Hey New York, Michael Bloomerg Is Not Your Daddy

By Phyllis Eckhaus, AlterNet. Posted June 20, 2009.

It's primal. We'd all love a powerful daddy to protect us and ward off looming dangers.

That yearning made Michael Bloomberg mayor. A long shot before 9/11, he seemed a cartoon, the Billionaire Who Would Be Mayor, until traumatized New Yorkers turned to him for rescue.

And Mayor Bloomberg has been in many ways a good daddy. He has offered a welcome voice of reason and racial tolerance, in contrast to the choler of Rudy Giuliani. The mayor does what often feels like the right thing: banning cigarettes, transfats and traffic from Times Square. His grand-scale projects promise fun, from new baseball stadiums to an ill-fated attempt to host the 2012 Olympics in New York. (The Games have gone to London.)

Bloomberg's critics sound shrill, their vehemence ill-suited to a good man of good will. What is the problem?

The problem is us, we who defer to Daddy. Father Knows Best government may make for comfort and efficiency, but it eats away at the capacity for self-government, damping even the appetite for information that might spur questions of authority.

If Bloomberg has a predecessor, it's not any previous mayor. It's [urban planner] Robert Moses, the model of benevolent paternalism who rebuilt the city according to his personal vision of the public good. As Moses accumulated power and used it for public works, a grateful New York stood by. For decades, Moses' plans were adopted with little debate or recognition of their downside, the displacement of working-class communities by highways. Will we remember the Bloomberg Era with similar ambivalence and regret?

Like Moses, Bloomberg has set in motion a building boom. By rezoning one-sixth of the city and encouraging real estate development, he has presided over dramatic changes in neighborhoods and street life. Longtime small businesses have seen their rents skyrocket. One illustrative example, Nusraty Afghan Imports, a Village shop of fewer than 900 square feet, was supplanted by the Brooks Brothers subsidiary Black Fleece in August, when the monthly rent shot up sixfold to $45,000.

Affordable housing has been lost to predatory investors. Between 2004 and 2008, 90,000 affordable-housing units were bought by speculators. Ross Perot once described the "giant sucking sound" of American jobs disappearing into a global maw. In Bloomberg's New York, that giant sucking sound is the disappearance of small businesses and affordable housing.

Where Moses gained power by stealth, Bloomberg openly makes use of his fortune to advance his agenda and chill opposition. Rep. Anthony Weiner dropped out of the mayoral race, despairing of substantive debate in the face of the mayor's expected $80 million campaign -- more than 10 times the amount available to a candidate accepting public financing. Wealth and incumbency give the mayor the kind of monopoly advantage antitrust laws were invented to prevent.

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Phyllis Eckhaus has written for In These Times, The Nation and other publications. Trained as a lawyer and social scientist, she was a senior policy analyst for former New York City Comptroller Elizabeth Holtzman.

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