De Blasio: Can a mayor reduce inequality?

New York City is now the front line in the war on inequality, said Michael Grynbaum in The New York Times. At his inauguration ceremony last week, the city’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, vowed to narrow the fast-growing gap between rich and poor. He pledged to build more affordable homes and raise taxes on the very wealthy to pay for universal prekindergarten classes. “When I said I would take dead aim at the ‘tale of two cities,’ I meant it,” he said to cheers. Resolving that division won’t be easy, said Alex Pareene in Salon.com. After 12 years of billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s policies favoring his fellow rich businessmen, New York is now “the least equal of all American cities.” Soaring rents of more than $3,000 a month and condo and co-op prices of more than $1 million have priced the middle class out of Manhattan. Clearly, it’s time “to focus on the New York that didn’t come out of the Bloomberg era better off.”

It’s absurd to think that de Blasio has the power “to reshape the city’s demography,” said Jim Epstein in TheDailyBeast.com. The state legislature and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will not let him raise taxes on the wealthy. The mayor’s scheme to build 200,000 affordable housing units can only happen if the city “gets a miraculous windfall of federal tax credit allocations”—unlikely in this austere era. If de Blasio really wants to reduce inequality, said Rich Lowry in the New York Post, he should promote greater personal responsibility. Research shows that people who “graduate from high school, get a job, and get married before having children” are much more likely to escape poverty. But it’s easier for the leftist mayor to blame the rich for society’s ills, rather than tell his supporters to take charge of their lives.

No matter what de Blasio does, New York will “continue to get more unequal,” said John Cassidy in NewYorker.com. As a global hub for the finance and information industries, the city teems with highly paid executives, financial traders, and foreign investors. Reversing rising inequality has “proved beyond any national politician, let alone a municipal leader.” As President Obama could have told de Blasio, promising change is a lot easier than delivering it.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up