8

Attacking the Problems,
Not the Victims

I was sworn in as the 106th mayor of New York City directly after midnight as the year 1990 commenced. The ceremony took place in the Bronx apartment of my old law partner Fritz Alexander, who was a Court of Appeals judge at the time. Of course, Joyce, David Jr., and Donna were there to witness the occasion. Deputy mayors Norman Steisel, Barbara Fife, Sally Hernandez-Pinero, and Bill Lynch, as well as corporation counsel Victor Kovner and police commissioner Lee Brown, were sworn in after my induction. Charlie Rangel, Percy Sutton, Basil Paterson, and Jesse Jackson, along with a loyal crowd of approximately one hundred supporters, squeezed into Fritz’s apartment. I held together quite well through the oath itself, but when I kissed my family and the room filled with applause, I swelled with emotion.

It was pouring outside, a dreadfully inclement evening, rain coming down in buckets, but there were parties around the city to attend and a new day on its way to dawning. As Barbara Fife and her husband Martin were driving downtown to celebrate, their car hit a giant pothole, a divot in the pavement so deep they had some difficulty driving out. Barbara looked at Marty, wipers slapping the windshield, rain drumming on the roof, and said, “Oh my God, it is our fault now!” Our days of advocacy were over—from that point forward we had to get things done.

I was inaugurated at midday on the steps of City Hall. My mother had passed away, but my father and stepmother were present for the event. I was sorry my mother was not there to see this; she had thought it was a great day when I finished high school. The crowd was estimated to be three times the size of those at previous mayoral ceremonies, as clearly this was an occasion of some moment. I was joined by former New York mayors Koch, Lindsay, Beame, and Wagner, and African American mayors Wilson Goode of Philadelphia, Sharpe James of Newark, and Marion Barry of Washington, as well as Governor Mario Cuomo. Harry Belafonte presided over the ceremonies, and South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu delivered remarks. Finally it was my turn to speak.

“Today,” I told the invited guests and members of the public, “we mark more than a transfer of power. Today we travel another mile on freedom’s road. . . . I stand before you today as the elected leader of the greatest city of a great nation, to which my ancestors were brought, chained and whipped in the hold of a slave ship. We have not finished the journey toward liberty and justice, but surely we have come a long way.

“I see New York as a gorgeous mosaic of race and religious faith, of national origin and sexual orientation—of individuals whose families arrived yesterday and generations ago, coming through Ellis Island, or Kennedy Airport, or on Greyhound buses bound for the Port Authority. In that spirit, I offer this fundamental pledge: I intend to be the mayor of all the people of New York.”

And so I was mayor.

...

Mario Cuomo said that one campaigns in poetry and governs in prose. I began writing my mayoralty.

I had asked Nat Leventhal to chair my transition team, assisted by Barbara Fife, who was herself assisted by Marcia Smith. Leventhal had been deputy mayor for operations under Koch and knew how the government operated and many of the people who were adept at operating it. They had separated the policy and personnel sides of the equation.

I wanted to change the way decisions were made in city administration and the manner in which the person who was mayor was perceived. Mayor Koch had been a bully in the bully pulpit. I didn’t want to be that man. That pulpit is easy to abuse, and having it can make one not only arrogant but a target for abuse. It was my intention to be a leader who found common ground and then moved the city in a direction I deemed valuable. I wanted smart, acknowledged leaders from a variety of the city’s many sectors who would have the stature to announce, “This is what our city should be doing,” and be recognized. I wanted multiple involvements. That would be my management style.

I had seen mayors buffeted by criticism of their point of view, by the sharp oversimplification of the press, and by the time it took to cut through that fog to have the public understand actual policy. I had no intention of being combative or reactive. I would overcome personal criticism by conducting a chorus, an orchestra of municipal virtuosos. My advisers and I would generate ideas, I would encourage consensus, and my highly accomplished staff would flesh out these concepts and create the momentum necessary to see them through.

Consensus, while preferable, was not always necessary. Abe Lincoln, the story goes, would convene his cabinet and after discussion put an issue to a vote. The question would go around the table, and these esteemed gentlemen would say, “Nay,” “Nay,” “Nay,” “Nay,” and on occasion Lincoln would say, “The ayes have it.” I would get all the information and tell my staff, “I’ll do what you all want 95 percent of the time, but the Lincoln Rule obtains.”

Presented in this way, our ideas to move New York forward would be perceived properly: “These are the views of accepted business leaders. It’s not some yahoo over here to whom the mayor is responding, or someone with an insider’s influence who is putting on the squeeze to move in a given direction.” I was not the type to say, “That is a stupid idea,” or, “That’s ridiculous,” as had my predecessor. I would orchestrate a more robust and fulsome discussion of the issues and mobilize support.

The central concept I wanted to reintroduce to municipal government was that of community. It had been missing for years, this sense that everyone in the city was connected, that there was a greater good to be considered than simply the selfish, and that we were all tied to it. It was important to me that this sense of community permeate the government because one cannot manage a government like New York City’s without it.

The essential conversation concerned the people I would select to surround me. Would I reinvent government with the lifetime outsiders whom Bill Lynch and I had introduced into my borough president’s administration, while sweeping out all traces of the Koch mayoralty, or would I search out the experienced insiders in what is known as the permanent government and attempt to work from within? There was some pressure from the Democratic Party leadership to maintain continuity, Ed Koch having been a Democrat and much of his staff having risen through those ranks. There was equal pressure from those who represented the constituency that felt it had been fundamentally ignored for the previous twelve years of the Koch administration, if not significantly longer. I could feel the weight of these expectations from each side; the former’s was intellectual and political, the latter’s was palpable.

Norman Steisel had started government service in the Lindsay administration and then entered the private sector. In the mid- to late 1970s, when there was public discussion of New York City declaring bankruptcy, a new financial team was assembled, and he reentered city government as first deputy budget director. This was around the time the Daily News ran the headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The national, state, and city economies were in trouble, income was dropping, and as a result so were the tax revenues on which the city depended. Deep budget cuts were necessary in an environment of constantly declining resources, and the city was not handling the crisis effectively. In 1975 the state legislature created the New York State Financial Control Board to oversee the financial management of the city and various related public authorities. Under its mandate, all financial plans and certain contracts were subject to its approval.

Steisel’s responsibilities at that time dealt mainly with the expenditure side of the budget. He was centrally involved in the large cutbacks that took place: the significant layoffs; the breach of contracts with major vendors; the negotiations with the unions, whose members were being asked to give up their jobs but whose pension funds were at the same time being asked to buy the city’s municipal bonds. He had been involved in some difficult negotiations.

To re-secure federal loan guarantees, as well as meet certain requirements that had been imposed on the city by the Financial Control Board, the city was required in 1977, when Ed Koch was first elected, to submit a revised financial plan in the first twenty days of his term. Even though Koch began work on this plan almost immediately following his election, which gave him perhaps two months in toto, it was a tall order to submit a revised plan in such a short amount of time. Even as he needed to create this plan, the mayor was focusing on creating his own administration and bringing in his own people to replace or augment Abe Beame’s staff of eight years. It was a time of high stress.

Steisel considered himself a bureaucrat and belonged to no political club. He was asked to stay on by Koch as his budget director, and he saw Koch’s first budget through the Board of Estimate. He served eight years as the New York City sanitation commissioner, becoming at the time that department’s longest-serving commissioner in the twentieth century. Steisel became highly involved in waste-to-energy conservation and especially favored the use of incinerators. He was an advocate for the rehabilitation of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which had fallen into disrepair after a decade of disuse, and was active nationally in promoting technology. Steisel started the city’s first curbside collection of recycled materials and, most significantly, reduced the Sanitation Department truck crew size from three to two by introducing performance- and productivity-based incentive payments to workers. The resulting 25 percent reduction of the workforce is still considered by many municipal experts and observers the signal productivity gain in New York City government operations in the past three or four decades.

During Koch’s third term, Steisel left government to work at Lazard Freres. While at the firm, he became the chairman of the School Construction Authority, which had been mandated by the State Legislature to manage the design, construction, and renovation of capital projects in New York City’s more than 1,200 public school buildings, half of which had been constructed prior to 1949. This is where Steisel and I first came to really know one another while I was Manhattan borough president. It didn’t hurt that we were both tennis players; I knew how he carried himself on the court, which I believe helps considerably in estimating a person’s character.

Norman is also a cigar chomper. He looks like a man who would be at home in the inner workings of city government, and he was. His knowledge of city government was encyclopedic. I felt I needed a person in a position of high responsibility who knew how to get things done. The business community felt I needed someone with Norman’s know-how. I offered him the job of first deputy mayor, and he accepted.

I named Bill Lynch deputy mayor for intergovernmental relations, Barbara Fife deputy mayor for planning and development, and Sally Hernandez-Pinero deputy mayor for finance and economic development. I now had an excellent inner circle.

...

As with my predecessors, the first two orders of business were staffing the government and creating the budget. Good government begins with good commissioners, and our elaborate process began with search committees to find not only suitable but excellent candidates. I decided that one did not sweep out an entire functioning government upon winning an election; one assessed the available talent and availed oneself of the best while letting the others pursue their private paths.

Imagine stepping into a business and having only seven weeks to identify, interview, and hire twenty-five high-level executives. Among the possibilities were Koch holdovers with substantial experience who wanted to keep their positions; staff members in my borough president’s office in whom I had great trust and who wanted to step up in responsibility; individuals heretofore unknown to us who wanted to be heard; and highly visible people who were known quantities to whom we felt obliged to listen. The process was time-consuming and filled with pressure. The city’s newspapers, which often concentrate on the horse race instead of the horses, soon began making comparisons between our timetable and those of my predecessors. By January first, Mayor Beame had X number of commissioners in place; Mayor Koch had Y, Mayor Dinkins has. . . . A month later they would run the next scorecard.

My choice of Steisel for first deputy mayor was not greeted entirely with open arms. Many of the outsiders-turned-insiders who were working in my borough president’s office went to be interviewed by Norman’s chief of staff, Ellen Baer, and came away miffed that the quality and importance of their work were not recognized. Activism, it appeared, was valued less highly than experience. There was a sense among some that these were tough, cold, nasty Koch people who didn’t understand a thing about what had gone on and what my election meant. There was initial consternation, but although the transition was hectic and difficult, ultimately people were placed in the jobs at which they were competent and the ones they deserved. Several of the policy analysts in my borough president’s office were assigned as program or policy office heads under Barbara Fife (environment, culture, land use) or Norman Steisel (health, education, homelessness, criminal justice, transportation), consistent with the portfolio of agencies reporting to each. My deputy, Dennis deLeon, was appointed chair of the Human Rights Commission, and several of the folks in constituent relations were assigned by Bill Lynch to head offices involving African American, Latino, Jewish, gay and lesbian, and veterans affairs. When asked, Milt Mollen, the presiding justice of the Appellate Division, Second Department, resigned his post to become deputy mayor for public safety. Two years later, in a remarkable display of civic-mindedness, Fritz Alexander stepped down from the Court of Appeals to succeed him.

Basil Paterson said, “I’ve got just the guy for your counsel.”

“Who?” I asked.

“George Daniels.”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s a Criminal Court judge, appointed by Koch.”

“He’s not going to give that up.”

“Oh yes he will.”

Basil, of course, knew what he was talking about. Daniels resigned as a Criminal Court judge. Three judges stepped down to join me. I tell people that the three of them, George and Milt and Fritz, needed a psychiatrist and I could probably get a fleet rate because they were all crazy for doing so. George served ably, with great insight and subtle skill. Four years later, before I left office, I appointed him back to the Criminal Court. He was then elected to the New York Supreme Court, and President Bill Clinton nominated him to be a judge in the US District Court, Southern District of New York, where he presides today. George has ascended to the position of “the Heavy Judge.”

The transition was not without its disappointments. Grassroots people thought, I used to hate dealing with that deputy commissioner, I was hoping he was going to be out, but he’s not. There were new lines of communication and authority, much of it through Steisel, and many people who had had casual access to me as borough president now were more restricted in their contact with me as mayor. There is always a highly pressing matter in the life of a mayor, there are more issues to be decided, and there are more decisions to be made and reviewed. Before problems or solutions were placed on my desk, Norman was at the top of this chain of command. Norman is a droll human being with a gruff way about him. I used to tell people, “Norman’s all right, he just doesn’t smile a lot.”

So much of the way New York City does its business is driven through the budget process. Policymaking equals resource allocation. If you don’t have the money, you cannot do what you want to do; it’s as simple as that. When we began to examine the actual city budget left to us by the Koch administration, we found a disturbing surprise. What we had been led to believe was a deficit of approximately $175 million on a going-forward basis—which is to say, the money needed to finance the remaining six months of the city’s fiscal year—was in actual fact closer to $750 million. As we began working on the next year’s budget and forecast those figures, we were close to a billion dollars in the hole! The city and country were already in a revenue free-fall. Where were we supposed to come up with this money?

Under the Financial Control Board agreement, the city was obligated to balance its budget. (The board consists of the governor, who is its chairman; the state comptroller; the mayor; the city comptroller; and three members who are appointed by the governor, with the advice and consent of the State Senate, and who serve at the governor’s pleasure. The public members are hardly shy and retiring types and will say and do what they want, but since they are appointees and can be influenced by the governor, the board is essentially under his control.) Unless the city ended its fiscal year and presented its audited final budget out of balance by less than $100 million, New York would go into receivership and the board would take over management of the city’s finances.

One hundred million dollars sounds like a lot of money. At the time, however, the budget was approximately $30 billion; $100 million is 0.0033 percent of that amount. In layman’s terms, for an individual making $50,000 a year, a takeover would occur if he or she exceeded expenses by $165 a year! Obviously, we were on a very tight leash.

Everyone in my administration felt passionately that we could not allow this to happen. I did not want to be elected mayor and immediately lose control of the city to the Financial Control Board and the governor. To be mayor but not be mayor—that would be unfathomable.

I recognize that there was significant skepticism about my ability to handle this crisis. I was elected in some part because New Yorkers were fed up with Ed Koch’s belligerent attitude in dealing with many issues and communities, minority groups in particular. My style and his were substantially different. I was perceived as more civil and less confrontational, more considered and less likely to fly off the handle. I was supposed to bring a different tone, a different level of discussion to the table, and to possess the ability to get people to work together and behave more harmoniously. However, my measured manner and precise diction seemed to some to be lacking in the fire or urgency New Yorkers had come to identify as mayoral prerequisites. Wall Street and the media in particular doubted my abilities. Opinion makers and people on editorial boards asked my senior staff, in so many words, Can the black guy count? My degree in mathematics from Howard apparently did not calm their fears that I needed to take off my shoes to count to twenty.

When told that the upcoming deficit might hit $1 billion, Mayor Koch denied responsibility. (In fact, when the time came, the deficit hit $1.8 billion.) He had earned credibility with the Financial Control Board by presenting quarterly reviews, and although at times when the city was not doing well the board would make its displeasure known, those displays would be subtle, not cataclysmic. “If I were here,” Koch told the New York Times after my election, “I’d take action to eliminate the deficit. It’s not hard; you have to have intestinal fortitude to increase taxes and reduce services.” Why, during the many years in which this deficit was mushrooming and he was in office, the mayor did not take these actions remains a mystery.

Mayor Beame had a more nuanced response to the problems facing New York City as I took office. “In my memory,” he said, “no mayor has ever inherited a more serious and overwhelming condition in both financial and social problems.” Crack, AIDS, and homelessness were cresting.

Governor Mario Cuomo was, of course, connected to the New York business community, and he heard this noise. When I came into office, the spotlights seemed to be trained a little more brightly on our performance. The huge deficit altered the dynamics of my mayoralty from the beginning. I had an economic and social agenda when I entered the mayor’s office. I ran on a platform of specific change and was determined to move the city forward. But could I get it done? It became immediately clear that if I closed the $1.8 billion deficit and avoided receivership, the answer would be no.

This was a blow not only to me but to the entire city that elected me. Some of the grassroots constituents’ representatives who had worked so hard to see me elected, including many who had joined me in the borough president’s office, were particularly upset. They were the outsiders; they had spent years pounding against the Koch administration, and finally, they felt as they came to the table, they were going to be in charge. Ignored by a particularly insensitive mayor, they had replaced him with a man who had their best interests at heart, and they were ready to put the city’s residents on a different path. They had committed themselves and fought for years. They truly believed in the issues they had worked on and the people for whom they worked. Now they were being told, “Well, you can’t do this, we have no money. Not only can we not expand city services to fill all the gaps in the unmet needs, as legitimate and important as they are, but we must cut back and cut back even more.”

Norman Steisel, whose Koch credentials made him a classic representative of the permanent government, was the bearer of this bad news. In his gruff way he let it be known: if the mayor has to succeed first by being tough and bottom-line-oriented and postponing some of his commitments and promises, then that was what he had to do so he could fight another day.

This setback was very difficult for people to accept. First, the transition from outsider to insider was not easy to accomplish. Many in my new administration had spent their professional careers as advocates and had to learn the consequences of their new responsibilities. Outside, they had found it easy to write reports and issue directives concerning what agencies should be doing, but once they were inside and had learned the finite nature of government funds and the intricate parceling necessary to satisfy all constituents, not simply theirs, they soon became aware of the true difficulty of governing. Given who I was and the platform on which I had been elected, the expectations for progress on many fronts were profound.

...

Nancy Wackstein was encouraged by her friends and former coworkers in the social services field to take the job offered her as director of the Mayor’s Office on Homelessness. “We need you there,” they told her. Within ninety days, they were beating the hell out of her because we hadn’t shut down all the welfare hotels yet. “Ninety days!” she says. “We couldn’t even find the toilets!”

 Addressing poverty and homelessness is never a winning strategy for a mayor. The issue has a very small constituency—far less powerful and well funded than, for example, the real estate or business communities—and the problems are so deeply entrenched and intractable that the best one can accomplish is to make headway, not truly solve these massive societal difficulties in one or two terms in office. Nevertheless, I felt it was important to focus on the issue of homelessness early in my administration. I had been elected on a platform that placed it front and center, and I could speak to the issues directly from the heart.

First, I wanted to empty the Manhattan welfare hotels of homeless families. The hotels were a blight, and they were not providing safety or comfort to the people whom they were housing. Children in particular were being damaged by the arrangement. It was inhumane and expensive, and two of the major offenders—the Hotel Carter and the Martinique—were in Times Square and Herald Square, respectively, crossroads of cultural and mercantile activity, which made them highly visible. Those hotels and dozens like them were costing the city millions of dollars and giving it a black eye. The Hotel Carter was only a few blocks from the offices of the New York Times, which almost guaranteed a continuing flow of negative press coverage. We began the relocation effort. Where could we house the residents? Our first choice was to place folks in hospitable shelters, most of which we would have to create, as few were immediately available. We had developed an aggressive program to develop alternatives to these hotels that we called Tier 2 shelters. Our plan was to use city-owned, tax-foreclosed in rem housing stock, rehabilitate it into private apartments with private kitchens and baths, and have these buildings run by social service agencies, not private landlords. We accelerated the production schedule at the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) to achieve this goal. At the same time, we put immediate pressure on the NYC Housing Authority to find suitable quarters for what was to be an extremely large group of relocated families.

Mayor Koch’s approach to the homeless had been punitive. He had created Tier 1 shelters, those huge Quonset hut–style armory structures, in places like Roberto Clemente State Park, where as many as a thousand men were housed in row after row of beds on an open drill floor with an absolute lack of privacy. His concept boiled down to: Don’t make shelters too nice because it will coddle people and they’ll stay there too long. I was of another belief altogether. I felt it was society’s duty to help the less fortunate among us live acceptably comfortable lives. We wanted these places to be pleasant. We also wanted them to offer social services so residents could not only live with some element of dignity but also begin the transition to better lives.

None of this came without a fight. The shelter system was administered by the NYC Human Resources Administration (HRA), whose commissioner, Barbara Sabol, was determined to fix the child welfare system; some of those trying to resolve the homeless situation found her disinterested in their cause. Some found HPD commissioner Felice Michetti overtly hostile to the notion of moving homeless families into newly renovated housing units, fearing damage to the equity, and Michetti battled with Nancy Wackstein over the order in which and to whom these units became available. Wackstein had leaned heavily on the Housing Authority to open some of the vacant units in city-seized abandoned properties and take in a larger number of homeless families by giving them priority of placement, and then she was castigated—shrieked at—by housing advocates for “ruining” public housing by putting so many homeless families in these units!

This was a complicated issue. Who gets first dibs on government housing—a hardworking secretary with a family who earns $23,000 a year, or a homeless family living in terrible conditions in a welfare hotel costing the city $3,000 a month?

I have an HPD secretary here who comes to work every day—why doesn’t she have priority for those apartments?!

I have a family of six living in one room with a hot plate for a stove—why don’t they have priority?!

The wait for subsidized housing was eternal. Who would get it? People who had followed all the rules and done the right thing or people who had nothing at all? There was no right answer because there were too many New Yorkers in need and not enough government services to help all of them. (Modern conservative thought would have them all out on the street, unserved by government whatsoever. I find that appalling.) Nancy Wackstein was berated by a New York Times editorial writer who told her, “You are ruining the New York City Public Housing Authority, which has been the jewel in the crown of municipal government, because you are, in effect, allowing people to jump the line!” Norman Steisel initially felt that this was an alarmist argument, that the number of people being relocated was sufficiently small that the effect on the Housing Authority properties was negligible, and besides, their need was great. Bill Lynch was initially supportive of the move as well because he had spent sizable resources and a significant amount of time in city housing getting out the vote and he found it a large and dependable political constituency whose increase in size could only help us.

Were people with substandard housing trying to abuse the system, declaring themselves homeless and knowing they could therefore jump the line for subsidized housing, or were they legitimate potential recipients of government assistance? Certainly some people were trying to scam the system, and the public at large does fix on anecdotes. (Ronald Reagan’s bogus “welfare queens” story comes immediately to mind.) But just as our system of jurisprudence says it is far better to let nine guilty people go free than to convict an innocent person, one does not formulate policy based upon outliers; one creates policy based on the majority, and this policy response was entirely appropriate to the needs shared by most of the homeless. I do not believe anyone in my administration ever imagined he or she was doing harm; we were only dividing precious resources in the best way possible.

Our initial efforts were enormously successful. Under my mandate, Steisel and Wackstein would knock heads every week with representatives of the Human Resources Administration, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and the Housing Authority. “Where are we? What are the numbers? How many units are coming on line? How are we moving the move-ins?” Within a year we had relocated almost all of the hotels’ homeless families; the residential population fell from 3,300 families to 150. Funding was divided 50 percent federal, 25 percent state, and 25 percent city; the New York State Department of Social Services had oversight of the shelter system, however, and it supported our Tier 2 concept. We had to demonstrate that we were meeting the state’s considerable regulations, and when we gained their approval they turned on the money.

Then came a surge.

When it became clear that the homeless were indeed receiving priority and that the supply of higher-quality housing was increasing, the number of people entering the shelter system began to rise dramatically. Those who had been concerned about such an eventuality were proved correct. Were there people on the edge who decided to become homeless in order to gain a better deal? Did an increased availability of housing stock, the belief that one could obtain this housing by declaring homelessness, and a national economic downturn that threw people out of their jobs and homes all conspire to create a homeless epidemic? It is entirely possible.

We had eliminated Koch’s Tier 1 shelters. I felt this to be a major accomplishment; they had come to symbolize all that was wrong with the shelter system. We were building Tier 2s as fast as we could but were forced by the circumstance of overwhelming demand to become reliant on hotels again. Outer-borough “hot sheet” motels could make more money renting to the city than letting out rooms by the hour, and we found some acceptable lodging there. But even they began to decrease in supply.

In 1979 attorney Robert Hayes had found a passage in the New York State Constitution that mandated “the aid, care, and support of the needy,” and he had sued New York City in an effort to help the city’s panhandlers, presumably all single people. Soon thereafter, Legal Aid sued on behalf of homeless families. Hayes found a receptive ear with Supreme Court judge Richard Wallach, and an agreement was reached. Hayes wanted small shelters and housing, but Mayor Koch disagreed. “I believe there are minimums below which nobody should be permitted to fall,” Koch said later, “but after that, this country is so big, so wonderful and filled with opportunities, after that you have to earn it.”

After much negotiation, the city and Hayes signed a consent decree that made New York the first municipality in the United States to guarantee each homeless person, as the New York Times put it, “the bare necessities of shelter: a mattress, a pillow, clean sheets, soap, a roof over his head.” The regulations included the proviso that anyone who applied to the city for shelter before 11:00 pm had to be placed by 8:00 the next morning. In an unpredictable twist, the New York State Social Services commissioner who approved that regulation had been Cesar Perales, who became my deputy mayor for health and human services. “My anger at the time I approved those regulations,” he says, “had been motivated by local upstate conservative communities who felt that if their homeless sat there long enough, they would just go to a relative or somewhere else, and the taxpayers of, say, Allegheny County would not have to put them up in a hotel.

“In New York City,” he continues, “there was a giant Human Resources Administration, but in most small counties there was only a small Department of Social Services. We got federal money, which was matched by the cities and localities, but we were in charge of the rules, one of which I thought was perfectly logical: if someone showed up at the Department of Social Services and said, ‘I’m homeless,’ filled out all the forms, and indicated they had no place to go, they had forty-eight hours to put them somewhere. You couldn’t just let them sit around your office, which was what was happening in most places upstate.”

In New York City there was also the issue of admission. The screening process itself was suspect. People would appear at the intake centers and say, “I’m homeless.” They would be asked, in effect, “Where did you stay last night?”

 “Well, I was with my brother-in-law, but his wife won’t let me stay there anymore.”

“Go back.” The examiner would assess the situation and determine that the person had an acceptable lodging and was therefore ineligible. Representatives from the Coalition for the Homeless and the Legal Aid Society opined that while this might be true in X number of cases, in Y number the person really had no place to go, yet all were being put out. What were they supposed to do? So you have to envision a mother with two or three little kids and no roof over their heads for the night out in the damn street. It didn’t stop there. Once applicants were ruled ineligible, they were not entitled to reapply for a specific amount of time, so they were out in the street for the duration.

The need was never-ending. The harder the Office on Homelessness worked, the more successful it was in shutting down these unspeakable hotels, the more people poured into the streets and the demand for affordable housing skyrocketed. The Office of Management and Budget would constantly ask, “How do you close the front door?” The answer was, until there is work available sufficient to enable families and individuals to pay acceptable rent, you don’t.

...

One of the ideas we brought to fruition was the “New York/New York Agreement,” a housing initiative jointly supported between New York City and the state. A number of recent legal decisions had made it more difficult to commit people to mental institutions against their will, and as a result, from 1963 to 1976, the national census of public mental hospital patients fell from 504,000 to 16,000. In the 1980s, managed care systems created financial incentives to admit fewer people to mental hospitals and to discharge them more quickly. The phrase “mental hospitals emptied” was not uncommon among policymakers and the media in New York at that time, and the streets and subways seemed inundated with people with mental difficulties who had nowhere to go. The city and state agreement assisted homeless people with mental illness or substance abuse problems by providing housing accompanied by a wide variety of social services located within the shelters. While that was an important breakthrough, because these residents were particularly troubled, their potential presence contributed to the Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) problems and made finding locations for the new Tier 2 facilities even more difficult; we had to reach out to the City Council for assistance. We needed local goodwill and ultimately acceptance to place facilities in individual neighborhoods, and while the Human Resources Administration had strong experience in working with advocacy groups on general issues, it was less experienced in working with community boards on a block-by-block basis on neighborhood issues.

The shelter system’s intake centers, called Emergency Assistance Units (EAUs) and run by the Human Resources Administration, were swamped. These were the offices established to interview and evaluate housing applicants as to whether they were in fact eligible, and if so, where they could be placed. The intake centers were the valve into the system. But as the demand surged we were faced with an overflow of applicants whom we could not get through the pipeline; there was no place on the back end to put them. Housing Authority stock was full, hotels were all taken, and Tier 2s were not yet built with capacity to meet the demand. As a result, the entire shelter system was overwhelmed. And so we were faced with the unsettling and entirely unacceptable picture of families camping out at intake centers, people sleeping on plastic chairs, babies diapered on desks, pregnant women and people with mental illnesses spending the night without food in office lobbies. The situation deteriorated so much that Judge Helen E. Freedman of the State Supreme Court found New York City in contempt of court and ordered four members of my administration to spend a night in the intake centers themselves. Norman Steisel and Barbara Sabol did not get along, and Nancy Wackstein, who worked with both, was keen on the idea of their sharing a jail cell. (Shortly thereafter, burned out from the battles, Nancy left government to direct the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House and, later, the United Neighborhood Houses of New York. She has been a tireless advocate ever since.) The contempt-of-court citations were later overturned by the Court of Appeals. The Legal Aid suit was finally settled with the Bloomberg administration in 2011.

Meanwhile, resistance from the Housing Authority increased. With the new families came heightened property damage and community destabilization. The formerly homeless were not entirely welcomed and did not always behave well, creating a physical, cultural, and political upheaval in the housing projects. Both Lynch and Steisel recognized the damage being done in their areas and were pursuing solutions.

The federal government ran a subsidy program called Section 8 that included a housing voucher for low-income people, but there was no possibility of its being used on New York City’s behalf. Mayors and governors habitually say that the federal government “walked away,” but this was the end of the Reagan era, when his administration had almost completely disinvested the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development; none of the Reagan people displayed any interest in putting money into affordable housing in New York or anywhere else. They didn’t so much walk away as hightail it.

Advocates for the homeless proposed that New York City create a Section 8 of its own. They suggested increasing the amount of money given to welfare recipients for rent supplements, on the theory that if you gave them another $20 a month they would be able to rent more commodious apartments in the community. We studied the idea and found that $20 would make no difference whatsoever: landlords would simply increase their rents without raising the quality of the housing. We found that raising benefits by $100 a month was more like it. In concept this made sense. Unfortunately, in New York City at a time of severe financial setback, the idea was a budget buster. The Office of Management and Budget ran the numbers and Deputy Director Beverly Donohue came running into Nancy Wackstein’s office saying, “We can’t do this, it will bankrupt the city!”

...

A pitched battle was erupting between the advocates, on the one hand, and what Norman Steisel calls the “naysayer ideologues,” on the other. We needed to broaden the discussion. We established the New York City Commission on the Homeless, headed by Andrew Cuomo, which, after some time, came back with a series of policy initiatives. One was the creation of the Department of Homeless Services, which would focus exclusively on this problem that was clearly going to be an urban issue for at least a generation.

I named Charles “Chip” Raymond that department’s first commissioner. I felt that we had sufficient advisers with advocacy backgrounds on our team and that we needed a person with strong managerial skills and experience. Raymond had distinguished himself while improving the conditions at the Willowbrook State School for mentally disabled children after WABC-TV reporter Geraldo Rivera’s startling revelations of its horrible conditions in 1972. The work Raymond did at Willowbrook not only made life better for the six thousand children exposed to these conditions, but set the groundwork for ultimately closing that institution in 1987 and putting people into community-based supportive settings. The state had hired a team of people led by Norman Steisel, who was a consultant at the time, to get that job done, and Chip Raymond had performed admirably. The fact that Chip and Norman had already worked together was an added benefit when we established the Department of Homeless Services and put Chip in charge.

The shelters would be taken out of the hands of the Human Resources Administration, and the city would hire nonprofit groups to provide drug treatment, job training, and other services for the homeless. Not-for-profit organizations were linked to the communities they served, while the city was viewed as an outside force; they could provide social services while capitalizing on and leveraging other available social service funds. Among the homeless commission’s suggestions was that families tie their eligibility for housing to their willingness to accept treatment or services for problems like drug abuse, alcoholism, and mental illness, which had been found to be rampant in the homeless population. Also offered would be stabilizing services such as parenting classes, so that once families had moved into Housing Authority and other facilities they had the knowledge and skills to maintain them properly. Without those skills, the homeless were feared to be destabilizing groups of people who just couldn’t take care of themselves. You give them new housing and they’ll just wreck it. Kids will get mugged. And so on. Participation in those programs became a ticket into permanent housing; in order to earn placement one had to successfully complete these initiatives. There was no such thing as a free ticket.

The New York City Commission on the Homeless reinforced the many proposals made by my administration and by advocacy groups, including expanding investment in housing for the mentally ill and affordable rentals for homeless families; eliminating the warehouse-style armory shelters; and expanding supportive services to the homeless living on the streets.

Andrew Cuomo chaired that commission until 1993, when he moved into President Bill Clinton’s administration as assistant secretary responsible for community and economic development at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Our approach was successful. According to Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources Administration figures, during the Koch years the homeless population rose to 28,000. During my administration, the figure was reduced to between 17,000 and 24,000. It remained steady during the Giuliani years, but has skyrocketed to between 35,000 and 40,000 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

...

It was apparent to me that New York City’s public health care system, if not entirely broken, needed intensive strengthening.

Think of Medicaid as insurance for the very poor. Under insurance plans, you visit a doctor, the doctor treats you, and then the doctor is paid a proscribed fee from the insurance company plus your individual copayment. The problem for poor folks was that the fee the doctor received from the government for his or her services was extremely minimal and that rate never increased. This payment had not been sufficient when the program commenced in 1965, and in 1991 it was no longer anywhere near realistic. As a result, most private practitioners were no longer accepting Medicaid patients. People who knew what was happening in the ghetto, in poor communities, understood that whatever health care existed was found in Medicaid mills, often run-down filthy offices in which a doctor would be set up to see one person every seven minutes to make even sixty bucks in an hour. Medical care was brief and perfunctory at best, and often shoddy. Sometimes the doctor would bill the government for serving the whole family when he had seen only one individual, because that was the only way these guys could make it. Not that they were nice guys to begin with.

The other alternative for care was in hospital clinics, where tradition held that everyone who entered was seen. Clinics were aligned with teaching hospitals. There were no appointments; one would arrive at 9:00 am and by 10:00, when the doctor and student showed up, there would be another hundred patients waiting to be examined. Then they’d let ’em loose out of the corral, like they were cattle. This is the way doctors were being taught to practice medicine. Poor people, with little access to doctors and no money to pay them, had also for some time been using the city’s public hospital emergency rooms for primary care, going there to have all manner of medical circumstance treated instead of only emergencies. This was not only driving up hospital costs at taxpayer expense, but creating a logjam that underserved the working class and prevented those in desperate medical need from being tended to in a timely manner. I created the position of deputy mayor for health and human services to create a system to cure these ills.

We recruited Cesar A. Perales, who for the previous nine years had been commissioner of the New York State Department of Social Services under Gov. Mario Cuomo, and before that had been assistant secretary for human services in the newly created Department of Health and Human Services in the Jimmy Carter White House. We had heard that he was tired of living in Albany and was excited about the possibility of returning to the city, where he had been raised, earned a bachelor’s degree from City College, and graduated from Fordham Law School. Perales had represented the Young Lords, an activist Puerto Rican community organization, after they took control of a church to provide social services to the poor in El Barrio, and he had negotiated the early-morning nonviolent arrest of over a hundred members who refused to obey a police demand to leave. “The Young Lords were seen as a radical young Puerto Rican group that, actually in that situation had taken over that church and were offering breakfast to the kids,” he says. “These young people had a right to have a lawyer. I was doing my job as a lawyer for a group that I thought was doing good things.”

During the interview process, Perales was introduced to the variety of styles and people in my administration. His initial meeting was with Bill Lynch, whom he had previously met casually. Lynch wanted to know how Perales thought, how he related to people, whom he knew in the community. Though this is not standard procedure for deputy mayoral interviews, they talked politics. Lynch tried to draw him out: What were his interests? What kind of person was he? “He wasn’t going to quiz me on what I knew about the latest changes in the welfare law, or in Medicaid or anything else,” Cesar recalls. “I don’t even know whether Bill knew anything about it.” Perales came away with the distinct impression that Lynch was interested in what he was about as a person, not simply as a government functionary. “You’ll hear from somebody,” Lynch told him when they concluded. “And a couple of days later a guy named Norman Steisel calls me,” Perales recalls now.

Rather than meet at someone’s home, Steisel suggested a more formal breakfast at a restaurant in the World Trade Center. “Norman was interested in what I knew,” Perales recalls. “What I wanted to do in the government, what I had heard about what was going on in the Dinkins administration. He was a tough interviewer. Pure business.”

Bill and Norman both reported back to me, each from his individual perspective. “I would hope that Lynch would say, ‘This is a solid guy,’ and that Norman would say, ‘This guy knows his business,’” Perales says. “I, like so many other people, had read in the newspapers that there was a war going on between the Lynches and the Steisels, and that it just wasn’t working. I could understand how somebody would say, ‘These guys have got to stab each other in the back every day of the week,’ because they were so totally different and approached people so differently. I mean, Norman was not a warm and cuddly guy. But I clearly got a very different impression, that while they were two very different people, they both were very serious about government. Both of them were extremely loyal to the mayor and were interested in giving him the best advice they could give him, but from two totally different perspectives.”

After Perales survived both Lynch and Steisel, he met with me. My question was: What do you want to do for the people of New York? Prepared to persuade me of his great talents, he gave me an insight into his many years in government: “The one thing I’ve learned is, we’re all short-timers. And that we have to decide what it is we want to do, and then narrow that down to what we think we can do within a period of time, and then decide that that’s what we want to do. And every morning when you get up and go to work, that’s what you’re about, and that’s what you’re going to tell the people who work for you.”

“Well,” I asked, “what do you want to do?”

Perales laid out the problem. Medicaid did not in any real sense give poor people access to care; most competent doctors would not see them because the program paid so little, which left a substantial portion of the city’s population to the mercies of Medicaid mills and emergency rooms. Neither was acceptable.

What was becoming increasingly clear to those conversant in public health was that unless a patient had a doctor whom he or she had seen before, that patient was at a serious disadvantage. A doctor treating a patient for the first time would have no medical history, would be unaware of the medicines being taken or previous reactions, and would have to start running tests in order to document symptoms, though usually the doctor wouldn’t even bother. What was needed—and the phrase became dogma among physicians who were concerned about primary care—was “continuity of care.” This was essential. Also, because of its progressive traditions, New York City maintained that people ought not to be forced to see a particular doctor; the concept of freedom of choice in selection of a physician was another accepted doctrine. Many members of my team believed in that freedom. Nevertheless, Perales suggested Medicaid Managed Care.

Until that moment, New York City had resisted the concept, and my predecessor was vilified for even mentioning it. Ed Koch had taken some heat on the issue, and during my first two years in office I had stayed away from it. But Perales was a smart and progressive man whom I trusted to give me an honest appraisal, and as I listened he made a lot of sense. I could take the heat if it meant improving the health of the city community.

There was an additional incentive to create such a system. At between 11 and 12 percent, the cost of Medicaid was the most rapidly rising expenditure in the city budget; citywide, other expenditures were increasing by between only 1 and 3 percent. If we could effectively control the growth of these health costs, we could save the city approximately $2 billion. The issue was a winner in the business community and with the public at large.

We decided to present Medicaid Managed Care as an experiment, but we were really just getting the ball rolling. Under our Medicaid plan, doctors would receive a monthly fee of $75 for every patient seen, but each patient would have unlimited access to the physician and could show up at the doctor’s office as many times as he or she desired. If the patient chose not to avail himself or herself of those services, the doctor would still receive the $75. The concept was that, unlike the Medicaid mill, where a doctor had incentive to say, “Come back tomorrow” in order to pick up another payday, physicians would act like real doctors and attempt to cure their patients as quickly and humanely as possible. In fact, it was in the doctor’s best interest to treat patients successfully from the start; any patient who got sick was going to come back and see that doctor three times that month, taking time and space away from other potential clients.

There were many in the health care field who said we ought not to change Medicaid and require people to join managed care, but Perales believed that if we had facilities and could put together decent plans, we had a true opportunity to improve the health care of a large number of New York City residents. Health care plans had been criticized for limiting the number of doctors available to each of their participants. Health care was a right, these critics held, and if the state put people in health maintenance organizations, it was abridging those rights. In concept this was fine, but in the real world the argument lost much of its luster; it was unacceptable to me to have people using emergency rooms as their primary care source and so getting no care. This wasn’t about denying people the freedom of choice. The choices available to them were so terrible that it was a meaningless argument!

For those who felt strongly about the importance of continuity of care, Perales had another plan.

Again I asked, “What do you want to do?”

“Well, we’ve got hospitals up the kazoo,” Perales told me. “We’ve got the Department of Health on the other side with all sorts of clinics. We ought to put them together and focus on providing people with family doctors right in their neighborhood.”

“How would we do that?”

“The first, the most important thing,” he told me, “is to lay out a plan. Once you’ve got a plan in place, it’ll happen. The most difficult element will be to get people to focus on how you get parts of the hospital system to work with the Department of Health clinics and all of the other facilities that might be available to do this. This takes planning, because not everything is going to fit.”

“How long do you think it would take you to do something like that?”

“I bet I could do it in about three months.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I could do that in about three months.”

I hired him.

On Cesar Perales’s first day on the job, I delivered the State of the City Address. He was seated prominently near the front. “I was thinking, Wow! with the City Council sitting behind me, I feel very important,” he remembers. I announced his appointment with great pride and seriousness, and then told the gathered dignitaries and press, “In one hundred days we will have a plan for Communi-care. Primary care facilities in the communities. One hundred days.” I gave him an extra ten!

The press surrounded Cesar afterwards. How could he possibly succeed?

Every twenty days, print and broadcast reporters would call Perales’s office to see if he was getting anywhere. Our entire operation was working hard, but there was a palpable sense that the media wanted us to fail. Success would mean an improvement in the health and welfare of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, but failure would mean a better story of broken government promises—always a winner.

Bureaucracy is notoriously slow to budge, and it is a Sisyphean effort to move the municipal rock. This had been Perales’s experience of federal and state bureaucracy, which was why he had come to the conclusion that all one could reasonably expect was to pick a small piece and try one’s best to dislodge it. However, Cesar was pleased to find that, working with tough and ruthless operatives such as Director of Operations Harvey Robins and Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget Barbara Turk, they got the bureaucracy moving.

One fight encapsulated the larger struggle. The doctors at the Department of Health worked nine-to-five. This was the expected routine: one passed the Civil Service exam or its medical equivalent, one became a government doctor, one worked at the clinic, and one left at five o’clock sharp. Well, that wasn’t going to work if we were going to have family doctors in the community. People—patients!—worked from nine to five, Monday to Friday, and often Saturday, and many were not in a position to take time off to visit their doctor. Our physicians would have to take turns being on call. This was the deal or else the whole concept would die.

So, believe it or not, there was a negotiation, a Civil Service negotiation, as to how much more we would have to pay doctors in the Health Department to change their title and create a class of physician, and a class of assistants and nurses and others, who would be available after hours a certain number of days each week to serve the community. All of this had to be negotiated. People outside of government cannot imagine that something like that would literally take weeks. And Cesar had the deadline of one hundred days looming.

How did this get done? Perales had a lot of help from his staff, people who would muscle everybody. “I mean, they were pushing people around,” he says. Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg’s preferred expression was a smile, so she smiled her way through while Barbara Turk applied the muscle. They found office space in which to situate community health care centers. They organized doctors, nurses, and aides to staff these offices, and they found supplies to make them whole. They created a network of community health care centers—Communi-care—and they succeeded. They came back to Cesar one day and said, “It’s done.” Peggy rose to the position of commissioner of the New York City Department of Health in my administration and later became the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration in the Obama administration.

Cesar delivered Communi-care to Gracie Mansion on the ninety-ninth day, at about 5:00 pm. The plan changed the very nature of health care in New York City by opening thirteen community family health centers in underserved areas; in these centers, individuals would have their own doctors and access to care twenty-four hours a day. With this level of access to primary and preventive care within the community, in warm, attractive settings, poor New Yorkers no longer were forced to resort to emergency rooms to serve as their family doctors. For the ten centers for which statistics were available, 637,493 visits were recorded from September 1992 to August 1993.

Our Medicaid Managed Care program was the largest privatization effort ever undertaken in municipal government. It replaced the problematic, cumbersome “fee-for-service” system with coordinated health networks offering comprehensive, preventive, and primary care for Medicaid recipients. The streamlined system gave doctors greater incentives to serve Medicaid clients and made a wide range of commercial health care plans available to Medicaid recipients. From 1990 to December 1993, the number of health care plans participating in our Medicaid Managed Care program grew from six to sixteen. Under this initiative, 162,000 Medicaid recipients joined managed care plans, greater even than our goal of 100,000, and more than tripling the number of those who had joined the small, voluntary plans that had been available over the previous twenty years, like Group Health Incorporated (GHI) and Health Plan of New York (HIP) (which had their own problems and needed a shot in the arm). Our plan was to sign up approximately a half-million recipients over a four-year period.

Our health programs were so successful that my successor, Rudy Giuliani, in one of his rare efforts to maintain a program from my administration, tried to expand them. His commissioners were instructed to really step on the gas and try to enroll 800,000 eligible New Yorkers almost immediately. Medicaid Managed Care was dependent on matching patients with provider networks, and whereas we worked diligently within reachable timelines and guidelines, Giuliani could not put these networks in place to match their increased enrollment. Insurers did not have the administrative capabilities to properly meet the medical needs of all those who were eligible. Giuliani’s effort failed miserably and collapsed for several years until it was reinstated on a more reasonable growth trajectory. What could have been a legacy of significantly improved health throughout the city died owing to overreaching. It was a shame. We were ahead of the curve.

Recently programs similar to ours have begun to be legislated in several states, most notably Florida, in response to or as an enhancement of the Affordable Care Act, or what is being called “Obamacare.”

We also created the innovative Primary Care Development Corporation to leverage funds and provide seed money and incentives for nonprofit organizations to open health centers in their neighborhoods; this program offered access to financing, allowed for primary care expansion, and further enhanced accessibility to health care for New Yorkers. We placed $17 million in a revolving fund for planning and development of these centers, and under this program $250 million in long-term, low-interest, tax-exempt bonds became available for construction costs. The program represented the single largest infusion of primary care capacity since the original federal community health center program of the 1960s and provided care for an additional 300,000 New Yorkers.

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In December 1992, a nor’easter tore through New York, damaging and isolating a huge stretch from Staten Island through the Bronx. From a distance New York may appear to be a gruff city, but that’s a bad rap; New Yorkers have a tradition of pulling together during times of emergency. However, its service agencies sometimes do not get the message. This storm required a coordinated effort among the Sanitation, Transportation, Parks, and Fire Departments. Each had individual expertise and separate equipment, and each was historically protective of its turf. Instead of having each agency work in its own silo, we told them, “Forget about what badge you’re wearing, we’re all one city.” This was my vision of the true New York community—a unity of neighborhoods, a gorgeous mosaic, put to the test—and I am very proud to say we responded generously. We brought the talent and resources of the city to the stoops of people in every borough along the border. For a city of more than seven million people, we went so far as to do boutique scheduling. If an elderly woman’s basement in Queens had filled with water and she said, “Well, my son-in-law is coming Saturday at two o’clock,” we had the first available department there to help her when he arrived. If a tree had fallen on someone’s home in the Bronx, the Fire Department company most available would get out its saws and solve the problem. It didn’t matter which neighborhood was in need. Regardless of neighborhood, people in crisis, whether an AIDS patient or a homeless person or one of the elderly, had the talent and expertise of all city agencies at their disposal. As Harvey Robins said, “Everybody got whacked, everybody got help.”

Infrastructure was vital to my vision of the city. New York is filled with aging bridges whose importance to city commerce and personal traffic is paramount. We were fighting for each dollar, yet I told the staff, “We cannot not have our bridges inspected.” They could not be allowed to fall into disrepair. Politicians generally don’t think about maintenance; there’s no photo-op to painting a bridge, and one cannot hold a child’s hand and walk him across six lanes of truck traffic to demonstrate such a thing the way one can escort a schoolboy into an after-school program at a library. But let the damn thing fall down and there’s hell to pay. (If one erects a new bridge, one can stand there and take bows, but we did not have that kind of money.)

The Daily News published a photo op-ed of a place beside one of the highways in the Bronx where people were dumping garbage. The image didn’t need a whole lot of words. The headline said approximately, “Why isn’t the Mayor taking on these dumping grounds?” Although I didn’t like the heat, I was glad the situation had been brought to our attention. We called in the sanitation commissioner and developed a vacant lot cleaning program. As a result, the number of vacant lots cleaned by the city that year doubled.

Not satisfied with a simple cleanup, we pursued a larger community effect. What was in short supply? Ball fields. We converted rubble-strewn lots that were of sufficient size into playing fields. New York was filled with vacant lots, and our program was highly successful. Didn’t mean they were going to be there forever; if the footprint was big enough, the land would probably, ultimately, be used for housing development. Still, we were straightforward with the communities, which were thrilled to have these dangerous eyesores rehabilitated. We leveled with them: “This is not for life. You can have it—until.” Housing did claim some of these renovated fields, but a number are still in place and being used by kids and adults to this day.

Harvey Robins was struck by the fact that abandoned vehicles routinely littered the poorest parts of the city but none whatsoever could be found in our wealthier neighborhoods. He put together a small task force of sanitation, transportation, and parks administrators. “Look, I don’t know how to get there, but this is what I want,” he told them. “I want, within three days, if there’s a vehicle in a neighborhood, if it’s in a park or it’s on a street—I want it gone.”

“Why is this such an important priority?” he was asked. “You know we don’t have money. We’re getting our budgets cut. Times are tight.”

Harvey said, “An eyesore in a neighborhood tells people that government doesn’t care.” And often an eyesore became a more serious problem: abandoned vehicles became filled with trash, then fires started and even more danger accrued. This is not unlike the James Wilson and George Kelling “broken windows” theory of criminology that Bill Bratton used so successfully when he became police commissioner. “I know you guys care,” Harvey told them, “so let’s get on with it.” The administrators said, “Feed us and get out of the room, we’ll figure it out.”

Meals were brought in for several days while the men and women conferred. When they finally emerged, they had created what they called a public-private partnership. In the past the three agencies had hated this work. It had involved picking up the abandoned vehicles, then towing them to a distant junk lot in Brooklyn, after which they had no use for them. All that changed.

First, the administrators developed a tracking system whereby, rather than reporting an abandoned vehicle to their agency, transportation or sanitation agents would simply tag the junker, note the cross street, and contact a scrap dealer, who would call in his own truck, take the wreck to his own shop, and turn it into a profit. If the first scrap dealer did not pick it up within three days, the agents went down the alphabet to find another.

The program was magical. Overnight what had been an urban blight became a job-creating economic opportunity. The administrators said, “This is great! All we have to do is phone it in, put it on a computer, and some guy comes and takes it away!” For our part, we could properly and accurately tell people in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, “We care.”

Our abandoned vehicle initiative has now become a national program.

...

I recruited a number of passionate, progressive advocates who, after twelve years of being on the outside during the Koch administration, were eager to make real change from within when they came to work for me. They felt their moment had arrived. But without any money, we were often reduced to maintaining the status quo, and even that was sometimes considered a win. Not only did this pain me, but it was hard to explain clearly to those on the outside whose needs were legitimate and continued to be unmet.

The Financial Control Board was a constant presence. It could not determine policy, and it could not recommend one course of action over another. Put simply, they couldn’t tell you how many eggs to buy—you could buy all eggs and no bread if that was the way you wanted to spend your grocery money—but they could tell you how much you could spend on eggs and bread. The need to cut spending rather than put government money to good use was an issue that invaded every aspect of my mayoralty. To that end, we monitored the agencies to keep the expenses consistent with the falling revenues. Belts were tightened all around.

Norman Steisel was a key strategist, as was Director of Operations Harvey Robins. We went over the city budget line by line. Do we need an annual report in color? Do we need another driver? Do we need to take so many trips? Harvey was particularly expert in this regard, and among the areas on which he concentrated was the reduction of overtime. In the police, fire, and sanitation departments, overtime is what commissioners use as goodies. Civil service pension rates are based on the final three years of one’s government employment, and if one has earned significant amounts of time-and-a-half or double-time overtime during this period, the added benefit can last a lifetime. This behavior had been institutionalized, and we found that commissioners were less than willing to alter the awarding of these perquisites, which would of course have decreased their individual power and ability to bargain. However, in a difficult fiscal climate the last thing New York City needed was a rising debt burden.

What leverage did we have to encourage the commissioners to control their spending? Harvey felt that he could not get this done quietly, that the Office of Operations simply did not have the clout. What he did have was access to the press. Twice a year Harvey provided the media with reports on the pension benefits the city was paying to the recently retired. You may have seen these stories: illustrated by bar graphs and pictures, they list former city employees, their jobs, their salaries, the overtime they accrued in their final years, and the total. They are newspaper classics—for the rest of his or her life, a former commissioner will be making more each year than the mayor—and an embarrassment to the people in charge of signing off on these arrangements. Harvey named names.

Our biggest nut to crack was the Police Department. Commissioner Ray Kelly was not particularly pleased with Harvey, but he did authorize less overtime, and we were able to drive several million dollars out of the NYPD budget. This effort continued into the next administration. Commissioner Kelly was succeeded by Bill Bratton, whose first deputy, John Timoney, called Harvey and told him, “I’m gonna beat you. You’re out of office, but I’m gonna beat you anyway. We don’t need the Office of Operations to tell us how to reduce overtime, that’s an operations decision within the Police Department!” He then proceeded to drive overtime in his department down from approximately $300 million to around $80 million. I am pleased to have helped New York City save millions even when I was no longer mayor.

The concept of prevention had some currency. New York City could not print money, but if we invested what funds we did have in preventive services, we could see substantial future returns. If we taught and encouraged parents to care for and not abandon their children, the city not only would benefit from the solidity of the family unit but would save money for decades by avoiding expensive foster-care placement. If we offered resources and services in the community, we could prevent people from becoming homeless and therefore alleviate a huge drain on the city’s finances. If we put money into after-school programs, we could prevent the social disruption and significant expense of juvenile justice placement. For some people the sociocultural advantages are the deciding factor in the creation and nourishment of such programs; for others it is the dollar savings. What was important to me was that the city move forward on all levels. These arguments are being made on the local and national levels to this day, with varying degrees of success.

One possible solution was to cut the budget across the board. From a distance this sounds like a fair and sound policy—share the pain equally—but it was not a course I chose. In practice it is not fair or sound at all. The loss of, let us say, 5 percent of one agency’s budget might make it unable to hire staff who would do their jobs more effectively; a 5 percent cut at another agency could mean that a thousand people didn’t get breakfast anymore! I felt it would be negligent to engage in such blind cutting.

Wall Street was also involved in the financial underpinnings of New York City, and these financial interests were under no governmental stipulations as to how they might influence the budget. It appeared to us that the banks, the institutions that purchased the New York City municipal bonds upon which we relied for funds, also had some trepidation concerning my personal and my administration’s financial acumen. They were not comfortable at all with us, and they made these feelings known. Wall Street firms were cutting back on the size of their workforces, and they suggested that the city ought to downsize as well. “We think you guys should reduce the size of your head count,” we were told, “and there should be a ‘2’ in front of it.” In other words, they were looking for a reduction in the size of New York City’s workforce of at least 20,000 people.

Surprisingly, this was within reach. As vacancies appeared in each agency, a threshold decision had to be made: Will we backfill this position or shall we let it go vacant? If we replace one worker with another, will we fill the replacement’s position? This was planned shrinkage, and working with Comptroller Elizabeth Holtzman, we pursued it thoroughly. Early retirement packages were offered in order to create more vacancies. It was a laborious process, but in the end we were able to weather the crisis with limited layoffs. This wasn’t 1975, when the city was forced to let large numbers of cops and firefighters go. Now, even though I had been a math major, there was no calculus called for, no fancy division or multiplication. I was more often called upon to subtract than to add.

The economy was severely damaged, national unemployment had risen by 18 percent in 1990, and tax revenues had been savaged by it. In that atmosphere, we still had to get things done. I was not elected mayor to ignore the promises on which I had campaigned. I needed to achieve my goals within these trying parameters. Despite these challenges, I believe I held true to one of the tenets I put forth while campaigning: “With your help, I intend to be a mayor who pursues basic principles of justice, opportunity, and caring—a mayor who attacks the problems and not the victims.”