He was arguably worse than Giuliani because he continued his racist policing but added a bunch of nanny state shyt.
I also think it was Bloomberg who started the hypergentrification of NYC. Compare the rent prices in 2002 to 2014. Granted, it's not all because of him of course, but he likely deserves some blame.
He was enormously responsible:
"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."
I feel like this campaign of his might be for another political agenda down the line unrelated to becoming president.
face on