Harvard Business SchoolRunning a city is one of the most complex jobs on the planet. Over the next four years we will bring over 300 mayors, and up to 400 of their senior aides, through a curriculum that sharpens the skills they need to run a 21st-century city.
The new program was created in partnership between Bloomberg Philanthropies, Harvard Business School, and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Helping mayors do their job - The Boston GlobeIssues that people care deeply about - their safety, their job prospects, their health, their schools, and their pocketbooks - are often shaped largely by local policies. As more and more people around the world live in cities - nearly…
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As many as 300 mayors and 400 aides are expected to participate over the…
Editorial
12 Years of Mayor Bloomberg
By
THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: December 28, 2013
96 Comments
When he walked into the mayor’s office 12 years ago, businessman and
billionaire Michael Bloomberg took charge of a damaged city. The World
Trade Center was a windblown construction site, barely cleared after the
attacks on Sept. 11. Tourists were afraid to come to the city;
residents were afraid to stay. The budget was a disaster, $3 billion to
$5 billion in the red. In a
modest speech
at an intentionally modest inauguration, Mr. Bloomberg nevertheless
pledged to rebuild and renew New York and to keep it “the capital of the
free world.”
Was the departing mayor of New York City a public health innovator or a “nanny state” scold?
As he leaves office this week, Mr. Bloomberg has, in many ways,
fulfilled that promise. New York is once again a thriving, appealing
city where, Mr. Bloomberg boasts, more people are moving in than out.
More than 54 million tourists, the most ever, crowded the streets in
2013. The crime rate is down, the transportation system is more
efficient, the environment is cleaner. He leaves
a $2.4 billion budget surplus, which could give the next mayor, Bill de Blasio, some flexibility in his negotiations with the unions.
Yet as Mr. de Blasio’s election showed, opportunity and prosperity have
been unevenly distributed. The homeless population has grown, and for a
great many others, the paychecks have been too small, the rents too
high. And in perhaps his worst mistake — authorizing a police practice
found unconstitutional by a federal court — Mr. Bloomberg and Police
Commissioner Raymond Kelly humiliated and alienated black and Hispanic
communities by having stop-and-frisk turn into a generalized method of
harassing law-abiding citizens.
On the plus side, one of his underappreciated accomplishments was to
make public service a valued vocation for a new group of urban experts.
Despite the occasional mistake, he hired mostly top-notch professionals
without political pedigrees, and challenged them to try new ideas.
With their help, he recaptured mayoral control of the schools, and with
it full responsibility for their performance. He rezoned almost half the
city, hoping to turn (and in some cases actually turning) industrial
deserts into sites for skyscrapers or residential housing — among them
Hunter’s Point South, with thousands of new affordable units, in Queens;
the Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s West Side (plus a new subway extension
to get people there); and the Greenpoint-Williamsburg complex in
Brooklyn.
He created a healthier city, where smokers are now taboo in many public
and private spaces, where calorie counts are publicized and where trans
fats are forbidden. He opened 800 acres of outdoor space, much of it
along the city’s shorelines, expanded bike lanes to cover more than 600
miles and added a fleet of Citi bikes for tourists and commuters. He
fought to reduce greenhouse gases, approved a balanced plan to dispose
of the city’s enormous waste stream, and, after initially rejecting
recycling as too costly, became a strong advocate of it. Using private
funds, including his own, he helped create new parks like the High Line
and the new greenway on Governors Island. After Hurricane Sandy, he
began updating building codes and created a long-range plan to help
defend the city against future storms.
The mayor’s team helped him in less dramatic but still useful ways.
There’s a new green apple taxi fleet for the outer boroughs and broad
pedestrian-friendly plazas on Times Square. He made it possible for a
splendid new high-tech university campus to be built on Roosevelt
Island. He established the 311 telephone number to help people with
routine problems like malfunctioning traffic lights, noise complaints
and questions about trash pickup on snowy days.
A master of numbers, Mr. Bloomberg displayed few political skills. His
unscripted comments, especially about the poor, can range from
thoughtless to heartless.
Mr. Bloomberg insists that crime has declined in part because of
stop-and-frisk, but crime has also declined in other cities that did not
make it a practice to stop law-abiding people. Between 2004 and 2012,
the police made an estimated 4.4 million stops seeking illegal weapons.
Half of all people stopped were frisked, but only 1.5 percent of frisks
found weapons, and only 12 percent of all stops resulted in any type of
summons or arrest. In August, a federal district judge ruled that this
indiscriminate use of stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional. Mr. de Blasio
has said he will not go forward with an appeal of that ruling.
Mr. Bloomberg’s efforts to modernize the city payroll became a scandal. By the end of the
investigation,
eight people were convicted of cheating the city out of millions of
dollars. And his donations to political parties to gain favor and ballot
lines were an embarrassment, though not illegal.
The increase in the homeless population on his watch was not entirely
his doing; both Albany and Washington pulled the plug on necessary
programs. But Mr. Bloomberg aggravated matters by canceling a sound
public housing strategy, thus sending more people to the streets and to
homeless shelters. And while he can hardly be faulted for encouraging
greater investment, many New Yorkers — not least Mr. de Blasio — felt
that he unduly favored the banking and real estate interests and did not
do nearly enough to help the working poor and those at the bottom.
Over all, however, New York is in better shape than when he became
mayor. As Citizen Bloomberg moves on to private life, and takes on
various causes like gun control, immigration reform, climate change and
healthier cities, we can only wish him well.
