Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America s Tale of Two Cities

by Juan González

How Bill de Blasio’s mayoral victory triggered a seismic shift in the nation’s urban political landscape―and what it portends for our cities in the future

In November 2013, a little-known progressive stunned the elite of New York City by capturing the mayoralty by a landslide. Bill de Blasio's promise to end the "Tale of Two Cities" had struck a chord among ordinary residents still struggling to recover from the Great Recession. De Blasio's election heralded the advent of the most progressive New York City government in generations. Not since the legendary Fiorello La Guardia in the 1930s had so many populist candidates captured government office at the same time. Gotham, in other words, had been suddenly reclaimed in the name of its people. How did this happen? De Blasio's victory, journalist legend Juan González argues, was not just a routine change of government but a popular rebellion against corporate-friendly policies that had dominated New York for decades. Reflecting that broader change, liberal Democrats Bill Peduto in Pittsburgh, Betsy Hodges in Minneapolis, and Martin Walsh of Boston also won mayoral elections that same year, as did insurgent Ras Baraka in Newark the following year. This new generation of municipal leaders offers valuable lessons for those seeking grassroots reform.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

Published September 5, 2017

About the author

Juan Gonzalez, a New York Daily News columnist, has lived in the United States for fifty of his fifty-one years. His numerous honors include the 1998 George Polk Award for excellence in journalism and the Hispanic Academy of Media Arts and Sciences Lifetime Achievement Award. Born in Puerto Rico, he grew up in a barrio housing project and was a cofounder of the 1960s Young Lords. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is ambitious in its scope in its attempt to do three things: chronicle the rise of Bill de Blasio; suggest his rise is part of a wider grassroots movement for more progressive political representation; and chronicle the 40 year onslaught of neoliberalism on NYC. I particularly appreciate contextualizing de Blasio's rise within a wider populist movement. Although I don't know if de Blasio is really as an ideal candidate that Gonzalez at times suggests, it is a useful wider framework to conceptualize various movements across the United States.

But there are some framing issues that hinder the book's analysis. Gonzalez goes into way too much detail regarding the neoliberal practices that have plagued NYC. The section reads like a simple string of his NY Daily News articles placed together. The details might make for good individual articles but are way too microscopic for this book's aims.

This leads to the real weakness of the book: Gonzalez's assessment of de Blasio, which is very truncated. De Blasio is a much more contradictory figure than Gonzalez suggests. Yes, he initiated free pre-K, higher wages, negotiates union contacts unlike Bloomberg, and gutted some of the excess of Bloomberg's heavy reliance on the IT sector. Yet, de Blasio also holds a rather strong neoliberal worldview.

Gonzalez recognizes some of the limits regarding de Blasio's housing policy by suggesting that it didn't have enough input from neighborhood groups and his median salary makes "affordable housing" a distant reality for most. Yet Gonzalez suggests that by 2016, de Blasio heeded his critics by initiating 20% extremely low-income housing.

Not quite. He still refuses to acknowledge that the median income is way too high; that a lottery system for affordable housing is a travesty that punctuates the inability of the private market from ever adequately addressing this; that there is too little public input regarding his policy; that much low-income housing resorts to market rate in 50-100 years in many cases; that massive tax breaks allow gentrifiers to plunder various neighborhoods.

The main limit of the book is Gonzalez's inability to see de Blasio's appointment of William Bratton as deeply connected to his private-public "affordable housing scheme." Gonzalez suggests that de Blasio picked Bratton as police commissioner simply because he had proven himself in the position before. But he fails to acknowledge the deep disappointment by many grassroots organizers over this choice since Bratton practiced "broken windows" policing that disproportionately targets working-class people of color for citations and arrests. So although Bratton ostensibly rejects stop-and-frisk policing, his tactics of broken windows policing implicitly endorses it.

Bratton's policing style is intimately tied into the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sector's deep interests in gentrifying neighborhoods to rid the working poor for more upscale and white clientele. To disassociate the modes of policing with de Blasio's housing policy is to miss much of the picture.

Although one does not want to discount the good de Blasio did and does. He stands much more above his predecessor, Bloomberg, who Gonzalez rightfully reveals to have attempted to privatize the city and apply IT concepts that simplly don't work.

But I don't know if de Blasio is so much a part of that grassroots movement Gonzalez speaks of or instead someone who has appropriated its causes into a much more nebulous, neoliberal vision. Maybe this is what happens when one has to run the gauntlet of city politics: it forces the shearing of you from your base, from those movements that you emerged from but lost connection with. Or it depends how much connection de Blasio had with them in the first place. Either way, this is a good but that tie the transformations in NYC to wider progressive and neoliberal practices. It's main limit is the book's inability to see de Blasio as symptomatic of those two forces.

[bianca · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is well written and does a lot in less than 300 pages. The author is trying to 1) tell de Blasio's story 2) explain how his mayoralty starkly contrasts from the Bloomberg era and 3) explore de Blasio as an agent (and product) of a larger national progressive movement.

I learned a lot about my mayor that I didn't know before but since Gonzalez is selective about what he wants to dive into details about, I was left unsatisfied by the end of the book. It seemed to me like Gonzalez is really, really proud and happy about de Blasio given all of Bloomberg's anti-poor neoliberal bullshit -- which is great.

However, Gonzalez did a really poor job of diving into very, very valid critiques housing, anti-zoning, and other advocates have with de Blasio and didn't bother tell the story of this administration's most contentious official, Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen. When you compare the mere paragraphs the author used to lightly and vaguely describe critiques of de Blasio's to the abundance of pages used to describe de Blasio's universal pre-K roll out, for example, it's hard not to think that Gonzalez didn't fully apply a critical eye. Examining de Blasio's first three years in office, irrespective of Bloomberg and with contemporary progressive expectations/goals now, is still possible and Gonzalez failed to do so.

Maybe he just tried to do too much in so little space, I dunno. If anything this book just made me want to read more books on de Blasio.

[Jonna Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a clearly written, easy to read, interesting book. The author has a bias, but it sounds mostly factual, even if many of the footnotes reference de Blasio administration reports. Reading about politics is unpleasant but educational. More people should read this book.

[Thomas Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like "Fallout", the first and BEST book on the 9/11 illnesses that were inevitable in the aftermath of the toxic stew at Ground Zero, Gonzalez's new book "Reclaiming Gotham" is by far the best new book on the overzealous expansion of neoliberalism and the pushback orchestrated by folks like Bill De Blasio and other true progressive political leaders. A must read for New Yorkers who like De Blasio but who have concerns due to his press coverage. Clearly, we can do a lot worst . . .