I took the Peter Pan bus back to Springfield last night, it was the last bus. There were too many people and not enough seats…at one point the driver stepped into the bus and asked if anyone would get up and let a young girl on instead, and wait 2 more hours for the next bus. No one said anything, most people looked away. She shuffled away, sad. On the bus I had the Village Voice, and found a story about Rudy Guiliani by Tom Robbins.
“Housing? Giuliani never even bothered to hatch a policy. As the numbers of homeless rose around him and an affordable housing crisis crunched the middle class, Giuliani gave the job of running the city’s housing-finance agency to the son of his political mentor, Liberal Party boss Ray Harding. Russell Harding has no background in the business and lacked a college degree.
A Voice series later helped send him to prison for stealing $400,000 from one agency (official scheduled release date: 2008). Giuliani’s housing commissioner, Richard Roberts, pled guilty to federal perjury charges in the same scandal.
Still in his first term, Bloomberg launched a major initiative to build and preserve housing–one that doesn’t take nearly adequate account of the need to hold onto current low-cost housing, but one that is helping to make up for eight years of inaction.
Crime? During Guiliani’s reign, crime went down, as it did nationwide. But during Bloomberg’s terms, even though nationally crime is up, NYC’s is still going down. And when you compare both mayor’s Top Cops–once convicted Bernard Kerik vs rock-jawed squeaky clean Ray Kelly, that’s a major difference too.
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