Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral platform is full of sweeping proposals: public grocery stores, rent freezes, and major new spending. The tenure of former mayor and fellow arch-progressive Bill de Blasio in City Hall shows how quickly big plans like these can collide with structural limits, flawed policy design, and unplanned events.
In January 2014, de Blasio inherited Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New York. Crime stood at historic lows, the population was growing, and the economy had rebounded from the 2008 crash faster than much of the country. But the gains were uneven. Inequality ranked among the highest in the nation, homelessness had reached record levels, and the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practice had become a national controversy.
De Blasio’s “Tale of Two Cities” campaign for the mayoralty was built on big plans: fight inequality, fund universal pre-K with a millionaire’s tax, end stop-and-frisk, and launch the most ambitious affordable-housing program in city history. Eight years later, de Blasio’s second term had been consumed by rising crime, the Covid-19 pandemic, and protests that exposed his weak leadership…