The greatest achievements of the Bloomberg administration were 1) raising the high school graduation rate by 20 points, improving the life prospects of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers (and removing an incalculable strain on public budgets for expenses dropouts tend to incur that otherwise would have gone to policing, shelter, public assistance, etc); 2) refurbishing the infrastructure of the city--opening a new water tunnel, developing hundreds of miles of waterfront, greening on an unprecedented scale through PlaNYC and related laws; and 3) making NYC the world's most successful tourist destination, adding billions to our economy--which was partly made possible by the enormous gains in public safety (themselves driven by choices other than stop-and-frisk).
The smoking ban was great because it made it more fun for me to hang out in bars into my early 30s, and it maybe helped with #3. Nobody gives a shit about the calorie counts, and the bike lanes mostly functioned as a story that confirmed the biases of lazy culturally liberal reporters.
Where they suck is telling the story--the tone deafness I'll give you. Wanting to keep the marathon after Sandy, poo-poohing the public fury when they didn't clean up the snow in December 2010, saying in print that he wants more Russian billionaires, reaching almost Giuliani-esque levels of dickishness talking about stop-and-frisk. The guy's egomania and empathy deficit killed Chris Quinn's chances and opened the door for de Blasio's ideological campaign for a managerial position.
Voters here don't even understand how much better things have gotten over these last twelve years. But they will, when the liberal superhero gives so much away to what's left of those machines and city services start to falter. Already it's clear that he's hiring political loyalists rather than anyone with actual policy expertise or managerial acumen. The bad old days of the '80s we're going back to are less the crack and murder Dinkins period than the "City For Sale" days of the later Koch years.
TenuredVulture wrote:The problem is that technocratic politics doesn't work. Elites seem to think it does, despite repeated failures (and very few successes.)
Populist politics is ugly, but the old party machines, while corrupt, had every incentive to keep delivering effective services to constituents, and they had every incentive to pay attention to what their constituents actually said they needed, rather than assume they knew what was needed and how to deliver it.
I mean, consider this quote:In City Hall, Mr. Bloomberg’s greatest achievements were technocratic triumphs — restricting smoking in public places, posting calorie counts and championing biking.
But he's absolutely tone deaf to the problems of housing costs and the way that's fundamentally transformed NYC. He seems quite content to allow NYC to transform to a city full of nothing other than investment bankers and tourists. I mean, consider how much the elite driven (and I realize it's a special case but the lack of democratic responsiveness is relevant I think) Robert Moses projects transformed NYC into a city that really didn't work for most of its residents, and those who had the means fled to the suburbs.
