Mayor Bill de Blasio listed his management of the homelessness crisis as the biggest “disappointment” of his eight years running the Big Apple — but critics have a far longer list of failings from Hizzoner.
The mayor offered the response during a Friday morning appearance on cable network MSNBC’s breakfast chat show, “Morning Joe,” when asked by host Joe Scarborough what “do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment and what do you consider to be your biggest disappointment?”
“The thing I’ve struggled with — I’ve been honest about it, Joe — and we finally are making some profound progress, but it’s homelessness,” de Blasio said.
“I’m happy to say that after some absolute early misunderstandings and missteps on my part, that I’ve owned up to, we’ve found some strategies that are working much better to get people off the streets,” he claimed. “Our shelter population has gone down greatly, it’s much lower than when I took office.”
De Blasio said his biggest accomplishment was his universal pre-kindergarten program — which rolled out during his first year in office — and his recent efforts to expand the availability of child care and early education for three-year-olds.
Hizzoner offered the answer as he eyes a possible 2022 bid to unseat newly minted Gov. Kathy Hochul in a likely Democratic primary battle in June.
It’s just one aspect of his management of City Hall amid the coronavirus pandemic that’s come under sharp scrutiny as he eyes a possible run for higher office. Those include:
- The complex of city-run lockups on Rikers Island experienced a weeks-long operational meltdown that left staffers and lawmakers calling for state and federal intervention;
- Shootings and homicides are still running at nearly double their pre-pandemic rate;
- City streets recorded the highest level of traffic-related deaths in nearly a decade as enforcement plunged, despite de Blasio’s much-touted ‘Vision Zero’ initiative.
- And parents have loudly complained about poor communication and uncertainty in the lead-up to schools reopening last year and this year.
De Blasio’s answer on MSNBC echos a response that he provided to a similar question in 2018 as he traveled the country as he eyed a long-shot bid for the White House, which spectacularly imploded.
“The thing I am most frustrated with — and I have to say it’s a failure because we’re not where I wanted us to be — is on homelessness,” de Blasio told an audience at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, TX., on Sept. 28, 2018, when asked by a reporter from another newspaper what his biggest failure had been as mayor.
“I thought we were implementing some of the right policies and now look back and say we were missing pieces of the problem entirely, just weren’t seeing the whole picture and were too slow to make the adjustments that we had to make,” he added.
There were 45,544 people in city shelters on Sept. 28, the most recent day that figures are available for, which is down substantially from the all-time high of 61,415 in January 2019.
Experts and homelessness advocates agree that de Blasio inherited a mess as he came into office in 2014.
The city’s homelessness population had increased more than 70 percent under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg as rents soared across the city.
Then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s decision in 2011 to ax the state-funded Advantage housing subsidy program as part of ‘Great Recession’-era budget cuts helped fuel the crisis, too. A City Council report released in 2020 determined it put more than 8,000 families back into shelters.
But, they point out that the dramatic drop in the city’s shelter population that de Blasio referred to came amid the coronavirus pandemic, as state and federal moratoriums halted all evictions for more than a year. That, they say, finally allowed officials to make a dent in the backlog of families that needed permanent housing.
“The de Blasio administration inherited a homelessness crisis that was out of control,” said Councilman Stephen Levin (D-Brooklyn), who chairs the body’s committee that oversees the city’s homelessness agencies. “The dramatic drop has been due to the eviction moratorium.”
