Following the Johns Hopkins public health creed of saving lives by the millions, Bloomberg gave to combat the deadly issues of the day. Beginning with millions of dollars to fight tobacco use (“even Beijing is now smoke free,” he boasted in 2016, after the city banned indoor smoking).13, 14 He added financial assaults on obesity and guns. He tried to cut traffic deaths around the world by funding such basic changes as pedestrian paths in Ghana or seat belt laws in Shanghai. He fought accidental drowning in Bangladesh and helped provide basic medical care in Africa.
One program for the East African nation of Tanzania trained high school students to do emergency C-sections and appendectomies. It was the kind of gamble most politicians would avoid—the downside being far too disastrous if some teenager accidentally killed a patient. Not Bloomberg, who explained it this way: “These high school graduates, how can they do an operation? It turns out they’re relatively simple. Most times it works. And if it doesn’t work, you were going to die anyways,” he explained to an audience at a synagogue in Atlanta where a few listeners laughed somewhat nervously. “But you’ve got to be willing to take risks like that. Everybody laughs about it. What would you do, let them die? They’d let them die rather than let a few die. I don’t think that way.”15 Only a numbers man would put it quite so bluntly.
Bloomberg would spend hundreds of millions of dollars fighting the thickening air near coal-fired power plants, the dying oceans, and even, above and over it all, climate change. Once, when a fellow business executive tried to convince him that climate change was a hoax, he angrily questioned the guy’s intelligence.16 And as climate change became more important to him personally and politically, he said, “The only thing I know that could literally wipe out every single living thing down to microbes on this planet is global warming,” adding, “If you turn this planet into Mars, it never comes back.”17
Bloomberg’s emphasis on education was his view that a good schooling was the main route out of poverty. Data showing that only 6 percent of students at top colleges were poor encouraged him to create a way for “high-achieving, low income” students to apply and go to top universities. Most top universities signed onto his program to make room for bright but poor students—Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, UCLA, the long list of top universities. Their goal was to graduate 50,000 lower-income students at 270 participating colleges by 2025.18 For his part, Bloomberg contributed $1.8 billion in 2018 to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins, to help low-income students apply and make it through to graduation. (Some residents of New York City immediately complained that the money would be better spent at the public City University of New York than the elite private university in Baltimore.)
* * *
Bloomberg’s philanthropy expanded beyond a few checks here and there in the 1990s, and in New York he became a top name on the begging roster for the city’s cultural and educational organizations. His tuxedos in those days got a lot of use as he joined the glamorous society-donor circuit.
A girlfriend of the newly divorced Bloomberg recalled introducing him to Beverly Sills, the famous soprano who quickly made sure he was added to the board of Lincoln Center.19 At the time, Bloomberg gave freely (and got on the boards) of the city’s cultural centers like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library, to name a few. He was part of the Central Park Conservancy, where he began to promote the Christo orange Gates for the park as part of the millennium celebrations in 2000. His friend Harvey Eisen once said that “he wanted to be a player, wanted to be a fancy guy in the city. He’s not a phony. He’s not a jerk like Trump, but he crossed over [to the elegant side], you know. Do you have any idea of the dirty mouth this guy has? He used to be impossible, but you can’t do what we used to do. He adapted.”20
Ever the Anglophile, Bloomberg courted London in much the same way. Julia Peyton-Jones, director of the adventurous Serpentine Gallery in London from 1991 to 2016, remembered how Bloomberg organized a dinner party in 1996 for people in the arts. At the dinner, when the glamorous Peyton-Jones sat next to Bloomberg and pitched her struggling museum, Bloomberg promised that he planned to spend more time in London (and, of course, more money). “It was like having a very exotic bird in our midst,” she remembered.
Peyton-Jones, who believed Bloomberg enjoyed modern, even “provocative” art, convinced her New York billionaire friend to invest heavily in her struggling museum housed in London’s Kensington Gardens. She said Bloomberg fearlessly sponsored a major project featuring the works of Piero Manzoni. Manzoni was best known for tantalizing and mocking the commercial art world, using his own fingerprints, a balloon described as his own breath, and small cans called Merda d’artista, or the artist’s shit. (One can sold for 182,500 pound sterling in 2015).21, 22
Patti Harris and later Kate Levin, the city’s cultural affairs commissioner, would encourage Bloomberg’s tuxedo-driven interest in the arts, especially public art to enliven cities around the country. Bloomberg would later give $75 million to the Shed, the odd but memorable name for a gigantic new cultural center near the High Line railroad park on Manhattan’s far West Side. The donation was for the 200,000-square-foot adaptable, moveable, multipurpose structure that could morph from art galleries to a five-hundred-seat theater, with a massive sliding contraption that allowed for cultural events both indoors and out. For his share of the cost of the Shed—$475 million—Bloomberg earned the rights to call it the Bloomberg Building by the opening in 2019.23, 24, 25
* * *
There would always be questions about whether his philanthropy and his politics were in sync. He gave freely to state politicians as he decided to run for mayor. And as he moved from being the private billionaire to the political candidate in 2001, his gifts to charities looked like something other than simple gifts. David Jones, president of the Community Service Society of New York, was one of those who became increasingly wary of the Bloomberg giveaways. His organization promotes economic progress for the poor but had not taken Bloomberg money. “I do think [the contributions] had a chilling effect on the willingness to take strong positions in opposition to the mayor,”26 he observed. Such talk infuriated Bloomberg, who insisted he wanted his money to improve the city, not muffle the complaints.
Sometimes Bloomberg even chose to remain anonymous. A few days after he was elected mayor in 2001, Bloomberg was stepping out of a restaurant when he bumped into Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.27 Gregorian, who counted Bloomberg as a friend, quickly explained to the mayor-elect that after 9/11 and a souring economy, many of the smaller arts and nonprofit groups that provide so much vitality to the city were suffering. Could his billionaire friend help set up an emergency fund? Gregorian asked. Bloomberg agreed, as long as the donations were anonymous and Carnegie would administer the fund for free.
Bloomberg sent a donation every December until 2010 when he shifted to his own foundation, and the Bloomberg money allowed Carnegie to give out 3,150 grants across the city. Soon, of course, these anonymous donations were no longer anonymous. Almost everybody in the nonprofit world knew about the Carnegie deal. The Times, which referred to Bloomberg as a “modern-day Medici,” declared in 2005 that his donations through his family charity and his corporation and Carnegie amounted at least $140 million a year to eight hundred institutions.28, 29 Moreover, Bloomberg told friends that he loved the idea that any anonymous gift in the city always made people think it was really him, trying to be humble about giving away his billions.
* * *
In many important ways, his post-mayoral charity became far more important as an extension of his time in city hall. As mayor he banned smoking in the city and tried (but failed) to limit sugary colas to sixteen ounces. As philanthropist, he announced that he had given nearly $1 billion by 2016 to help fifty-nine countries pass anti-tobacco laws and curb tobacco use even in smoke-filled societies in Turkey, China, India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh.30 He fared better by promoting soda taxes in Mexico and Philadephia.
As mayor, he fought for cleaner air and water. As philanthropist, he pledged half a billion dollars in 2019 to help close coal-fired power plants and move to a clean energy economy by 2030. And he would fight climate change at every level, from the city to the states to the White House.
He began battling against illegal guns as mayor. And even though he was criticized for his stop-and-frisk policies targeting minorities, his support for gun control turned into a nationwide political and moral challenge to the National Rifle Association. As he left city hall, and with gun deaths mounting to more than 33,000 Americans a year,31 Bloomberg announced a $50 million grant to merge two groups—Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. The new group would be called Everytown for Gun Safety, and its main purpose would be to energize voters to support gun control and candidates unafraid of the NRA.32 By 2018, Bloomberg and a group run by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011, vowed to fight the NRA at the polls. In the congressional midterm elections that year—$37 million went to candidates who promised to control guns, compared to $20 million from the NRA.33
The political donations had to be separate by law, but with his Independence USA PAC (political action committee), Bloomberg was becoming a prime king and queen maker among those in his billionaire class.
* * *
For all the money that went out under the Bloomberg name, perhaps nothing was as radical in the world of philanthropy as his emphasis on cities as the major engines of change. After twelve years in city hall, meeting mayors from around the world, talking about how to keep these clusters of human beings healthy and prosperous, Bloomberg was a believer in the power of mayors to do more than march in parades and tub-thump into microphones.
Bloomberg called cities the “laboratories for democracy.” And, “If we can help them along, we can sleep well at night.”34
As he would say repeatedly, his mission was to supplement government and pay for experiments that most city politicians wouldn’t dare try. Plus, as mayor for twelve years, he had seen problems up front and in agonizing detail, problems he believed cities could fix.
At one private dinner with a group of mayors in 2012, Bloomberg said, “There’s one thing mayors can agree on, whether they’re Republican, Democrats or Independents—and I’m the one person in the room who can speak with authority on all three—we don’t have the luxury of giving speeches and making promises.”35 That was when his fellow mayors, like Philadelphia’s then mayor Michael Nutter, began offering constant encouragement. “Mayor Bloomberg is the mayor’s mayor,”36 Nutter said.
“Mayors do things,” Bloomberg added shortly before he left his own mayoral hub. “Mayors make things happen.”37
Out of office, he turned cities into international testing grounds by using a series of contests, offering funds up to $5 million worth of grants and support for a winning idea that could also help other cities. He also created a consulting firm of top city officials to help other cities gratis, courtesy of his philanthropy.
Here were a few of the ways he used his money to get cities to experiment:
• In 2013, he gave $1 million each to Chicago for “predictive analytics” data and to Houston for a new recycling program. Chicago’s effort was a clear success, using department data to predict problems. (For example, the city’s data experts cross-checked water-main leaks and garbage complaints to predict sudden surges in the rat population in an area.)38 Houston’s proposal for a high-tech, one-bin recycling program was junked by a new mayor who opted instead for a contract with a standard garbage hauler.39
• The grand prize of $5 million that year went to Providence, Rhode Island, for a program called Providence Talks.40 Researchers had found that children from poor households heard about a third as many words as those from wealthier homes, and this limited vocabulary often held them back in school. To help out, children in 170 families wore recording devices that were analyzed by machines tracking the number of words said by adults in the home. When their word count got low, coaches from the city would come to help with books and other teaching aids. Those children who heard the fewest words in the beginning of their survey—about eight thousand adult words a day—soon heard more than twelve thousand words as adults talked more about cooking, the news, the household, et cetera.41 Brown University researchers found that the program provided a “promising strategy” to “advance early learning,” 42 and the program began to spread to other cities.
• Cary, North Carolina, a town of 130,000, got a Bloomberg grant to test sewage to determine where people were overusing opioids.43 Their idea was to direct more help to these areas where opioids were plentiful.
• Santa Monica won $1 million in 2013 to measure the well-being of its residents. (That meant details of people’s health, fears, access to the community, and opportunity, etc.) The results were hopeful. Data from the city and from interviews of some of the 92,000 citizens showed that people in one poorer area were not eating enough fruits and vegetables. So they increased the value of food stamps in the area, made them easier to use at a nearby farmers market, and started basic cooking classes in the neighborhood.44
In 2014, Bloomberg looked for new ideas in European cities, offering a million euros each to try different programs in Athens, Stockholm, Warsaw, and the Kirklees, a district in West Yorkshire, UK. The grand prize of five million euros went to Barcelona for a digital “trust network,” an online community of volunteers to help care for the city’s growing number of senior citizens.45
By 2017, his focus was back on America, and he announced another $200 million for what he called the American Cities Initiative. He had granted $1 million each in 2018 to Denver, Durham, Fort Collins, Georgetown (Texas), Huntington (West Virginia), Los Angeles, New Rochelle (New York), Philadelphia, and South Bend. Then came the $70 million American Cities Climate Challenge that provided expertise and support to another twenty-five cities finding inventive ways to reduce their carbon footprint.
Still, the help for so many cities came in such small numbers that complaints came from another direction. This money was a pittance, that $100,000 wouldn’t even buy a “public toilet,” some groused. Henry Grabar, an urban affairs writer for Slate, noted that such grants were small potatoes for cities with billion-dollar budgets. Bloomberg often made the same point himself—that he was not trying to make up for cuts to local or federal budgets. He could give millions to private anti-smoking campaigns, but as a mayor banning indoor smoking, he would enhance the lives of 8.5 million people. No mere philanthropist could do that. As a private citizen, he could not replace city governments, he could only encourage innovations at a local level that might work in other cities.
* * *
The Bloomberg contests would be only one way to help mayors around the world. Bloomberg also brought some of the biggest names from his city hall into the charitable operations, creating what the Times would call his “urban SWAT team.”46 Near the end of his third term as mayor, Bloomberg had asked George Fertitta, who was running the city’s tourism campaigns, to create a group of his top aides who could share their expertise with other cities.
Fertitta, another former tycoon in perpetual motion, had been a successful marketing expert who once helped Bloomberg peddle his news operation by giving out radios that had only one channel—Bloomberg Radio. “It was Mike’s idea,” Fertitta insisted. At city hall, Fertitta had helped lure more than 54 million tourists to the city by 2013 (up 20 million from the lean years after 9/11).47
Fertitta was Bloomberg’s kind of guy. Even in his seventies, he often got to the office at 6:00 a.m. (an hour earlier than his boss) and made decisions (or took advice from the ex-mayor) on the run. Fertitta’s appointment to head the group was typical. After a brief conversation about the idea, Bloomberg told Fertitta, “ ‘Okay, we’re gonna do this. You’re gonna be the CEO, and I’m gonna pay you this,’ and I said, ‘Fine.’ ”48
Fertitta’s grou
p included Amanda Burden, former planning commissioner; Janette Sadik-Khan, former transportation commissioner; Rose Gill Hearn, who was commissioner for the city’s Department of Investigation; Kate Levin, who had been Bloomberg’s cultural affairs commissioner; Linda Gibbs, former deputy mayor for health and human services; and others.
Word quickly got around that the “Associates” did not charge for their services. The bumptious London mayor, Boris Johnson who was a Bloomberg friend, got help to improve Internet capability in his city. The mayors of Mexico City and Los Angeles impressed Bloomberg and then also made the cut.
Cities could not hire the Bloomberg consultants. They were not clients; cities would receive advice, not buy it. That arrangement meant the Bloomberg people could be frank, since they were not angling for another contract, and, of course, the cities were free to reject the advice with minimal grief from taxpayers. By 2018, the Associates had encouraged fourteen cities to allocate $1.3 billion for 280 local projects.49 Along with London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Rio, they worked with Athens, Atlanta, Bogotá, Detroit, Houston, Kansas City, Milan, Nashville, Oakland, and Paris.
With the help from Bloomberg’s former city hall deputies, Athens officials provided $14 million to fund local health and economic improvements, including a pedestrian plaza and assistance ridding the city of graffiti. In Detroit, the team helped struggling residents get thousands of dollars in tax credits and advised city officials on how to carve out more public space for pedestrians.50
As survivors of New York City’s bureaucracy, the Bloomberg Associates knew how to get around notoriously difficult city bureaucrats. And their help ranged from city plazas to an exotic way to entice tourists into a town. When Sony wanted to use Mexico City for an opening scene in a new James Bond movie, the company got nowhere with city officials: Enter Fertitta and his film team. They negotiated to keep 007 in Mexico City for the first twelve minutes of Spectre when the Bond producers created a dramatic parade of giant skeletons for the Day of the Dead (as in Halloween). “That’s a billion dollar commercial” for the city, Fertitta crowed, adding a zero or two for emphasis. Some viewers said it was the best part of the film, and Mexico City began having a Day of the Dead parade to boost the local economy by drawing tourists from around the world.
The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg Page 36
