For better or worse, it’ll no longer be Mayor de Blasio’s New York in a week’s time.
Eric Adams will be sworn in as the city’s 110th mayor on Jan. 1, and de Blasio will have a lot more free time on his hands. And we, as New Yorkers, will no longer have de Blasio to kick around like we once did — that is, unless he runs for governor.
Over the last decade, we voted him into City Hall twice, made him a punching bag on a regular basis and turned to him for leadership during one of the lowest points in the city’s history — the COVID-19 pandemic.
By now, almost everyone has an opinion of the Manhattan-born, Massachusetts-raised and Brooklyn-claiming mayor. He is, at turns, a progressive champion or an unethical buffoon, too anti-cop or too pro-cop, a micromanager or just plain lazy — depending on who you ask, of course.
What’s still not entirely clear is how history will judge the man. Clarity on that may take several years or even decades to come by — and even then, historians and political scientists will still debate the finer points.
What we do know now is that de Blasio left us with an eight-year record to dissect, debate and, hopefully, learn from — and that record is likely what he’ll be judged on.
How will history remember Bill de Blasio?
His first and crowning achievement was implementing free prekindergarten education for every family in the city who wanted to enroll. The win came early in his first term, and since then, it’s been viewed by most as an accomplishment with far-reaching, long-term benefits. Other leaders eventually came to build on that success, too.
“Not only is it the single most impactful piece of legislation on New York life in the past 40 years — on par with the New Deal — but what happens when you have a successful policy? Others want to do it,” said Neal Kwatra, a longtime political strategist who’s worked with both de Blasio and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Notably, universal pre-K ended up being a part of President Biden’s Build Back Better bill — and that piece of the plan alone comes with a price tag of tens of billions of dollars in federal cash if passed by Congress.
When he was vying to replace former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, de Blasio ran a campaign broadly focused on making a big dent in income inequality — a move consistent with the zeitgeist of Occupy Wall Street and the antipathy many felt at the time for Bloomberg. Universal pre-K was part of that — but not the only piece of the puzzle.
Over his eight years as mayor, de Blasio successfully pushed to freeze rents on rent-regulated apartments, provided free legal representation to tenants against landlords, afforded paid sick leave to workers and created a municipal identification card, IDNYC.
But it was the struggle to implement pre-K that would ultimately throw gasoline on a simmering power struggle between the mayor and then-Gov. Cuomo — a battle that would have huge implications for most of de Blasio’s time as mayor.
De Blasio wanted to fund universal pre-K with a state tax on the wealthy. Cuomo disagreed, but the program was ultimately funded through the state. The battle over taxing the rich was just a small part of the complicated and rancorous dynamic between the two, though.
“The feud,” as it came to be known in New York press and political circles, played a starring role in the COVID crisis, with the two leaders at odds over whether New Yorkers should remain indoors at the pandemic’s onset, health officials from the city and state refusing to communicate, and de Blasio and Cuomo failing to deliver a unified message during a time of deep uncertainty.
When Cuomo resigned in disgrace over sexual harassment allegations last summer, de Blasio may have ended up as the last man standing, but the fight had already taken a huge political toll on him.
“He beat him up and he humiliated him and he did it in public. So much of political power is reputation. And Cuomo created a reputation for weakness and powerlessness that not only affected de Blasio, but affected what we thought of de Blasio,” said Ken Sherrill, professor emeritus of political science at Hunter College. “Looking at it in light of what we now know, Cuomo, in one fashion or another, did many of the same things to the people who worked for him and other people in his life.”
De Blasio, though, also made himself an easy target — and not just when it came to Cuomo.
He didn’t do himself many favors when it came to the city’s press corps, especially early on. He made a habit of showing up late to events and being driven from Gracie Mansion to his gym in Park Slope, Brooklyn, so he could work out late into some mornings.
“It created this notion that Bill de Blasio was lazy and didn’t work hard,” Kwatra said. “That caricature defined him. He’s a really stubborn guy, and it didn’t serve him well,” Kwatra continued, but then said that’s not the whole story. “I’ve never worked with anyone who works as hard as Bill de Blasio,” he said.
But many of de Blasio’s critics don’t view his record as just a matter of public perception. They believe he was simply a bad mayor. They blame his personality and his managerial chops, and point to his ethics scandals and free-spending ways.
Under de Blasio, the city’s budget grew from $70 billion in Bloomberg’s last year to $102.8 billion this year. De Blasio has added more than 300,000 people to the city’s workforce. He poured an additional $3 billion into trying to address homelessness, and many would argue that he made a negligible impact.
“He has not focused on management and efficiency. Over his term, his budget has grown tremendously and his workforce has grown, but he did not find savings,” said Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission. “History should look at this as an expansive government mayor who grew his budget and grew his workforce and was then fortunate that the biggest federal bailout in history helped save New York from the recession he did not prepare for.”
The mayor has also been investigated by federal and local agencies for his handling of lead paint in New York City Housing Authority buildings, his use of his police security detail for personal reasons and allegations that he orchestrated illegal political donations and granted favors to businesses that donated to his campaign and political causes.
One of the most damning examples of de Blasio’s run-ins with the law came in a 2017 statement issued by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. In it, Vance said de Blasio’s fund-raising practices ran “contrary to the intent and the spirit” of anti-corruption laws, but Vance didn’t file charges against the mayor because he was unable to prove certain elements of the alleged crimes.
Most recently, newly released letters to the mayor from the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board show he kept violating city ethics rules when it came to asking for donations from people with business before his administration — even though the watchdog agency warned him three times not to.
Still, John Kaehny, executive director of the ethics watchdog Reinvent Albany, said the “sleazy” side of de Blasio likely won’t go down as an enduring part of his legacy because he never got indicted.
“Historians will judge him harshly for it, but the public probably won’t. When you’re completely shameless, when you never apologize, then the public seems to unfortunately reward that,” Kaehny said. “De Blasio not paying a price just shows you how sleazy New York politics are.”
De Blasio has also taken heat for the NYPD’s handling of racial justice protests in the summer of 2020, as well as recent spikes in violent crime. But his relationship with the Police Department was shaky from the start after campaigning for the better part of 2013 as a police reformer.
In 2014, hundreds of cops offended by comments he made in the wake of Eric Garner’s death turned their backs on the mayor as he delivered a eulogy for a fallen officer.
Progressives, meanwhile, decried his choices for police commissioner — all three were white men — and his defensive reaction to a police car charging through protesters in Brooklyn last year.
Others cite de Blasio’s tendency to focus on relatively minor issues, such as banning horse carriages, as distracting him from more pressing concerns like homelessness.
“He’s still talking about it,” Ken Frydman, a former aide to Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said of the horse carriage issue. “Rome was burning, and he fiddled with the smallest of small-bore issues.”
De Blasio’s handling of COVID has drawn mixed reviews. Even critics have praised him for it — the city has one of the highest vaccination rates in the nation and created a COVID testing infrastructure in relatively short order — but they point to stumbles on public safety, education and homelessness during the city’s COVID era as well.
“Did they do a good job on COVID? Yes,” said Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City. “Did they do a good job getting the city through COVID with a minimum of damage? That’s a different question. A lot of other things fell through the cracks.”
