When it came to the most important speech of his campaign for mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio’s timing couldn’t have been worse. On May 30th, at the New School, the candidate sketched a powerful picture of the issue that he wanted to put at the center of the race: the city’s “inequality crisis.” “Right now, as we’re gathered this morning, one New Yorker is rushing past an attended desk in the lobby of a majestic skyscraper,” de Blasio began. “A few miles away, a single mother is also rushing, holding her two young children by the hands as they hurry down the steps of the subway entrance…” The first New Yorker is thinking about how to profit from the bull market in stocks; the second is trying to figure out how to pay her grocery bill.
De Blasio described New York’s rising inequality in terms that were not only personal but also analytical: the number of luxury apartments being built, soaring C.E.O. pay, declining middle-class incomes (the city’s middle class isn’t just shrinking, he said; it’s “in danger of disappearing”), and the stark fact that almost half the city’s residents live in poverty, or very nearly in it. He mentioned a New Yorker infographic showing the neighborhood-by-neighborhood income extremes that commuters pass through as they ride the 2 train.
De Blasio had some answers, too—the most ambitious proposals of any candidate in the race. These included an income-tax increase for New Yorkers making more than five hundred thousand dollars a year, which would pay for universal pre-K education and after-school programs for kids in middle school; two hundred thousand new units of affordable housing (currently, people can remain on the waiting list for public housing in New York for years); and tax incentives that are directed away from big development projects and toward small neighborhood businesses and industries. He also talked about preparing the city’s students for technology jobs and ending the police department’s stop-and-frisk program—a practice that, as a judge ruled Monday, has violated New Yorkers’ constitutional rights.
It was a far-reaching speech, making its case in both economic and moral terms, describing a city—or, in de Blasio’s somewhat predictable phrase, “two cities”—that just about every resident with some level of awareness is familiar with, likely takes for granted, and perhaps tunes out. De Blasio was trying to move inequality out of the realm of loud street noise—to make New Yorkers think about it, and not as an unpleasant fact of metropolitan life but as an immense problem that must be addressed.
A week before de Blasio’s speech at the New School, the former congressman Anthony Weiner jumped into the mayoral race. A few embarrassing things had happened as he made his way toward the decision, and those very things—plus Weiner’s talent at attention-getting, and the public’s willingness to comply—insured that hardly anyone knew that de Blasio had given such a speech, or that he existed at all. The press did its part in not informing the voters. (Mea culpa.)
Now Weiner is disappearing, and the race, ahead of the primary on September 10th, which will cull a crowded field, has started to get a little more serious, and de Blasio’s ideas on the inequality crisis are receiving some of the attention they deserve. How will this serve him in the final weeks?
New York’s political pros can figure out all the angles: the union angle (de Blasio has one big endorsement but has kept his distance from others and has managed to antagonize the teachers); the race angle (de Blasio is married to a black woman, and their mixed-race teen-age son is featured vouching for his father in de Blasio’s first TV ad, but the former comptroller Bill Thompson is the candidate of color among the contenders); the gender and sexual-orientation angles (Christine Quinn, the City Council Speaker, is trying to make history as New York’s first woman and first openly lesbian mayor, while hovering close to Mayor Bloomberg as the centrist in the race); and what’s left of the Weiner angle.
But there’s another angle, one that’s a little harder to talk about in liberal circles. When I mentioned de Blasio’s speech to a New Yorker who generally votes Republican, he said, “Yeah, and New York will end up like Detroit”: tax the rich, give to the poor and the mayor’s favored constituents, drive away successful industries like banking, bankrupt the city. He didn’t say, “He has a very nineteen-sixties, nineteen-seventies vision for the city.” That was what Howard Wolfson, a New York deputy mayor, said to the Times, adding, “If you prefer the version of the city that existed then, he’s your guy.” And it’s what plenty of New Yorkers might think, including some who live near de Blasio in Park Slope.
The Bloomberg years have been very good ones for people who can afford to live in Park Slope and places like it. Crime in high-income neighborhoods is infinitesimal. The subway that takes de Blasio’s guy to the majestic skyscraper is relatively clean, orderly, and reliable. The food choices are dizzyingly various and excellent, and there’s an artisanal shop on every block. Farmers’ markets spring up on Saturday morning, near newly painted bike lanes and refurbished playgrounds and swimming pools for the kids. Parental contributions keep the local public schools in chalk, music teachers, and “sustainable education”; and, if that isn’t good enough, private-school choices abound. Yes, life is ridiculously expensive and inconvenient—the frigid dawn lineup that Sunday in February for Carmelo the Science Fellow!—but Bloomberg’s New York is a city that works extremely well if you make somewhere in the six figures. If you do, you might well find yourself thinking, I get the inequality thing, I like what de Blasio’s saying—but is he going to mess everything up?
Implicit in this question is the idea that New York can’t work extremely well for everyone, that it’s something of an I-win-you-lose, zero-sum game here, and if you start undoing a few of the Bloomberg policies that have benefitted prosperous New Yorkers, or at least pulling and poking at them here and there, then everything is going to start ripping open and fall apart. The unions will get too strong, the poor will get too demanding, the tax base will erode, the cops will go on the take, and the subways will start to bear early warning signs of graffiti. You don’t have to be a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute to know that there’s a long way for the city to fall.
Of course, there’s another view: that the rampant inequality that characterizes every aspect of New York life is not just a moral blight on our era but also, ultimately, a threat to New York’s economic viability and social peace. According to this view, the theme of de Blasio’s speech should be the foundation of debate and discussion in the last weeks of the Democratic primary—better late than never—and in the fall’s general election, whoever gets the nominations. De Blasio’s chance of becoming the next mayor depends in part on whether voters, including sympathetic liberals, see in him a politician with the courage to face the city’s biggest, hardest problem, or the beginning of the end of a golden age. Better to ask yourself the question than pretend that it doesn’t exist.
Photograph by Spencer Platt/Getty.