Bloomberg’s New York was intensely friendly to rich developers. His city planning director, Standard Oil heir Amanda Burden,
stated the administration’s aspirations: “What I have tried to do, and think I have done, is create value for these developers, every single day of my term.”
Little-noticed zoning changes protected rich people’s neighborhoods from development and put poor neighborhoods up for grabs. Billionaires building luxury towers in New York City
pay almost nothing in property taxes, and
CityLab concluded of Bloomberg’s plan to lure as many billionaires as possible that “what Bloomberg saw as a way to provide for the welfare of New York looks more like one of the firmest expressions of inequality anywhere.”
CityLab writes that “the property-tax burden has shifted from owners to renters, and from the wealthier to the poorer.” Under pressure, Bloomberg introduced a “market-based” solution for affordable housing, but it
produced a pitifully small number of affordable units and “affordability” was often a joke, with units accessible only to those making more than the median income. Public housing was neglected, and “under Bloomberg, the city
stopped checking for lead paint in public housing apartments, a disastrous decision that endangered thousands of children.” Kate Albright-Hanna
describes the destructive effects of the Bloomberg philosophy for
City & State New York, and warns what would happen to the country if Bloombergism were enacted on an even larger scale:
New York City is under siege, vanishing, empty or already dead as a result of the “Bloomberg Way”—the concept of the mayor as CEO, businesses as clients, citizens as consumers, and the city as a product that’s branded and marketed. Bloomberg’s corporate worldview drained the color out of New York City—a sterile, relentless kind of destruction that dehumanized its victims with the logic of the market… Bloomberg invited global investors to knock down old brick buildings and erect glassy, lifeless towers of secrecy that housed the wealth of foreign oligarchs and kleptocrats.
For a deeper look at the sad destruction of New York’s culture and heritage that the Bloomberg years produced, see Jeremiah Moss’
book and
blog Vanishing New York (reviewed
here). Moss documents block by block, building by building, the eroding fabric of New York City culture, as beloved diners, dives, and bakeries are turned into banks and luxury goods stores after their rent is hiked from the thousands to the tens of thousands. Perhaps the ultimate expression of Bloombergism is
Hudson Yards, the lifeless complex of glass towers, an “
ultra-capitalist Forbidden City” where the poor are invisible.
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:
Like what the fukk are you talking about? If you want to run for a party, then shut the fukk up and play by their rules. End of story. Or run as an Independent. How you gonna say the “Establishment” (a divisive, accusatory and insidious term to use on your peers to begin with) should be scared when you need those people to get in 
