Is New York Still a ‘Tale of Two Cities’?

In his final weeks in office, Mayor Bill de Blasio has sought to cement his legacy, arguing that he has accomplished what he set out to do when he first ran for mayor in 2013: reduce inequality in New York City.

There is some evidence to support this. His signature accomplishment, creating a prekindergarten-for-all program, set the stage for a “3K-for-all” expansion in 2017. Currently, about 96,000 children are enrolled in both programs. The mayor has also pointed to the city’s poverty rate, which fell before the pandemic to roughly 18 percent in 2019, from 20.5 percent in 2013.

“We know there was a huge transfer of wealth,” Mr. de Blasio recently told reporters. “I’m a believer in redistribution of wealth. It happened to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.”

Experts say his legacy is more complicated. Mr. de Blasio ran for mayor vowing to fix the inequality that had created a “tale of two cities,” and his policies often did not live up to that rhetoric.

Mr. de Blasio, who is considering running for governor in 2022 and declined a request for an interview, made progress on key issues like bringing down the poverty level and building affordable housing, but the pandemic was catastrophic for poor New Yorkers. When the virus was at its worst in New York, Black and Latino people were dying from it at twice the rate as white people — a disparity that the mayor acknowledged was a reflection of long-held inequities in access to health care. The unemployment rate soared to 20 percent, and the poverty level likely rose again.

The mayor also failed to address longstanding inequities facing the transit system and segregated schools, and said that his greatest failure was his response to the homelessness crisis.

There were certainly wins that improved the lives of working-class New Yorkers — many of them outlined in a new 12-page report by the city called “The de Blasio Years: The Tale of a More Equal City,” including pushing for a $15 minimum wage, paid sick leave, rent freezes and municipal IDs for undocumented immigrants. The city delivered more than 200 million meals to New Yorkers during the height of the pandemic.

His most lasting accomplishment may be his creation of universal prekindergarten, a popular program that could serve as a national model for the Biden administration.

Porshia Rogers, who lives in public housing in Queens and works at a nonprofit, recalled how relieved she was when her daughter Paije secured a free 3-K spot this year. She said that it was difficult to afford $800 per month on child care.

“I knew that once she turned three, I would at least have some type of break,” she said. “When the mayor announced 3-K for all, I was like, thank you, God.”

Mr. de Blasio’s ascension to mayor was viewed by Democrats as a chance to reset the city’s trajectory to the left, after 20 years of being led by Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican, and Michael R. Bloomberg, who was first elected as a Republican and later changed parties.

In the 2013 Democratic mayoral primary, Mr. de Blasio drew a sharp contrast to Mr. Bloomberg, vowing to undo the policies that he said had led New York to become a “tale of two cities.” He then followed through on his pledge to end discriminatory police stops against Black and Latino men, and created universal prekindergarten to help close educational gaps.

But the mayor had to be pushed by city leaders when it came to other initiatives, including closing the Rikers Island jail complex, offering half-price MetroCards to poor New Yorkers, and providing deeper levels of affordability in his housing plan.

Wealthy New Yorkers certainly continued to prosper during the de Blasio years — the number of billionaires in the city jumped to 99, second in the world to Beijing, according to Forbes — and Mr. de Blasio’s attempt to secure a tax on millionaires or their second homes failed in Albany, where the mayor lacked strong allies.

By 2019, the city’s poverty rate had dropped, but the Gini index — the primary U.S. census figure that measures income inequality — had not budged. It has remained flat since 2013 at a rate that is worse than other major American cities like Los Angeles and Chicago.

“There has been an explosion of wealth in New York City, but it hasn’t trickled down,” said David R. Jones, president of the Community Service Society of New York, an antipoverty nonprofit.

The next mayor, Eric Adams, will have to navigate a series of complex issues left unresolved by Mr. de Blasio. Mr. Adams grew up in poverty in southeast Queens and says that addressing inequality is a priority. But he also promised a closer relationship with the city’s elites.

Mr. Adams might be better served by improving on Mr. de Blasio’s relationship with state lawmakers and the governor. Mr. de Blasio fought constantly with former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo — over subway funding, the response to the pandemic, public housing, the homeless crisis and even whether to euthanize a deer.

Even with Mr. de Blasio’s first-year success in getting prekindergarten approved, he was forced to accept state funding instead of a tax on the wealthy. Mr. Cuomo often had the upper hand in their confrontations, and the city suffered.

Some former allies grew disillusioned. Mr. de Blasio waited until late in his second term to phase out the gifted and talented program for elementary schools, and to open supervised drug injection sites. A plan to create 100,000 jobs that paid $50,000 or more faced criticism for not doing enough to include New Yorkers in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

Bertha Lewis, president of the Black Institute, who helped Mr. de Blasio win over progressives during the 2013 Democratic primary for mayor, said it became difficult to defend Mr. de Blasio because he failed to act on key issues. His allies wanted the all-hands on deck approach that the mayor had used to win prekindergarten to confront other issues like public housing but Mr. de Blasio often seemed unwilling to risk the political capital to do so.

Ms. Lewis called universal prekindergarten “an incredible accomplishment,” but said that the program alone was not enough to declare victory against inequality.

“How long are you going to ride that surfboard?” she said.

James Parrott, an economist with the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, said Mr. de Blasio does not get enough credit for “actively using policy to actually reduce poverty,” including instituting other labor protections like settling union contracts.

Workers in the bottom half of the economy saw a 15 percent increase in wage share from 2013 to 2019, while the rest of the country held steady, according to Mr. Parrott’s analysis of data from the Independent Budget Office.

The discount MetroCard proposal seemed to fit squarely within Mr. de Blasio’s left-wing rhetoric. Mr. Jones pitched the idea to the mayor, and Mr. de Blasio liked it so much that he called Mr. Jones and said he was going to appoint him to the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to help see it through.

“Almost immediately after that, he began moon-walking away from it,” Mr. Jones said.

Mr. de Blasio unsuccessfully argued that Mr. Cuomo should pay for the program since he ran the subway. At the same time, the mayor announced significant city funding for a heavily subsidized ferry system that is used mostly by affluent, white New Yorkers.

“If you’re able to provided a subsidized ferry system for middle and upper class people, very few of whom are people of color, what’s so difficult about providing almost the same amount of money to the very poor?” Mr. Jones said.

The City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, convinced the mayor to add it to the city budget in 2018; more than 260,000 New Yorkers have since enrolled. “It’s been incredibly popular, and it’s putting hundreds of dollars in poor people’s pockets,” Mr. Johnson said.

On the homelessness crisis, Mr. de Blasio has said that it took him too long to fully understand the problem. The number of single adults living in shelters has risen, and Mr. de Blasio received criticism for moving thousands of homeless people out of hotel rooms and back into barrackslike dorm shelters during the pandemic.

“This is an area where we didn’t see all the solutions in the beginning — I’m very honest about that,” the mayor told reporters recently.

Shams DaBaron, one of the homeless men living at the Lucerne hotel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side last year, said that the city’s shelters were inhumane and Mr. de Blasio did not focus enough on creating permanent housing.

“Those places are warehouses — they have no services on site and they’re havens for drugs and other activities that are not healthy for human beings,” he said. “That is part of the mayor’s legacy — not having compassion for homeless populations.”