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 e.