Yesterday, New York Democratic mayoral nominee Bill de Blasio went to the Rockaways, the southwestern corner of New York City, a peninsula that’s home to everything from prosperous beach communities and Robert Moses–designed public-housing projects. This whole area, which is basically a barrier island, was the part of New York City proper hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy, so de Blasio naturally talked up his plan to heal the area — and it sounds a lot like his liberal agenda.
When asked whether he’d use the funds on job training and to create “living-wage jobs,” de Blasio said, “I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know all the laws, rules and regulations effecting this funding. We are going to respect the law by definition. But within the power we do have, I think it’s substantial. I think the city of New York is in a strong position to make sure this money is used to the best way possible for our communities. I want to see the money used for living-wage jobs, for people who were affected by this crisis.”
That doesn’t sound so horrible, obviously, but it’s not exactly what you’d think “disaster relief” funds should be applied to. This isn’t some Sandinista-Straussian reading of de Blasio. He made his intent even clearer: ”With these new resources from the federal government,” he said, “we have to use it as a moment, not just to right the wrongs of Sandy but start righting some greater wrongs.”
One of the New York Times’ reporters covering the race, Michael Barbaro, tweeted out his piece on the event with the tagline, “De Blasio plans to use Sandy recovery money to achieve his liberal aims.” And there’s a lot of it (the Sandy recovery money, not de Blasio’s liberal aims — though there’s that too): The federal government appropriated about $60 billion for Sandy relief, with $1.8 billion of that directly going to the New York City government. The money was supposed to be allocated among infrastructure repair, higher city administration costs, projects to shore up the city against future storms, economic development, and housing costs. The last one is what we might actually want disaster relief to cover: helping to cover cost of damage done to people’s homes – what insurance doesn’t cover, transition costs, etc. (though why one of the biggest city governments in the world can’t do that on its own isn’t clear). Sending funds to repair infrastructure might seem halfway sensible when the federal government spends a lot on infrastructure, including cities’, as is, but the amount the federal government is sending is actually a pittance compared to what it’s going to cost to fix the city’s infrastructure.
But de Blasio doesn’t want the money spent on such sensible things, apparently: He’d rather see it spent on progressive programs – specifically, by letting the funding priorities be set by Alliance for a Just Rebuilding, a group of community nonprofits, labor groups, and leftist organizations that are almost to a one sympathetic to de Blasio’s campaign.
De Blasio’s “aspirational” ideas for Sandy relief reflect his casually corrupt liberal agenda, but they also get to the fundamental problem with the way federal disaster relief works: The federal government is put under tremendous pressure to bail out affected areas, but if it wants to disburse cash quickly (which, in the cases of some impoverished — probably not the tri-state area – maybe it should), it should involve block grants, loans, etc., that aren’t tied to arbitrary federal plans and can be best allocated by the local governments. But that presents a problem too, whether it’s because the local government is run by Bill de Blasio or because it’s as corrupt as New Orleans’s was and is. There are actually plenty more specific problems with the way federal disaster relief is disbursed, but the inherent conflict in their design is one reason to be a little skeptical of demands for generous funding in the wake of a disaster.
De Blasio claimed he also supports Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to shore up the most vulnerable parts of the city against future storms, which is what his opponent, libertrarian-leaning Republican Joe Lhota said he’d like to do. Jetties and seawalls, though — even union-built ones — don’t seem to be at the top of de Blasio’s priorities.