Mike Bloomberg Created A Housing Crisis in New York City. Don’t Let Him Become President.

When Mike Bloomberg began running for president in November of 2019, he emphasized that he had created “tens of thousands of affordable housing units so families could have a decent place to live” as Mayor of New York City. Clearly, Bloomberg’s claims of success in revitalizing affordable housing has resonated with some voters, as he has surged in presidential polls in recent weeks, and is now only polling below former Vice President Joe Biden and United States Senator Bernie Sanders.

While Mike Bloomberg’s claims of supporting and cultivating affordable housing in New York may sound attractive, they could not be further from the truth; Mike Bloomberg’s record on housing as mayor of New York almost entirely contradicts his claim that he improved the state of affordability in the city. Between 2002 and 2013, Mike Bloomberg oversaw one of the largest luxury development projects in the city’s history as his housing policies valued developers and real estate profits over the lives of everyday New Yorkers, accelerated the process of gentrification and displacement across the city, rapidly worsened the city’s homelessness crisis, and made renting unaffordable for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. These outcomes can be largely attributed to the trickle-down economic policies that shaped Bloomberg’s housing policies; he was much more interested in gaining the support of affluent real estate developers and large corporations than he was in gaining the support of working class New Yorkers.

Bloomberg’s desire to gain the support of wealthy real estate interests at the expense of working class New Yorkers most clearly shaped his decisions on neighborhood rezonings. Over the course of Bloomberg’s term, nearly 40 percent of the city’s landmass was rezoned, shepherding in an unprecedented amount of development, construction, and so called “revitalization” of neighborhoods that had been long ignored by the city. During the Bloomberg administration, New York City’s Department of Planning actively sought out to upzone many already-gentrifying and working-class neighborhoods, citing the neoclassical economic idea the construction of new rental units in a poorer region will reduce demand for low-cost units, and would eventually drive down average rents. However, this assumption proved to be incredibly untrue, as Bloomberg’s rezoning projects in low-income neighborhoods like West Harlem led to an increase in evictions, the shuttering of local businesses, and a 250% increase in asking rents between 1996 and 2006. Bloomberg’s now infamous 2005 Williamsburg rezoning had a similar effect; between 2000 and 2013, rents in the Brooklyn neighborhood increased by 69 percent, while the Latinx population declined by 27 percent, compared to a 10 percent increase city wide over the same time period. Thus, Bloomberg’s brutal housing policies clearly pushed many black and brown working-class tenants out of the neighborhoods they had called home for decades.

At the same time, these upzoning policies turned working-class neighborhoods into a playground for the developer class, as Bloomberg continued and expanded the practice of subsidizing real estate developers for constructing new units, regardless of whether or not they constructed any affordable housing. Despite the fact that Bloomberg’s upzoning policies were making rents more expensive for everyday New Yorkers, particularly in communities where there were low rates of ownership, Bloomberg continued to contribute to gentrification, actively encouraging developers to invest in quickly gentrifying neighborhoods by proposing well over 100 neighborhood rezonings during his tenure as mayor. Bloomberg incentivized luxury development in formerly industrial neighborhoods like Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Long Island City in Queens, where looming, sleek, and shiny luxury condominiums (that were deeply unaffordable to the mass majority of the neighborhood’s current population) began to dominate the skyline. For example, in the years following the infamous Williamsburg/Greenpoint rezoning, only nine apartments of low and middle-income housing were constructed, while countless new luxury units began to pop up all around the heart of the rezoned area. In addition, this had a truly adverse impact on the city’s rent stabilized stock, as rent regulated apartments were demolished to create new market rate units. This decreased the number of remaining units that were subject to New York’s rent regulation system, further increasing the city’s affordability crisis and leaving more and more tenants subject to the whims of abusive landlords. During Bloomberg’s term in Gracie Mansion, two-thirds of his appointments to the Real Estate Guidelines Board, or the body that determines the annual allowed rent hikes for rent-regulated apartments, have backgrounds in investment banking, finance, or the real estate industry, showing that Bloomberg did not necessarily have significant concern for the plight of rent regulated tenants in New York City, but especially in neighborhoods undergoing upzonings.

Ultimately, it is clear that Bloomberg’s administration cared more about building housing for the wealthy few rather than the cash-strapped many, as his team continually worked alongside major real estate developers in search of major profits to shape New York’s housing policy.

The rapid and destructive upzoning of once working class neighborhoods like Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Harlem, and Long Island City during Bloomberg’s 12 years in office is sharply contrasted by the downzoning that occurred in many white, upper class neighborhoods across the city. Downzoning is often a measure used to keep affluent neighborhoods costly, by restricting private development and therefore restricting new constructions. This measure often keeps immigrants, black and brown people, and working class folks out of so-called “selective” neighborhoods, like the Upper West Side in Manhattan. While Bloomberg was displacing tens of thousands of black and brown New Yorkers, pushing families closer and closer to homelessness through upzoning policies that led to rapid gentrification, he was also actively “preserving” white, affluent neighborhoods like Clinton Hill and Riverdale by restricting development in these areas. These zoning decisions ensured that working class New Yorkers of color would bear the burden of the housing crisis, while white, rich New Yorkers were able to ensure that their neighborhoods did not suffer from the challenges of mass development.

Mike Bloomberg often also pursued development that put undue burdens on working class New Yorkers; taxpayers bore the burden of tax-exempt development projects that Bloomberg pursued aggressively, such as Yankee Stadium, Citi Field, Atlantic Yards/Barclays Center, and most recently, Hudson Yards. These four projects alone received over 3.5 billion dollars in city funding; Yankee Stadium got $866 million in tax-exempt financing, Citi Field got $100 million, the Atlantic Yards/Barclays Center project got $205 million for infrastructure and other elements, and Hudson Yards got a $2.4 billion extension of the №7 subway line. So many of these development projects did nearly nothing to solve the housing crisis that already was wrecking the lives of so many New Yorkers; instead, they sought to improve or create urban amenities that brought little back to the communities they were located in. Communities like Flushing, Highbridge, and Downtown Brooklyn had much more immediate and dire needs, like accessible healthcare, high quality public schools, and truly affordable housing, that mass investment in sports stadiums was entirely unable to fix. Ultimately, black and brown working class New Yorkers not only faced the burden of displacement that ensued from Bloomberg’s manufactured gentrification of working class neighborhoods, but also faced the burden of much of the taxation required to finance these developments.

Perhaps worst of all, however, was Mike Bloomberg’s neoliberal approach to the city’s rapidly growing homeless crisis. In 2002, when Bloomberg took office, the city was already facing an unprecedented housing crisis. Homelessness was at an all time high in 2002, with over 40,000 New Yorkers struggling to find a safe place to sleep at night, but over Bloomberg’s 12 years in Gracie Mansion, this crisis only worsened. By 2013, when current Mayor Bill deBlasio was elected, homelessness had risen by a 20% margin, with over 10,000 additional New Yorkers losing their homes over the course of just twelve years. Additionally, by the end of Bloomberg’s term, over 22,000 children were living in the shelter system. This can be largely attributed to the Mayor’s embrace of programs to make the homeless “more self-reliant”, such as ending longstanding practice of prioritizing homeless families for federal housing vouchers, which enables households to pay landlords no more than 30 percent of their income in rent, with the federal government footing the rest of the bill. While housing vouchers are by no means a good housing policy, as they tend to restrict access to affordable housing to a small subsection of those who are in need, Bloomberg’s abrupt departure from this program had serious impacts on worsening conditions for homeless families. As rents continued to rise more rapidly than incomes, chronically housing insecure families became increasingly entrenched in the shelter system with fewer and fewer accessible exits, making more and more families permanently homeless across the city. Bloomberg’s mass gentrification rezoning plan only made this issue more severe, as families found themselves displaced from neighborhoods they had lived in for decades, and were left to get by in the shelter system.

Bloomberg also frequently vocalized opposition to one of the few protections that homeless New Yorkers had: the right to shelter. New York remains one of the few cities in the nation where the homeless have a right to a shelter bed at night, which is by no means a solution to the housing crisis. However, it does ensure that families have (at minimum) a roof over their heads at night, a protection few other urban cities offer. Bloomberg often tried to overturn this policy, unsuccessfully seeking changes in rules surrounding emergency shelter that would have left many homeless people without access to a bed in 2011, and frequently complained that people could arrive to New York in a “private jet at Kennedy Airport, take a private limousine and go straight to the shelter system and walk in the door and we’ve got to give you shelter.” By frequently advocating for the repeal of one of the few protections that homeless New Yorkers were able to maintain, he all too often threatened New Yorkers’ ability to access shelter each night, an absolutely despicable position to take on the homelessness crisis.

Just seven years after Mike Bloomberg moved out of Gracie Mansion, he has selected to run for President of the United States as a Democrat, and has become a shockingly formidable contender for the nomination. At the same time, the housing crisis across our city and nation has gotten exponentially worse over the past several years. To afford a one bedroom home at the national average fair market rent, a minimum wage worker needs to work 99 hours per week for all 52 weeks of the year, or approximately two and a half full-time jobs, making fair, dignified, and accessible housing inaccessible for a great percentage of the population. In addition, the monthly cost of a modest one bedroom apartment is greater than an SSI recipient’s entire income in 220 housing markets across 40 states and the District of Columbia, making housing especially inaccessible for low income disabled folks. While we undoubtedly need a national rent control standard to lighten the burden of rent-regulated tenants, Mike Bloomberg has sought to address the national housing crisis through a large housing voucher program, which is an incredibly weak way to address these issues. First of all, housing subsidies are means tested programs that will never be able to fully meet the need of all low income tenants in the United States. In addition, in the absence of strong national rent control standards, vouchers help to line the pocket of landlords. Since vouchers reduce the cost of housing so significantly for low-income tenants, they have no incentive to move based on the costs. Ultimately, this just gives landlords of these units an incentive to continually increase rent.

Based on Mike Bloomberg’s failed housing record as Mayor of New York City and his bound to fail plans for housing as a presidential candidate, it is clear that Bloomberg is both a nightmare for the state of housing in our city and nation. He didn’t successfully create units of affordable housing for low-income people in New York; he turned our vibrant city into an increasingly affluent playground for the wealthy, real estate developers, landlords, and luxury tenants. To ensure that our entire country does not head in the same direction, we must vote against Mayor Bloomberg in the presidential primary to ensure that families are not pushed to homelessness across the nation.

Housing is a human right.