I’m one of those people who sometimes doesn’t know what he thinks until he starts writing. It was different with Bloomberg. From the moment he said if the city council overturned term limits, that he would run again, I knew he’d be on the ballot and I knew what I thought about it. I really did.

All the stuff about the fight to get them to overturn term limits was silly. You don’t have to be an insider to understand Christine Quinn and the gang. As for the Republican and Independence Party bosses who gave him their ballot line, the only issue was how much.

I don’t blame any of them. You’ve got to pay the rent and feed the kids. These days, except for the mega rich who are feeding egos and libidos (Not all of them; I like Corzine, for example.), that’s what politics is about.

Is there anyone in that crowd who is employable outside of politics? Well, there are some, but not many.

What I didn’t know was whether Weiner would drop out or how badly Thompson’s campaign would be run. Weiner made a mistake but it was understandable. He didn’t want to repeat Andrew Cuomo’s 2002 resignation in his first run for governor. Recall how Cuomo dropped out, leaving the field to H. Carl McCall, the first Democratic gubernatorial nominee. Cuomo was still on the Liberal Party line, but he didn’t campaign.

It was the coup de grace for the party, which didn’t get the requisite 50,000 votes to qualify for the ballot in the next statewide election. As that piece of political real estate had already been sliced, diced and sold to Rudy Giuliani, nobody but a few old timers missed it. I’m sure Weiner understood that a Democratic primary, not only against Thompson but against the New York Times, would have damaged his career. Too bad. He might have won.

Maybe the take away from all this — if you didn’t know it already — is never believe a word you read in the New York Times, not about the Middle East (remember Judith Miller), and certainly not about New York politics, at least not in the news section. Krugman and most of the other columnists are excellent. Their opinions are worth reading. And you can trust the sports section, at least the scores. For the rest of it, you’d better find a blogger or two.

Unless it’s signed by someone else, anything you read in this space from here on in, will be written by Mike Dang. My wife and I are going to San Miguel for a couple of weeks and then I’m hoping to restart www.hacksandflacks.org. Mike and I are talking about it, but we’ve got to figure out the money.

Thanks for any attention you might have paid to what we’ve been reporting and for the kind words some of you have written. They meant a lot to us.

- Neil Fabricant

Returns Via NY1:

Purnick went on to deliver a history lesson on the last fifty years of mayoral elections in which only two incumbents, Beame and Dinkins, three if you count Koch’s try for a fourth term, won reelection. New Yorkers, she opined, are “pragmatic, even complacent, when their city is not in anguish.” She wondered why anyone would even bother to run against the man who is managing our “stable” city so well.

Finally, she would have much preferred the mayor not to have spent all that money so New Yorkers could feel “as though he was asking for their votes rather than buying them.”

How we wish these people would be taken away in the back of carts, not for beheading, of course; we’re opposed to capital punishment. Maybe just a year on, say, a hospital worker’s salary. We’ll skip the rant and get right to the point: Purnick’s political chops are as withered as her investment advice is silly. Bloomberg knows what he’s doing. Without having bought and bullied his way onto the ballot and into a third term, there is no way her host and benefactor would have had a chance at another term. (I write before the results, but I assume he’s won.) He had to spend every nickel.

If it weren’t so devastating to the most vulnerable among us, I would be pleased to have him rather than a successor saddled with cleaning up the mess he’s left us. But by that reasoning, I would have been rooting for another term for Bush or McCain. So I bit my lip and voted for Thompson.

That Purnick doesn’t seem to understand any of it is simply dumbfounding until I recall the opening pages of her Bloomberg book:

The first time I met Mike Bloomberg was in the late 1990s at a dinner party in his Manhattan town house. It was a typical New York gathering of the moneyed and the prominent, thrown together for an evening of polite conversation that goes in one ear and out the other.

The legendary I.F. Stone, whose self-published newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly taught me how to read a newspaper, didn’t socialize with the people he wrote about. “I made no claims to inside stuff. I tried to give information which could be documented, so the reader could check it for himself.”

Purnick attends too many dinner parties with the rich, the celebrated, and the vacuous. She has internalized their world view. Of course, the polite conversation goes in one ear and out the other—there’s nothing there to impede the journey.

As Mayor Michael Bloomberg approached the end of his first term in 2004 with his eye toward re-election in 2005, the administration was able to momentarily turn away from the city’s economic turmoil. Bloomberg began re-examining some of New York’s social service policies, putting fighting poverty and homelessness at the top of his list.

In June 2004, Bloomberg announced an ambitious five-year plan called “Uniting for Solutions Beyond Shelter” with the goal of tackling the complex questions of homelessness — particularly ending chronic homelessness within 10 years — and cutting the homeless population by two-thirds. “At its heart, this new plan aims to replace the city’s over-reliance on shelter with innovative, cost-effective interventions that solve homelessness — and to make visible headway in reducing homelessness on the streets and in shelters,” said the mayor.

To be sure, there have been bumps along the way: controversial moves offering homeless individuals one-way tickets out-of-town or enforcing a never utilized Pataki-era state law charging homeless families for their shelter stay. There also was an extremely unpopular attempt to move a Manhattan intake shelter to Brooklyn. And, at a recent Working Families Party mayoral forum, media reports quoted Bloomberg as saying New York’s homeless find shelters “a lot more attractive” than “permanent living situations.”

But more significantly, Bloomberg’s lofty goals have not materialized. In fact, rather than cutting the population by two-thirds, the administration has seen homelessness increase substantially.

[See the rest of the story at Gotham Gazette]

As we know, the city didn’t bother to enforce the J-51 law at Independence Plaza North, under which every apartment should have been registered as stabilized before HPD permitted the development to leave Mitchell Lama. Instead, nearly two years after IPN left the Mitchell Lama program, after numerous in-person meetings between HPD’s commissioner and Gluck’s lawyers (to which the tenants were not invited), HPD accepted back Gluck’s repayment of the post-Mitchell Lama J-51 benefits, giving Gluck a fig leaf to defend against what had by then become the tenants’ lawsuit for rent stabilized status. Part of the logic here is that, to Bloomberg, it is better to have the federal taxpayer pay for vouchers that protect only the poorest tenants, while the landlord gets market rents, than for the City to actually enforce a law that mandates affordable rents for everyone.

Our Follow Up:

We discovered long after the negotiations had ended that HPD held several meetings with Gluck or his lawyers. Martin Siroka, one of Gluck’s lawyers, was a former HPD lawyer. Here is one such episode.

Unbeknownst to the tenants, before the negotiations with Gluck even took place, Julie Walpert, the assistant commissioner for Mitchell-Lama, froze the waiting list for incoming tenants as well as the internal transfer lists. Walpert simply overrode the federal regulations that required Gluck to continue renting the apartments and making internal transfers to eligible tenants for as long as the complex was in the program. Rather than get too deeply into the weeds on it, suffice to say that this had an important adverse effect on the tenants’ position and gave Gluck a great economic benefit.

With the obvious purpose of rationalizing her unusual action, Walpert wrote a formal letter to Siroka in which she explained that she was freezing the lists for the benefit of the tenants.

Here is an excerpt from her December 19, 2003 letter to Siroka:
As you know, HPD does not permit a Mitchell-Lama housing company to stop renting apartments even when a buyout is imminent. However, the federal government only provides a waiver for up to one year for tenants who are over-housed to receive the enhanced voucher. Therefore, since HPD wants to ensure that the maximum number of tenants receives this voucher, HPD will waive its requirement to immediately rent up all available apartments. The sole purpose of this waiver is to accommodate the maximum number of moves and to avoid displacement of income-eligible tenants…

The freeze meant that there would be no incoming tenants who would get apartments at Mitchell-Lama rents. Nor would tenants who were entitled to transfers to larger apartments because of increased family size get them. Why give them larger apartments or allow new, non-voucher tenants to move into Independence Plaza? Once he was out of the program Gluck would get market rents for all voucher tenants and rent the vacant apartments at market rents. Only the already occupied, non-voucher apartments would bring him less than market rents.

Gluck had made a concession during the negotiations that he would pay the difference in rent for tenants who couldn’t transfer down to smaller apartments within the one-year period. He made it with knowledge that there would be no such tenants.

Walpert’s letter to Siroka said that she wanted him to know – not us – that she was freezing the lists for our benefit: we are making this exception as an accommodation to the tenants living at the development so that they are not displaced as a result of a federal policy…

The rationale was a sham. If tenants on the internal transfer list who qualified for larger apartments had been allowed to move up, as federal regulations required, those who had to move down could have occupied the apartments they vacated. In addition, Walpert knew that a substantial number of apartments were already vacant (we had complained in writing that the owner was illegally warehousing apartments) and that many other tenants were being evicted for having paid cash under the table to the previous management for getting into the apartments. HPD had known about them for years and Gluck had been given a list. (We offered to produce the management employee who had received the cash and called for an investigation before the transfer to Gluck. The request was denied.)

When all the vacant apartments were added up, it was clear that there was no need to freeze the lists. Had we known about the deal that Walpert and Siroka cooked up, they would not have been able to go forward with it. That’s why we didn’t know about it. And I had thanked Gluck for the concession and made one of my own. It was one of the many sleazy things we had to deal with when dealing with HPD generally and Walpert specifically.

The political principle embedded in that episode and in so many others that we had experienced on the way to these negotiations is: Not about us without us. Unless the reason is compelling, whenever a politician or bureaucrat professes to be doing something for, or negotiating on behalf of, tenants or other constituents, the fact that the alleged beneficiaries aren’t invited to attend, comment, or in this case even know about the meeting means that something else is going on. Walpert’s decision and her memorandum to Siroka written to protect herself was just bullshit.

- Neil Fabricant

Tomorrow is Election Day! You will probably not vote, because there are no contested races for anything important in 90% of the nation. But if you are a New Yorker, we have one message: don’t vote for Michael Bloomberg.

You know those idiots who don’t know anything about politics but think it sounds smart to say “I am a social liberal and an economic conservative?” Bloomberg is the candidate for them, if they love a liberal nanny state and a conservative religious fervor for the eternal goodness of private enterprise.

For all the talk of Bloomberg the power-player who at least gets things done without worrying about the unions and special interests, he’s been unable to win any political battle with anyone he couldn’t literally buy off. Like Sheldon Silver, who (thankfully) killed the West Side Stadium and (annoyingly) ended all that “Congestion Pricing” talk. And those unions and special interests were just bought off, which worked fine back when the boom whose end Bloomberg never saw coming was in full swing.

And about that stadium: what the fuck was that? And the Olympics thing? After bitching about Giuliani’s disgraceful subsidizing of the fucking Yankees, Bloomberg both turns around completely on that particular issue and attempts to build the fucking Jets a stadium, so that New York could get an Olympics that it did not want. And that failed, and everyone forgot about it. Meanwhile: 40,000 people in shelters! Bloomberg could personally buy every single one of those people an apartment in a vacant Williamsburg luxury condo building and still have enough left over to bribe a City Council member into supporting his fifth term.

And those luxury Williamsbug condo buildings, by the way, that stand vacant? Yes, well, that was part of this brilliant plan to utilize rezoning to spur the free market (which always allocates resources more efficiently than anything else in the history of civilization but sometimes it needs government help, like with tax breaks and stuff) to create affordable housing all over the waterfront. This did not work, as developers decided to just not bother to build all those affordable housing units they were supposed to build. More than 2,200 promised new affordable apartments in Williamsburg and Greenpoint have turned out to be 768, 20 percent of which are renovations of apartments that were already affordable. There are lots more of these stories.

His record on housing, like his record on nearly everything having to do with the outer boroughs and poverty and human beings who make less than $100,000 a year, has been a ridiculous disgrace. His entire philosophy of development solving everything turned out to be precisely, 100% wrong, and suddenly the city itself was driving the real estate boom, driving up land prices to absurd levels across the boroughs and tearing down neighborhoods only to replace them with vacant lots and half-filled cheaply built hideous high-rises once the bottom fell out of the City Hall-inflated market. But hey, we got the High Line and 311! So you can sleep in that fancy park while you call 311 asking if there is room in a shelter because you can no longer afford your home.

Eight years into the Bloomberg administration, Ground Zero is a still a hole that everyone continues fighting about.

The MTA has raised fares while cutting service (without actually cutting service, officially—it’s just that whatever line you happen to ride is suddenly experiencing a whole lot of track work every single goddamn weekend).

The Gays: still not married! And also a lot of them are getting beaten up on the streets these days for some reason?

Bloomberg is also the beneficiary of the most friendly news coverage of any big city mayor in the nation. Easily. It helps that, you know, he is a media mogul, himself, and he is good, close, personal friends with the three publishers who run the newspapers that went after each one of his predecessors for shit they’ve let slide under this mayor, because they know he’s a good, decent guy, at heart, and the only one who can Fix New York, because of his Money.

Can you imagine how the Post would’ve blown up if David Dinkins lied about taking the Subway to work every day? The Daily News response to discovering that John Lindsay flew to Bermuda every weekend?

Let’s talk about the cops, for a second: they are still operating under Giuliani levels of complete disregard for the law. They are getting drunk and running people over and shooting unarmed black people and sodomizing people in subway stations. The Civilian Complaint Review Board has become a joke, unless your case gets a lot of publicity. There’s obviously no accountability, whatsoever, and no attempt to recruit and train more cops from the communities they actually police. The NYPD remains, primarily, the home of roided-out white people from outside the city with a great deal of contempt for civil liberties. The Mayor always sounds properly upset when some of them rape someone, but he’s never done a damn thing to rein them in or change the culture.

What he has done is Keep Us Safe by never once giving a shit about Civil Liberties. The cops stop and frisk thousands more people every year, your 4th Amendment rights do not apply in the Subway system, and expensive and completely ineffective new rings of cameras are going up across Manhattan.

Bloomberg deserves to be run out of town on an inadequately funded public rail line for the 2004 GOP convention alone. Remember that ridiculous farce? No, of course not, no one does, besides the thousands of people improperly spied on, arrested, harassed, and detained by the NYPD. All of this was completely illegal. No heads rolled.

One more special bonus factoid: New York leads the world in marijuana arrests! Specifically, marijuana arrests of black people!

And he is personally a jerk. He is a thin-skinned, unpleasant, sanctimonious asshole. His company is being sued for a culture of sexual discrimination that plaintiffs say Bloomberg himself contributed to. He is a tremendous dick to reporters whenever he gets cranky. He is fucking race-baiting with Rudy Giuliani again, because why not?

He has been a shitty mayor and he does not deserve the support of anyone who claims to be a liberal. Though what all of his most destructive missteps as mayor have in common is that they do not in any way upset or inconvenience the well-off self-professed liberals who support him. Besides maybe a couple Critical Mass riders arrested in illegal sweeps. (Though he sure does like bike lanes, so it’s a wash, right?)

We cannot encourage you to vote for the Democrat in the race, because even we still aren’t sure if we’ll go for him or the much more delightful Billy Talen. Just don’t fucking vote for Michael Bloomberg.

Send an email to Alex Pareene, the author of this post, at alexp@gawker.com

Tom Tomorrow is one of the country’s greatest social critics. I read this book to my soon-to-be four-year old grandson. He enjoyed it and he got it! If only adult New Yorkers understood as much — our readers excluded of course. Then again, he hasn’t been exposed to the relentless spin factory. We recommend it. Can’t start strengthening our kids’ immune systems soon enough.

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