Blasio administration that should give us clues about how to proceed from here.