New York City’s decline in four mayoral administrations

Successfully managing a modern polity as large and complex as New York City is no mean feat. Interest groups compete for resources. Existential challenges suddenly emerge that were on no one’s mind when voters went to the polls (the 9/11 attacks, the current migrant crisis), and issues both large and small are relentlessly sensationalized, exacerbated by local tabloid media and the nation’s focus on happenings in its largest city.  

These all serve to make New York City, as it was once famously characterized, “ungovernable.”

The difficulty in attributing outcomes to specific policy initiatives, setting priorities among affordability, public safety, economic opportunity, quality of life, etc., and analyzing policy feedback loops all pose challenges to determining whom and what to credit for success — or to blame for failure.

One heuristic for gauging the success of a mayoral administration is to assess the atmospherics surrounding key policy initiatives: specifically, what they convey about a mayor’s competence and the public mood during a given mayoralty. Often, a single impression or initiative stands out and fits within a larger trend across mayoral administrations.

Rudolph Giuliani took office in 1994 with a clear mandate to reduce crime and establish that New York City could, indeed, be governed. The annual murder rate was 1,946 in 1993, the year prior to his taking office; by 2001, the final year of his administration, it had fallen to 649 and would continue to drop thereafter.

When Giuliani became mayor, the city had separate police forces for public housing and the transit system alongside the New York City Police Department, which he successfully merged. While consolidating police bureaucracies may have seemed like inside baseball to some, it sent a message that institutional prerogatives and interests would be subordinated to his administration’s overarching goal — the efficient and effective delivery of public safety.

One of the more memorable initiatives of the Michael Bloomberg administration (2002-2013) was his creation in 2003 of a “311” service for city residents, a government non-emergency hotline available to New Yorkers around the clock. Building on the success of the Giuliani administration in reducing crime, Bloomberg focused on “quality of life” issues and moved up Maslow’s hierarchy, in keeping with his stated view that New York City is a “luxury product,” and that city services should match the tangible and intangible costs of living in the city.

Bill De Blasio, mayor from 2014 to 2021, is arguably the least competent (and certainly among the least loved) New York City mayors in recent memory. Yet, he too, like Bloomberg, benefited from the momentum of preceding administrations and, along with criminal justice and police reform initiatives (among other controversial policies), maintained a focus on quality of life. The most memorable and visible manifestation of this was his announcement of the Vision Zero initiative in 2014, a plan to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries in the city by 2024.

While certainly a worthy goal, it was perhaps unwise to make it so visible a priority for an administration already letting slip the various advances made by its predecessors.

While it is perhaps too early in the administration of Mayor Eric Adams to offer a fair assessment, the exigencies of the migrant crisis have done him no favors. Still, his performance to date assessed against his predecessor’s Vision Zero plan offers at least some preliminary insight.

Vision Zero’s goals have no realistic prospect of being met, as electric bicycles used by delivery services and, increasingly, unregistered mopeds operated by (among others) illegal immigrants continue to proliferate, to the peril of pedestrians throughout the city. 

Indeed, Mayor Adams recently said the illegal migrant issue more broadly “will destroy New York City.” The NYPD’s belated attempts at cracking down on unregistered gas-powered mopeds suggest nothing so much as a finger in a dike holding back a far larger flood.

Using opinion polls, media coverage and policy post-mortems are all well and good for considering the success or failure of a given administration. But voters rarely remember statistics; they retain how they felt during a given period. New York City’s rise and fall in the last 30 years can be summed up neatly in these few signal actions taken by its leaders.

Richard Shinder is the managing partner of Theatine Partners, a financial consultancy.