Bloomberg's Big Disaster: His Legacy

He's smart, he's ballsy, and he's the best mayor New York City has had since who knows when. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg has, while radically rezoning and transforming the City in cooperation with developers, destroyed much of the middle class, exiled poor people to the further reaches of the five boroughs, and further entrenched the poverty class. What's a mayor to do? It's obvious that in New York you have to squeeze as much money from the rich as possible—and his unprecedented use of private-public partnerships have kept the City running. But what will happen when the current recession starts to make its impact on the rich, and the philanthropist money slows? This financing game has succeeding in making New York City more like Gotham than ever before. And now today, says the New York Times, over the course of the spring, "city-supported food pantries served 1.39 million meals, up 9.3 percent compared with the 1.27 million during the same period last year." And soup kitchen meals are up "8.8 percent from the same period last year."