Mayor Mike: Master of Competence
Posted by Josh Friedlander | 1 Comment
I hope Mike Bloomberg does run for President, because then we’ll get a full accounting of his progress as Mayor. It really just holds academic interest for me, but I don’t think Mike can lay claim to very much in the end. It took a true authoritarian like Rudy Giuliani to turn Times Square into Disney World. Bloomberg has been more adept at polishing the edges.
He’s stopped smoking in restaurants and bars, raised taxes on housing, raised the cost of riding in a cab, tried to foist an unwanted stadium on us, and presided over an extremely benign set of circumstances: a glut of cheap credit powering Wall Street and bringing in mammoth tax revenues, a residential real estate boom arising from said credit, and the emergence of hedge funds as a major force (helping to bump up midtown office prices as the largest aggregation of hedge fund assets are in midtown Manhattan).
I’m probably leaving out some other beneficial factors that were outside Mike’s control.
In the world of hedge funds, about which I write (and should be writing about now instead of posting this!), a good money manager is one who beats the return of the market and does so while taking on less risk than the market. In a regatta, you sail with the wind, and the boat that runs faster than the other boats, and also rocks less, is one to be emulated.
I’m not certain what Mike’s accomplishments have been outside of those we might have witnessed under any decent administrator. But maybe that’s Mike’s claim to fame: that he was decent. I just have trouble feeling a swell of pride over the competence of a billionaire who came to office with practically unlimited resources. Seems like the least he could do…
Tags: Bloomberg > Captain
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The mayor has certainly fallen into a barrel of, let’s say, good fortune when he started his first term.
Bloomberg inherited a city with rising property values and thriving brokerage firms that benefited from what is still an ongoing bull market.
The mayor clearly made the best of a rising tide by balancing the city’s budget on time (for the first time in years) and launching into a sustainable city campaign.
It should also be said that the mayor deserves a limited amount of credit. A lot of the heavy lifting involved with resurrecting the city from the depths of the Dinkins years was performed by Rudy Giuliani, the outgoing mayor and presidential hopeful with the odds of a snowball in Arizona.
Giuliani bears the brunt of the public backlash for Stalin-like steps toward metaphorically making the trains run on time. He initiated a crackdown on the homeless — having them herded into shelters and out of sight — by ordering police to hand out nuisance tickets. He also took on Times Square and cleaned up decaying neighborhoods throughout the city.
Some of the current Mayor’s initiatives are still works in progress that may still help or hurt his legacy.
Ongoing efforts to reform the public schools are still a subject of debate. The mayor claims high school graduation rates are increasing, but critics say he plays fast and loose with statistics that really mask overall dropout rates rising year after year.
In hindsight, I think Bloomberg will get high marks for good stewardship and presiding over what has been the most livable incarnation of New York in the city’s history. Few people bother to read nettlesome details of history. The roaring times of the post-Sept. 11 rebound will be remembered as a picnic in the sustainable city that New York is readily becoming. It’s really the economy.