The City Politic: David Freedlander

Bill de Blasio Did What New Yorkers Wanted So why does he leave office so unpopular?

HE SHOULD HAVE been a contender. As backbenchers and prattling senators piled into the 2020 race for president, Bill de Blasio entered as the manager of the nation’s largest city, overseeing a police force the size of a small army, a school system that had more children in it than the entire population of seven different states, and the successful response to not one but two infectious-disease outbreaks.

He had created early-childhood-education programs that served more than 100,000 children under the age of 5 each year, given paid family leave and higher wages to city workers, added or preserved 165,000 units of affordable housing, granted greater access to health care for the poor, imposed fair-scheduling requirements for fast-food workers, and kept the annual increases on rent-regulated apartments to a minimum.

De Blasio had won election twice, the first Democratic mayor to do so in 32 years, in the face of warnings that his election would herald a return to New York’s dark past: crime rising, followed by people leaving, followed by businesses leaving, followed by higher taxes to pay for their absence, followed by more people leaving.