Cornell was so hungry for this spot that an army of Cornell alumni in the city were organized to rally for their team. Every day Cornell made another pitch to somebody—the business community, the cultural mavens, the media. When Cornell’s president, Dr. David Skorton, presented his university’s proposal to a few journalists in 2011, he said, “Our campus is absolutely electrified by this proposal.”
Some in the Stanford crowd back in California were not so thrilled about a new campus on the other side of the country, and shortly before the winner was announced, Stanford suddenly pulled out.14 City hall insiders said that Stanford had come up with an impressive proposal, but the school’s representatives worried about how hard it was to build anything in New York City. They wanted more assurances that the city would protect them from all kinds of New York City construction problems.
“From their perspective, it was kind of an experiment, and if it worked, they would be all in, and if it didn’t, they could pack up and go back home,” one insider said.15
Cornell, in contrast, promised they would be there to stay. Also, Cornell had a secret weapon. Very quietly—first in Beijing and then at the Cornell Club in Manhattan—top officials of Cornell met with leaders at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel’s MIT. They began working out a deal to win the Roosevelt Island contest together. They would be joint tenants, an unbeatable combination.
On December 19, 2011, almost exactly a year after announcing the contest, Michael Bloomberg revealed that Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology would build a $2 billion, eleven-acre tech campus designed “to make New York City home to the world’s most talented work force.” The city would provide the land with a ninety-nine-year lease and an option to buy the land at the end of that term for $1. Bloomberg’s city would also provide $100 million to cover capital costs to prepare the site.16 The billionaire club had helped considerably. A Cornell alumnus, Charles Feeney, who made billions of dollars with his Duty Free Shoppers Group, pitched in $350 million.17, 18 And Bloomberg himself soon produced $100 million for a building that was named for his two daughters. The entire project would be built to serve 2,500 students and 280 faculty members by 2043.19
When Bloomberg left office at the end of 2013, his genius university was still a muddy field on Roosevelt Island. Technion-Cornell had promised that the first phase would open four years later.
* * *
On a warm September day in 2017, with engineers still putting the finishing touches on two elaborate buildings and gardeners hastily tamping down bits of sod to make a green space, Cornell Tech invited the former mayor to the formal opening of the Roosevelt Island campus.
Under a large tent set up for the occasion, political all-stars from the city, the state, and Washington had arrived to celebrate. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney of New York City declared that this was finally “New York City’s MIT.” Governor Andrew Cuomo called the campus “an extraordinary, extraordinary, singular achievement,” comparing Bloomberg to Franklin Roosevelt, who “recognized the possibility of government—to make a difference in people’s lives,” Cuomo said. “He was not about theoretical change, or change in the abstract. He was about change in practical terms. FDR knew that holding office was not the real goal of an elected official, that pontification and mere advocacy are not the goals of an elected official.20
“Mike Bloomberg had the formula—vision plus confidence plus achievement equals progress,” Cuomo added, then pulling the ultimate Cuomo compliment, he compared Bloomberg to his own father, Mario Cuomo. He is “a progressive who gets things done.”
The room was tense and silent. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had offered a little faint praise for his predecessor, was uncommonly still, perhaps trying not to register the pointed comparisons. Bloomberg, however, now had his Silicon Island. And Technion-Cornell would cement his efforts to create the talent needed to turn New York into a haven for the tech world. Google would soon expand its presence in the city—purchasing the massive old Port Authority building in Chelsea and start adding more jobs, more real estate.21 Twitter had a natty office for about four hundred people in Manhattan that included a bar for lattes with your initials or your favorite rose. Microsoft had added people and office space. Another bonanza seemed on the way when Jeff Bezos announced plans to create a massive new facility for Amazon in Queens, adding 25,000 New York City workers to his gigantic company. That fizzled when local Queens politicians said no way. But even Amazon couldn’t deflate the city’s new technology sector. By 2018, the city boasted 320,000 tech workers with more to come. Another pillar of the city’s economy was slotting into place, and this one had Bloomberg’s name on it.
23
AS FOR THE OTHER HALF
“We’ve pioneered new ideas—some of them controversial, but all of them worth trying.”
—Bloomberg, 20131
Like other New Yorkers, Bloomberg had seen them. The shivering woman with a dog wrapped inside her coat. The scraggy man with his hand-lettered sign about trying to get back to Omaha. The paper or plastic cups that added their sad rattle to the city’s richest streets. But as New York’s billionaire mayor, a man who would soon own fourteen estates from New York to Bermuda to London to Florida, Bloomberg’s life was far removed from the desperate plight of the poor and what it meant to drag your children to a homeless shelter, night after dangerous night.
On a Sunday morning seven months after he took office, Bloomberg’s homeless commissioner, Linda Gibbs, wanted to show the mayor what poverty in his city really looked like. A seasoned expert in the city’s social services, Gibbs took him to the Emergency Assistance Unit in the Bronx, the dreaded EAU, as it was called. A grim building even by government standards, the EAU was the “front door” to the city’s homeless shelters, and it was the city’s version of a Victorian poorhouse. Homeless families came here by the dozens every day to ask for help. And because so many people were still in line when the EAU closed for the weekend, the building often became a makeshift dormitory where the homeless would stay until the offices opened again on Monday.
That August morning, the hallways were crowded with people sleeping on the floor, on benches designed to lack comfort. In a desperate search for relief, they were draped over their belongings and one another. And, by any Sunday, the place reeked—of garbage pails stuffed with used diapers and spoiled food.
The mayor was silent as he stepped over children and tried not to wake the exhausted people around them. A stoic by nature, his face still betrayed his dismay about the wretchedness he witnessed. As the tour ended, Bloomberg turned to Gibbs and said, “Okay, do what I understand you need to do.”2
When Michael Bloomberg took over city hall as the richest man in New York in 2002, advocates for the city’s 1.5 million poor and the 31,000 homeless worried that the new Republican mayor would have little time or understanding for those who were not rich or, at least, comfortable. Instead, he tried to calm the doubters, promising to find safer shelters, especially in dangerously hot or cold weather. Within two years, he even vowed to end chronic homelessness altogether in a decade.3 And by 2006, he predicted a “major reduction” in the number of poor people in his city within the next four years.4
His efforts to provide enough relief for the poor would eventually fall short as the gap between his wealthy class and the desperately needy only widened in New York and elsewhere. And Bloomberg’s most innovative attempts to fix the growing homeless problem for families failed as the family shelter population nearly doubled from about 31,000 to more than 50,0005 while he was in office. At the same time, the city’s public housing stock for about 600,000 people continued its steady deterioration—“sinking into the loam like a Mayan ruin,” as one critic put it.6
The businessman-engineer-mayor would push his staff to experiment with new methods for relieving poverty and homelessness, and his team would try a wide array of new programs—some sensible, some not. He committed nearly $8 billion to more affordable hous
ing, and focused on ways to help the poor get and keep jobs (“If you want to work, we want to help you,” one official explained).7 At the end of his three terms, Bloomberg’s administration announced they had added jobs for more than 400,000 people.8
He would help the poor save on taxes. He would create a program to help young black and Hispanic males that was so promising President Obama adopted it as a national model. He would demolish the old EAU and build a new intake center, and the street homeless would benefit as the city turned to programs that provided housing first, then added support later.9
Bloomberg kept many of the hard rules about giving out public assistance from his miserly predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, although he made it somewhat easier to apply. As he said early in his time as mayor, “We will not allow our city to recede to a culture of dependency.”10
The data mayor also adjusted the number of people on poverty upward to reflect the high cost of trying to survive in his city. As a result, instead of a poverty rate of 19.3 percent, according to the federal government, Bloomberg’s data showed that 21.3 percent of the city’s population were below the poverty line. He would make it easier to get food stamps, but require fingerprinting by applicants, an offensive prerequisite that was eventually stopped by the governor. And to try some of the most untested programs, he would use his own funds and the help of his rich friends to experiment.11 For all the effort, he did not end chronic homelessness in five years as he promised in 2004,12 and under his watch, there would not be the “major reduction” in poverty he had envisioned in his early years as mayor. Family homelessness would double, and the city’s poverty rate would remain at nearly 21 percent after he left office.13
Bloomberg’s scripted comments about the poor were thoughtful: “Our motive is the simple belief that every human being deserves better than to sleep on the streets,”14 he said, announcing one new effort in 2006.
His unscripted comments did not help shed his image as a cold and distant tycoon. When the city council wanted to demand a “living wage” for employees of any company doing business with the city, Bloomberg railed that the higher costs for companies would mean fewer jobs and that “the last time we had a big managed economy was the USSR and that didn’t work out so well.”15
And he fumed about the court rulings that required the city to provide shelter to any homeless New Yorker. “You can arrive in your 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,” he said as he prepared to leave office.16 An exaggeration, certainly, an outburst of frustration, undoubtedly, but it was another statement that added to the widespread view he had a lack of empathy for those who couldn’t get rich like him.
Overall, Bloomberg’s approach to fixing the problems of the poor and the homeless leaned toward his Republican side, and the anti-poverty community soon had its own way to describe Bloomberg’s method as a hand up more than a hand out. Critics accused Bloomberg of creating too many “small bore” solutions to poverty that failed to help the growing numbers of people without homes or enough money to live on. And, like his friends in the Republican Party, Bloomberg backed programs during his years as mayor that provided basics but not too much comfort for anyone using public benefits. Open-door policies would only provide a “perverse incentive” for more of these needy people to sign on for help, the most conservative critics of welfare and relief argued, mostly in private.
Others found that he should not be faulted for trying “some of the most innovative ideas” even if they failed, especially in dealing with homelessness. Philip Mangano, who served as the “homeless czar” for Presidents George W. Bush and briefly for Barack Obama, saw Bloomberg’s policies coming straight out of his business experience—the search for different solutions, the assessments of costs per person, per family, the search for hard data, not heartrending, individual stories. Bloomberg wanted to fix the problem, not manage it, and failure at one program meant you dropped that idea and tried something different.17
* * *
Some of the innovations for dealing with the homeless were the result of an urgent, daily scramble to find places for people to stay. An empty jail in the Bronx provided one early solution. It lasted three weeks. A special master panel quickly ruled that the walls contained lead, plus it was inhumane to store homeless people in a prison, even if it had a fresh coat of paint.18
Then there was a plan to use old cruise ships—“Operation House Boat” it was called. Bloomberg allowed Gibbs and her aides to take his private plane to the Bahamas to inspect three ships once used for tourists. The price was modest by city standards—about $40 million for a capacity of four hundred cabins, an estimated cost of $43 to $51 per person.19
But the cruise ship idea foundered as well. For one thing, the city was having trouble finding a bit of shoreline to secure these large, cumbersome vessels. The waterfront was becoming more valuable every year as the Bloomberg team emphasized a return to the shore for housing and parks. Gibbs located a spot in Brooklyn, but it was in a part of the borough that, at the time, was still desolate and thus possibly dangerous for families.
In the end, the fire department rejected homeless cruises. Imagine a fire, these officials argued. Think about an emergency, with families and children scrambling and panicked, trying to figure out how to get out of the lower decks and up—up, not down, and out—to safety. The cruise ships had disaster written all over them, the FDNY said, and Bloomberg finally agreed.20
At one point, the city would pay some of the homeless to leave town, to return to relatives elsewhere. The mayor and his staff provided a total of $500,000 for one-way tickets by bus, train, and airplane. Favorite destinations appeared to be Puerto Rico, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Florida. One family got the city to send them to Paris, at a cost of more than $6,300, about the same as keeping them in some homeless shelters for less than a few months.21
Bloomberg later explained that his one-way travel program saved the taxpayers of New York City an enormous amount of money. “The average cost is trivial,” he insisted, adding that most leave town by bus. According to city data at the time, 48 percent of the travel by families was actually by air. Even so, a one-way tourist seat was cheaper than a bed for a few days at one of the city’s homeless hotels.22
Bloomberg was mocked for trying to ship poor people out of his town, but it was not such an unusual idea. Other cities had tried it, possibly shipping their homeless back to New York. And eventually even Bloomberg’s antagonist and successor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, made the same old offer under a new name. Project Reconnect23 was designed to send the homeless back to their original home.
* * *
It is worth remembering that Mayor Bloomberg inherited a modern homeless crisis that really began in the mid-1970s. The city was then a frightening place. People were fleeing—to the suburbs, to other cities, to the South. Good jobs were scarce, real estate and tourism were not doing well, and city leaders were scrambling to ward off bankruptcy. At the same time, the numbers of people on the streets had expanded into a large, ragged army. Many came to the city after the state began closing hospitals for the mentally ill. At the same time, single-room-occupancy hotels were beginning to shut down, and the homeless could sleep on the streets legally after the Supreme Court decriminalized vagrancy.24
Soon “vagrants and panhandlers,” as the Times called them, were camping out in Central Park, under the Brooklyn Bridge, in Times Square and Herald Square, and in the rough streets and alleyways of the Bowery. The city shelters were notoriously dirty and dangerous, and in the late 1970s a young lawyer named Robert Hayes was so outraged about the “abominable” conditions for the homeless that he sued, arguing that the New York State Constitution, Article 17,25 required the city to provide shelter.
Mr. Hayes, who was twenty-six at the time, had never tried a case.26 He took the city to court on behalf of three homeless men (Callahan v. Carey), and to the surprise of most old cou
rt hands, he won. (Hayes found the lead plaintiff, Robert Callahan, on the streets of the Bowery. Despite his crucial role in the city’s history, Callahan, a chronic alcoholic, failed to find much relief from the courts, the city, or even Hayes. He died on those same hard streets in 1980.)27
The Callahan case, however, was the beginning of a series of court rulings that essentially assured the right to shelter in New York City. In 1982, Hayes also coestablished the Coalition for the Homeless, which had doggedly pursued that right to shelter in court and in the media for more than two decades by the time Bloomberg became mayor.
In his early years as mayor, Bloomberg’s hope was that the relentless court monitoring would stop. In what Bloomberg labeled a “tremendous victory” in the dealing with homeless issues, the court ceded its powers for two years in 2005 to a special master panel headed by the respected attorney John Feerick.28 It was a brief respite, and Bloomberg’s administration and advocates for the homeless were soon back in court, with the mayor complaining that the “litigants” would sue every time his people tried something new.
* * *
At the beginning of his second term, Bloomberg began a more intense effort to deal with the city’s poor. First, he brought in the experts. Two of New York’s most prominent African Americans—Geoffrey Canada, the charismatic charter school leader from Harlem, and Richard Parsons, then chief executive of Time Warner—ran a commission trying to find better ways to meet the needs of the city’s poor. They quickly determined that any new programs should concentrate on three areas affecting more than 700,000 people: the working poor, young adults sixteen to twenty-four, and families with children.
In 2006, the group created the Center for Economic Opportunity—or CEO, appropriately enough for a mogul mayor. It was designed to be an “innovation lab,” and over nearly seven years, Bloomberg’s CEO created more than sixty different programs to relieve poverty. Some worked, but Bloomberg also canceled seventeen programs that failed.29
The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg Page 29
