Bill de Blasio, Role Model?

Ah, we remember …

The bizarre morning rides across the city in a police-driven SUV to use the gym at the Park Slope YMCA, where he sometimes forgot to wipe down the exercise equipment. The quixotic and disastrous presidential campaign. The chronic lateness. The boomlet of fundraising corruption scandals involving some of the city’s sleazier characters. The endless battles with the governor.

But also …

Universal pre-K for the city’s children. An end to the racist scourge of stop-and-frisk police harassment without an increase in crime and with a decrease in incarceration (at least until COVID-19 hit). Contracts with unions that the previous administration had left behind like ticking financial time bombs. Midtown East rezoning. Ferry wakes crisscrossing our rivers. Vision Zero driving down pedestrian and traffic fatalities.

It’s been nearly four years since Bill de Blasio left office; at the time, much of the city said “good riddance.” But Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has called him his favorite living former mayor, pointing to progressive policy achievements, and prompting at least a few non-Mamdani voters to snarkily refer to him as “de Blasio 2.0.”

With four years of Eric Adams behind us, it’s instructive to gaze back at the de Blasio years in light of Mamdani’s praise. Have the de Blasio administration’s successes and failures stood the test of a little time?

While it’s too soon to declare history’s final verdict, patterns are emerging, as are lessons for the city’s young new chief executive:

Don’t let your progressive ideals and hunger to be a star on the national stage get ahead of the mayoral work of nailing the basics. Don’t micromanage your staff or the professionals you put in charge of agencies. Finally, don’t let your annoying personality get in the way of your accomplishments — being sanctimonious or above it all will be a major liability when it comes to your legacy; that’s what New Yorkers will remember most.

De Blasio critics and fans agree that his single greatest achievement was the introduction of universal pre-K, a resource that had only been previously available in select corners of the city when he was elected in 2013. Making good on a campaign promise, de Blasio and his team secured $300 million from the State for a program that has since accommodated roughly 73,000 young children a year.

This early win showed flexibility that the mayor lost as his first and second terms wore on. While he’d initially wanted to fund the program with a new tax on the wealthy — essentially killing two progressive birds with one stone — he dropped that demand when then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, pathologically opposed to tax increases, found the money elsewhere.

Allocating the space and lining up the teachers for all those kids was no mean feat, either, but it got done.

“I don’t think he gets enough credit for universal pre-K,” said Ken Fisher, a lawyer and former City councilman who deals often with City Hall. “Clearly this was a big accomplishment. Not that it was necessarily controversial, but logistically it was something that was difficult to do, to basically will a new part of the school system into being.”

This piece of de Blasio’s legacy lives on every time a 4-year-old enters school for the first time.

There is also little disagreement on de Blasio’s extraordinary accomplishment of ensuring steady drops in crime as the City, initially under pressure from a lawsuit, moved away from the controversial police policy of unconstitutionally stopping and frisking minority men by the hundreds of thousands.

Stop-and-frisk had run amok under his predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly. In 2011, for example, officers conducted 685,724 street stops with little or no justification. It was a policy that helped sweep de Blasio into office (remember the famous ad with his son Dante), as was Bloomberg’s stated belief that New York was a “luxury product.”

The stop-and-frisk numbers had declined dramatically in Bloomberg’s final years, but the question lingered: Could the new progressive mayor keep crime down, too? De Blasio set aside his ego — again, something he’d have trouble doing down the road — and brought in former police commissioner Bill Bratton. Picking a former commissioner and not his own new guy — one who’d worked for Rudolph Giuliani, of all people — was a bold move, according to Peter Madonia, a former staffer of Mayor Edward I. Koch and chief of staff to Bloomberg who helped advise de Blasio on his transition in 2013.

“I told him, ‘I think you should pick your own.’ I believed that,” Madonia said. “You have to have the loyalty of your police commissioner. But at the end of the day, he picked someone else’s police commissioner, and it was a really smart thing to do.”

This decision may have already influenced Mamdani, who has said he wants to keep Adams’ popular police commissioner, Jessica Tisch.

Fisher, Madonia and others in and around the City Hall firmament point to other de Blasio successes. In 2017, his administration created the NYC Ferry program and extended ferry routes to all five boroughs with fares that were the same as the subway.

His Vision Zero traffic safety program brought down pedestrian deaths across the city — to 101 in 2017 from 140 in 2014 — using a variety of enforcement measures and infrastructure improvements.

More wonky but nonetheless crucial to a functioning City were his administration’s successful negotiations with 13 powerful unions, which somewhat outrageously had been left without contracts by Bloomberg. The de Blasio administration made deals with the teachers union, District Council 37 and all of the uniformed services unions, among others, although not without some drama.

Other high points cited by City Hall-watchers of those years include rezoning to the East side of Midtown Manhattan and moderate successes in building affordable housing.

It’s harder to pinpoint abject policy failures. New Yorkers recall a discernible increase in troubled homeless people, as well as increasingly frequent subway breakdowns, and were quick to blame de Blasio. But the causes of both are complex, with a great deal of the blame being laid at the feet of Cuomo, who had cut funding for a program called Advantage that subsidized housing, and whose administration had starved the State-run MTA of funds for years.

The most glaring de Blasio policy miss in people’s memory, perhaps, was the ThriveNYC program, which was created to address mental health issues. De Blasio assigned it to his wife, Chirlane McCray, despite her lack of experience and the inherent conflict of interest of appointing a family member to such a high-profile role. The program was generally seen as a $1 billion boondoggle, with at least one former official calling it “well-meaning but poorly thought-out.”

Entrusting ThriveNYC to McCray, who also sat in on job interviews at City Hall, underscores what many saw as de Blasio’s most glaring flaw — a kind of goofy arrogance that propelled him to do things that almost any advisors would have begged him to avoid, and almost surely did.

Famously, that involved using his security detail to drive him from Gracie Mansion to his favorite gym in his home Brooklyn neighborhood, where, by many accounts, he engaged in less-than-energetic workouts. These morning jaunts were constant fodder for the tabloids. He also was chronically late to events, including emotional memorials.

“He had this arrogance about knowing how to fix all the problems,” said Karen Hinton, de Blasio’s press secretary for a year during his first term. “Once he got his head there, it was very hard to move it. I saw this happen with a lot of people who got very frustrated with him.”

On the other hand, she added, “What politician on the planet doesn’t do that sometimes?”

For his part, Madonia said de Blasio “was his own chief of staff, and that’s not good.”

Forgotten by many in the wake of COVID-19 was the 2015 outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease in several Bronx apartment buildings that left 12 dead. At the time, in the view of many, de Blasio acted as the City’s doctor-in-chief and took the lead in being the public face of the crisis, sidelining his Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and making the outbreak appear worse than it was.

De Blasio’s presidential campaign in 2018-2019 suggested to many that he’d lost interest in being the mayor of New York City. And it came with a cost — he was eventually fined $475,000 for using City resources (again, his security detail) during the campaign. For Mamdani, this would be more a question of optics than reality — having not been born in the United States, he can never be distracted by an overly optimistic run for president.

Notwithstanding Bratton, the former mayor’s relationship with rank-and-file police officers was terrible from day one. After officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were assassinated in their car in Bedford-Stuyvesant in late 2014, grieving officers turned their backs on de Blasio and McCray in the blood-drenched hospital emergency room just feet from the slain men’s corpses.

“It was a world gone mad,” de Blasio said soon after, clearly rattled. Seemingly intent on avoiding this conflict — after all, he’ll be in charge of the cops — Mamdani has already apologized for previous comments he made calling officers racist; only time will tell if that and other gestures will avoid any schisms.

De Blasio’s relationship with the City Hall press corps was even worse than it was with the police, another example of his misplaced confidence in himself. Arriving late to events and dragging reporters to far corners of the city for modest policy announcements was the least of it. He consciously scorned and mocked journalists, refused to build relationships with them, and paid for it every time the presses rolled.

De Blasio “failed to even try to allow the tabloids to get to know him or see him as human,” Madonia said. “I begged him to go have a cup of coffee with Murdoch. He refused. Said he didn’t need them. So they tortured and embarrassed him for eight years and severely damaged his legacy.”

Then there were the corruption scandals and investigations. The misdeeds, such as they were, appeared in the view of at least one former City Hall insider to be another example of misplaced confidence, in this case that the former mayor knew how to walk right up to the line of impropriety without crossing it. No one ever accused de Blasio of seeking to line his own pockets.

Many of his headaches stemmed from the actions of two real estate developers, Jona Rechnitz and Jeremy Reichberg, who wound up convicted of bribing police and other officials. The mayor had solicited donations from them but was never charged with a crime.

This was all especially jarring after three terms of billionaire Bloomberg, who had no reason to engage in fundraising, the realm where the scammers come out to play. In a sense, it was a return to the past. This would seem to be a minimal threat for Mamdani, who’s powered his campaign with small donations and has consciously, and quite publicly, eschewed the big money-giving class.

De Blasio gets passing marks for his handling of COVID-19, although there are quibbles as to whether he acted too slowly to push for school closures or to reopen restaurants. In any event, by pulling the rug out from under him when it came to most pandemic policies, especially schools, Cuomo at times left de Blasio practically powerless.

Which brings us to de Blasio’s relationship with the mercurial governor, his former boss at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who toyed with him like a cat with a mouse throughout his two terms. Engineering a scant one-year extension of mayoral control of the schools and shooting down the 421 tax break for developers, a de Blasio priority, were two of many examples. These prompted de Blasio to publicly slam Cuomo. It’s hard to fault de Blasio in this struggle because, as a certain president might say, he didn’t have any cards, but observers think his penchant for fighting back wasn’t always the best idea. Certainly, it invigorated the cat.

“Sometimes when you are fighting with a superior political foe, it might make you feel good to fight with them, but it’s not the most responsible thing to do,” said one former official who did not want to be quoted by name.

The lessons for Mamdani from the two terms of his favorite living former mayor will ultimately be up to the young Democratic Socialist to decide, but topping the list would surely include building bridges with the police and journalists, recruiting a strong team and listening to it, and putting good government ahead of politics. When fundraising, stick to the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law. And pick a gym near Gracie.

To his credit, he has so far avoided several de Blasio missteps. His collegial relationship with Gov. Kathy Hochul and his previously mentioned police apology suggest he’s paid close attention to the failings of his favorite mayor.

And as for de Blasio’s legacy? Most of those interviewed felt that his personal foibles would forever outweigh his policy successes in New Yorkers’ memories. But Hinton, once deeply frustrated by the man, conceded that his stock has risen for her in recent years.

“Looking back on it now, we can understand better the challenges he faced and the risks he took to try to do the right thing, especially for people who are lower-income residents of the city,” she said. “Unlike in many ways what Michael Bloomberg had done, Bill took on a whole new class of people as his own and was courageous at times at helping them through really tough times. I think that’s one reason Zohran Mamdani has embraced things about Bill, because he relates to that himself.”