Unsurprisingly, Bloomberg’s tenure saw an explosion in both rent prices and homelessness. By the end of Bloomberg’s
time, “half of renting households paid more than 30 percent of their income in rent and utilities.” Commercial rents soared too, and beloved mom ‘n’ pop stores that had been in the city for decades closed by the hundreds. (Moss’ blog is a heartbreaking catalog of these.) The St. Vincent’s Hospital was shuttered
and turned into luxury condos, just one of nearly
20 hospital closures between 2000 and 2013.
At the end, nearly one of every three children in the city resided in poverty, and the “record-high shelter population includes more than 22,000 homeless children.” The New York City Coalition For The Homeless
has been absolutely scathing, noting that “the number of homeless people in NYC has soared to all-time record highs under Bloomberg; and the number of poor New Yorkers has also risen and remains at alarming levels.”
Bloomberg’s administration required homeless people to
prove to shelters that they had no other options. In fact, he was critical of the very notion of a “right to shelter,” and said that shelters might be clogged with rich people taking advantage of the system: “You can arrive in your private jet at Kennedy Airport, take a private limousine and go straight to the shelter system and walk in the door and we’ve got to give you shelter.” (Because lots of oligarchs in limos are trying to check in to the New York City homeless shelters.) As the Coalition for the Homeless noted, “he sought to repeal longstanding court orders obligating the City to provide emergency shelter for homeless children and adults,”and “
urged New Yorkers to overturn these fundamental legal protections for homeless people, saying: ‘New York City taxpayers have just gotta go to call their representatives in Albany and say, ‘We ain’t gonna do this anymore.’’”
Bloomberg “even lobbied against a measure that sought to save city funds and prevent homelessness among disabled New Yorkers living with AIDS.” Bloomberg
also:
… chose to cut off homeless families from priority access to public housing apartments and Section 8 vouchers – permanent housing resources that had successfully helped move tens of thousands of homeless kids and families from shelters to stable housing under three previous mayoral administrations. They then replaced those programs with short-term subsidies that became a revolving door back to homelessness for thousands of families.
Former City Council chair Christine Quinn was blunt: “In a time of prosperity, he took aggressive steps from a policy perspective to hurt the homeless.” Bloomberg’s idea of a solution to homelessness was
giving them one-way bus tickets to get them out of the city. Today, Bloomberg insists that inequality is a top priority, but before his sudden transformation into a Democrat, Bloomberg said of
inequality that “that’s not a measure of something we should be ashamed of.” (Recall he specifically wanted billionaires to move to New York to increase the “income gap.”)
Asked about all this, Bloomberg alternated between pretending it wasn’t true and admitting he didn’t give a shyt. “
Nobody’s sleeping on the streets,” he said, though even if they were, he believed the shortage of housing was a “
good sign.” The Coalition for the Homeless says that, confronted with the problem he had caused, “the mayor and his aides responded with evasions, distortions, and a refusal to accept responsibility.” He had the audacity to “claim[] credit for the same legal right to shelter for homeless New Yorkers that he has fought aggressively to repeal!”
The human reality of this situation was documented well in a
New York Times profile of an 11-year-old Black girl named Dasani, constantly bouncing from bed to bed in the city. The
Times described how Bloomberg’s vision of a New York for billionaires had treated girls like Dasani as nonentities:
In the shadows of [Bloomberg’s “new gilded age”] it is Dasani’s population who have been left behind… With the economy growing in 2004, the Bloomberg administration adopted sweeping new policies intended to push the homeless to become more self-reliant. They would no longer get priority access to public housing and other programs, but would receive short-term help with rent. Poor people would be empowered, the mayor argued, and homelessness would decline. But the opposite happened. As rents steadily rose and low-income wages stagnated, chronically poor families like Dasani’s found themselves stuck in a shelter system with fewer exits. Families are now languishing there longer than ever — a development that Mr. Bloomberg explained by saying shelters offered “a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before.”
Asked to comment on Dasani’s story, Bloomberg said, “That’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky and some of us are not.” (God apparently being the one making New York City housing policy these days.) Asked whether he was concerned about the poor, he reiterated his usual line about how everything depends on benevolent businessmen like him, and then gave the classic billionaire’s line about how because there is air conditioning people should shut up and stop complaining that the rent is too high:
“When we grew up we didn’t have air-conditioning. Air-conditioning in the schools, the subways. Are you crazy? Now, by most of the world’s standards, you ain’t poor.”
Bloomberg’s approach to poor people is that he knows what is best for them, and that their job is to shut up and do what he says. He has even said that regressive taxes are good (regressiveness is “
the good thing about them”), because taxing the poor more makes them behave. Has called for fingerprinting
public housing residents and
food stamp recipients (making New York one of the only places in the country to do this). One could see this same mentality in his signature proposal, the “big soda” ban; big sodas are unhealthy, but Bloomberg thought more about how to control poor people’s decisions than how to improve their material conditions. In defending taxing the poor for their own good, he said he didn’t want to “
pander to these people.”
Bloomberg reserved his sympathy for bankers. As mayor, he
gave Goldman Sachs more than a billion dollars in tax breaks to build a headquarters in New York. Later he said Occupy Wall Street was unfairly targeting financial industry workers who were “
struggling to get by.” After all,
he said, “This is our industry. We’d appreciate it if someone recognized that this is our tax base.” He was scathing about the Obama administration’s effort to regulate banks after the financial crisis,
calling fines “outrageous” and suggesting that Wall Street insiders, rather than Congress, should be writing the laws, and has supported cutting the corporate tax rate. He called raising taxes on the rich “
about as dumb a policy as I can think of,” making his usual case that rich people give us everything, describing Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax as “
mean.” Bloomberg can be comically out of touch with working people; when the city was crippled by a blizzard he suggested residents use the free time to
take in a Broadway show.
. I've never seen a politician, not even Trump, who was so open about how much he favored rich people over the poor. (For sure Trump does it to an extreme too, but even his loose mouth isn't this open about it.)
