Bloomberg would claim among his successes the programs to “promote financial literacy” and help families get more than $100 million in tax relief.30 The city would help with tax preparation and guide taxpayers in ways to get child care tax credits or earned income tax credits. Another successful program helped support accelerated study programs for low-income students at City University of New York. Still another provided what the city called a “non-stigmatized” environment in schools for sex education and help for mental health problems.
The failures included a parks department effort to get young people to help plant trees—employment opportunities in this area had “dwindled.” And the most famous experiment that failed was Bloomberg’s own effort to try Mexico’s successful anti-poverty program called Oportunidades.31 The program in Mexico provided nearly 25 million poor people with cash rewards when they made certain their children went to school (about $61 a month) or checked in with the local health clinic.32 After a visit to Mexico City in April 2007, where Bloomberg could enjoy speaking his distinctive Spanish, the results looked promising enough to try in New York.
Bloomberg and his wealthy friends put up $40 million for a new program called Opportunity NYC—Family Rewards. The rewards included $100 for taking the child to a dentist, a little more every month for holding down a full-time job. If your child passed the difficult Regents Exams in high school, the family earned a hefty $600. A few families did well, like one single mother in Brooklyn who collected more than $7,610 in two years.33 But only $14 million had been paid out to 2,400 families before the program was canceled in 2010.
Unlike in Mexico, New Yorkers had access to other social services—food stamps, shelter, other assistance. Plus, the rewards program was simply too complex for most people whose lives were already overloaded with complexities. Gibbs, by then the deputy mayor for health and human services, acknowledged that there were “too many things, too many details, more to manage in the lives of burdened, busy households,” she said. “Big lesson for the future? Got to make it a lot more simple.”34
Perhaps more important for Bloomberg personally, he publicly acknowledged that paying the poor to improve their own lives in New York City had not been enough of a success to start using the public’s money. That did not mean the project failed altogether.
“In order to find what works in solving difficult problems, you must have the freedom to try new things with the understanding that some things might fail while others succeed,” Bloomberg explained at one point.35 He would continue to talk about how the rich—instead of the taxpayers—could provide a financial cushion for governments (and timid politicians) by paying for untested programs.
In other ways, Bloomberg made good use of his contacts with the city’s wealthy, many of whom agreed to contribute to his riskier projects. One of Bloomberg’s most important anti-poverty programs began over lunch with George Soros. To the billionaire Soros, Bloomberg provided disturbing data: the poverty rate among black and Hispanic youths aged sixteen to twenty-four was 50 percent higher than Asians or whites from the same age group. Their unemployment rate was 60 percent higher, and they were the ones most likely to die from gun violence on the streets of the city.36
As two of the world’s richest men talked about the city’s poor, Bloomberg tried to convince Soros to put in $30 million to help start the Young Men’s Initiative. The initiative would help black and Hispanic youths in the city to stay in school and get jobs, the mayor argued. Soros agreed that it was a worthy idea, with one caveat. He would put in $30 million if Bloomberg matched it. Expensive lunch, Bloomberg would joke later.37 Begun in 2011 with those two gigantic checks and at least $70 million from the city, the initiative focused on 315,000 New Yorkers who were “disproportionately undereducated, incarcerated and unemployed,” as the Times put it.38
The ambitious plan included nine hundred paid mentors and new satellite offices for probation officers to make it easier for some of these youths to check in, as required. It was designed to help the participants get driver’s licenses or other identification. It would help with internships and even jobs. President Barack Obama so admired the Bloomberg system that in February 2014, he used many of its ideas for a five-year $200 million federal program called My Brother’s Keeper.
If Bloomberg wanted to find new solutions, he also wanted data, which, as it turned out, could be extremely controversial. A program called HomeBase, designed to keep people in their homes as long as possible, started in 2004 in six of the hardest-hit communities of New York. It seemed to be working, so in 2008 Bloomberg’s homeless experts hired a consultant to run the numbers. The company tracked one group that got the city’s full support from HomeBase services, and a control group of about 150 who were on their own. To almost no one’s surprise, those with services did far better than those without.
But what about the control group—about 150 people stumbling along without the extra help? The Daily News and a slew of city politicians suddenly were outraged that two hundred families (it became more, it seemed, every day) were being denied aid. They were like “rats in a lab experiment,” as one homeless advocate put it. Scott Stringer, then the Manhattan Borough president, called it a “bone-headed experiment.” Melissa Mark-Viverito, a member of the city council at the time, said, “Just when you think you’ve heard it all. It’s inhumane. How cold-hearted and callous.”39
Bloomberg did not blink. “In the end,” he said, “we are only going to spend money on things that work, so we have to find out what works.”40
As he had already made clear when he announced a new program in 2006, “The status quo, the familiar pattern, the shopworn methods of the past: these must be abandoned if we are to finally end homelessness in America. We must recognize that the ‘tried and true’ has actually far too often been the tried and failed.”41
* * *
Bloomberg’s real hope of ending chronic homelessness began to slip away in his first term when his administration stopped allowing homeless people to jump to the head of a long line of those trying to get federal housing.42 One reason given for this new policy was that some city officials suspected that people were gaming the system. Some families were claiming to be homeless in a tragic attempt to get public housing, they argued. Linda Gibbs, who would eventually become Bloomberg’s deputy mayor in charge of a multitude of issues involving the poor, said at one point, “We don’t want people to think that the best way to get housing is to bundle their children up and take them to the [homeless intake center].”43
Bloomberg later observed that “you never know what motivates people. One theory is that some people have been coming into the homeless system, the shelter system, in order to qualify for a program that helps you move out of the homeless system”44 and into more permanent housing. Homeless advocates were outraged that the city would make it harder for such desperate people to find places to live.
Bloomberg and Gibbs tried other ways to deal with the growing homeless problem, and eventually the city adopted a program called Advantage.45 Advantage participants got a rental subsidy for one or two years. It was not a perfect fix. There were reports of confusion about details among city workers, and some participants had to pay the landlord on the side to keep their apartments.46 But Advantage was better than nothing, as long as it lasted.
In 2011, Governor Andrew Cuomo made a disastrous decision to cancel the state’s share of the money for the city’s Advantage program. That cancellation caused a loss in matching federal dollars as well. While the city was pleading with Cuomo to stay with the program, city staff had seen encouraging numbers from Advantage. On a budget of $148 million a year, the city had helped 10,000 clients and only 12 percent of them had returned to the streets.47
Bloomberg’s city budget had been contributing $48 million a year, but, in February 2012, he ended the Advantage program. Without state or federal help, the city’s full cost would rise to $148 million. Bloomberg decided the city could not afford it, especially after his budg
et advisers argued that they should not take on another burden that belonged in Albany or Washington.
The loss of the Advantage program only added to the city’s homeless problems. By the time Bloomberg left office, the number of homeless people on the streets had declined, but the total number including families had risen to 53,173, compared to 31,000 when he arrived in 2002.48 If Bloomberg and his housing team tried and failed, it should be noted that the numbers kept going up when the progressive mayor Bill de Blasio took over. By 2019, six years after Bloomberg had left office, there were nearly 64,000 homeless people49 in the city, the highest levels since the Great Depression.
The gap between rich and poor grew during the Bloomberg years, but the alarming inequality was not confined to New York City. The increasing wealth of the few and the struggle to survive for everyone else were part of a national, even global, crisis. Economists and political theorists gave their reasons—corporate greed, a shift to the tech world, diminished unions, outsourcing of secure old manufacturing jobs, the rising cost of rent and health care, just to name a few.
Bloomberg never moved away from his central theme that the best defense against poverty was a good education and a good job, and as mayor, he emphasized programs—including in schools—to help New Yorkers find work and employers to find workers. For all his efforts to improve schools and training and find thousands of people jobs, the poverty rate in the city barely changed. In 2006, 20 percent of New Yorkers were struggling below the poverty line, according to the city’s tougher poverty analyses. When he left office and after the city was still fighting the remains of the Great Recession of 2008, the rate was 20.7 percent.50
As he often did, Bloomberg found a nugget of good news in the data: New York was doing better than other big cities. In November 2013, six weeks before he left office, Bloomberg released his version of his record. Of the twenty largest cities in the country, all saw poverty rates increase since the 2000 census except New York City, where the poverty rate was essentially flat.51 Using that same measure, Philadelphia’s poverty rate increased 17 percent, Chicago and Houston 22 percent, Memphis 37 percent, and Indianapolis 88 percent.52 As he gave out those numbers, Bloomberg’s staff released the speech he was preparing to give as he received an award for his anti-poverty efforts from the Children’s Aid Society. It would be his final statement on poverty as mayor, and he would tout his record on education, health care, crime control, housing, tax assistance, and social services. And he would sum up his administration’s fight on poverty this way: “We’ve pioneered new ideas—some of them controversial, but all of them worth trying.”53
24
OVERTIME
“The overturning of term limits—when this happens in another country, we call this a coup.”
—Fran Lebowitz1
“Term limits unfairly limit voters’ choices.”
—New York Times editorial2
Bloomberg had said repeatedly that eight years as mayor were enough. New York’s voters had twice voted to limit city politicians to two four-year terms in office. It was also a personal rule for Bloomberg that you could overstay your welcome, outlive your usefulness. He said he was outraged in 2005 when city council members considered extending their own to terms from two to three—from eight years to twelve. They had been there too long, he decided. “There’s no organization that I know that would put somebody in charge for a long period of time. You always want turnover and change. Eight years is great. You learn for four years. You can do for four years.”3
It turned out that there was one exception to his diktat—Bloomberg himself. As the red digital clock at the city hall bull pen began to click down in his second term, the mayor became restless. He clearly loved running the city, or, as his friend Michael Steinhardt said of that time, “I think he likes hearing himself talk publicly.”4 Returning to his private world would be a retreat. He was not ready to leave public life, mothball the tux, or cede the microphone that he had learned to master enough for people to resist mocking his delivery.
One option seemed particularly tantalizing. He could run for the only public job more important than mayor of New York. After eight years of President George W. Bush, the nation would pick his successor in 2008. Bloomberg’s name was on the media’s lists of potential candidates, and for months, his staff did their best to keep him there. But where would he land in the political landscape? He was a former Democrat who became a Republican because the Democratic field for mayor was crowded in 2001. But he was a Republican who approved of gay marriage and a woman’s right to choose an abortion, and he was a very unorthodox Jew who often said religion should be a private matter. That pretty well ruled out the Republican roster and had already earned him their tag as a RINO, or Republican in Name Only. His proud capitalist credentials and his attachment to the hard rules of the marketplace would make him suspect as a Democrat.
There was a third option. He would now shift to the lonely center in American politics. In June 2007, he filed papers to change his party affiliation. He would be an independent. “I believe this brings my affiliation into alignment with how I have led and will continue to lead our city,” he said.5
Bloomberg, the self-described nonpolitician, had long advocated an end to New York City partisanship. He wanted the mayor to be nonpartisan. Even though he contributed lavishly to the political parties over the years (mainly to state Republicans and the Independence Party in New York during this period), he campaigned for a charter amendment in 2003 to convert the city to nonpartisan elections, and New Yorkers soundly rejected a nonpartisan mayor by a vote of more than two to one.6
The announcement of his switch to the independent center quickly ignited speculation that he was really planning a third-party run for the presidency in 2008, but after enjoying the attention, he looked at the data for third-party candidates. In an op-ed for the Times on February 28, 2008, the mayor argued the case for an outsider who could be independent of both increasingly strident parties. But he made it clear it wouldn’t be him: “I listened carefully to those who encouraged me to run, but I am not—and will not be—a candidate for President.”7
* * *
Bloomberg had his own plan B, as always. In this case, he wanted to shake up politics on a more local level. He had asked a few people about running to replace him as mayor in 2009—Richard Parsons, a moderate Republican then chairman of Time Warner, was a favorite.8 But when his choices said no, he knew a candidate who really wanted the job—himself. When he told his top political advisers, including Patti Harris, Kevin Sheekey, and Ed Skyler, they were stunned and solidly against it. For one thing, it was an abrupt reversal of his own very-public record in favor of term limits. Moreover, he had established himself as a man of his word, and falling from such a lofty perch would tarnish his credibility, or worse.
Clyde Haberman, the city columnist at the New York Times, was one of the journalists who dug out the details of Bloomberg’s protests when the city council had tried earlier to add four more years. “This is an outrage,” Bloomberg had said, promising at the time to veto any effort to change the law. “The people themselves have twice explicitly voted for term limits,” he added. “We cannot ignore their will. They want the openness new faces bring. And they will get it. We will not go back.”9 Plus, he had benefited from those limits when the state legislature refused to grant Rudolph Giuliani more time in office after September 11.
More worrying for his advisers, a third term was historically jinxed. Top staff members are exhausted and many simply leave. Mistakes creep in, and good reputations wither all too easily. Corruption got so bad in the third term of Mayor Koch10 that he confessed (in his videotaped obituary for the Times) that he had considered suicide. People are also tired of your face; some even grew weary of the later sanctified Fiorello La Guardia, who served three terms from 1933 to 1945.
The decision to consider a third term was classic Bloomberg, who admired stubbornness, especially his own. And when he wanted something, he us
ually reached for it and took the necessary risks to get it. For his aides to warn him that this was a mistake was in itself a mistake, as it turned out. It simply hardened his resolve. Plus, why couldn’t he change his mind about something? Even term limits.
It would not be simple, overturning the city’s law on term limits. Some city experts suggested giving the voters another chance to vote on the issue after New Yorkers had already voted in 1993 and 1996 that term limits were a good thing for the city government. But polls showed that another referendum probably would not turn out his way.11 Plus there was an easier option. Instead of a referendum, the city council could simply pass a bill to add a third term for him and—this was crucial—for themselves. And he would, of course, sign it into law.
As the mayor began to pitch his plan for four extra years, the business community was desperate to have him there. After some vigorous internal debate, the city’s most powerful business group, the Partnership for New York City, welcomed a third term for a fellow financier. Even Donald Trump, then a mere real estate mogul, offered his support. Two terms for mayor was “a terrible idea, an artificial barrier,”12 he huffed as encouragement.
Rupert Murdoch quickly offered the support of his local tabloid, the New York Post. Mort Zuckerman, who owned the Daily News, agreed as well. Both tabloids even ran the same headline, “Run, Mike, Run.”
The New York Times? That would be more difficult. Bloomberg complained that Arthur Sulzberger, then publisher of the Times, had agreed that the paper would support his third-term bid, “then they killed me every single day.”13 What Bloomberg didn’t get at that point was that Sulzberger would promise support only from the editorial team, which he controlled and which did, after a little skepticism, support a third term. Sulzberger would not tell the news reporters how or what to write.
The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg Page 30