(20 Dec 2013) When Michael Bloomberg took the oath as mayor nearly a dozen years ago, he was a political neophyte faced with a city still smoldering from a terrorist attack that crippled its economy, wounded its psyche and left a ragged scar across lower Manhattan.
Bloomberg is now poised to leave office Dec. 31 having dramatically reshaped the city, from its government to its skyline. He steered it through a series of crises, both natural and man-made, and his innovative public health policies appear to have added years to residents' lives. The city has never been safer or cleaner, a teeming metropolis transformed into a must-see attraction for more than 50 million tourists a year.
But Bloomberg's approach to governing as the billionaire businessman he is, employing hard data and the free market to drive much of the city's renaissance, sometimes left him without an ability to connect with those who felt left behind. Income inequality grew during his years. The number of homeless has soared. And some ethnic and religious minorities complain that a steep drop in crime has come at the expense of their civil liberties.
As Bloomberg's three terms trickle down to their final days, he leaves as a singular figure with an unquestioned impact but as one whose legacy is still being debated. Polls show his policies are far more popular than the man.
"He took office at this unprecedented time and you look at what he did over 12 years. I think his legacy is going to be number one, public health," said Jeanne Zaino, a political science professor at New York University. "I think he has really staked his claim in that area."
Bloomberg spent three terms attacking cigarettes, artery-clogging fats and big, sugary drinks with the zeal most mayors reserve for wiping out crack dens and graffiti.
His initiatives weren't uniformly successful, and they often wound up getting challenged in court. Critics decried Bloomberg's New York as a "nanny state." Comics and commentators delighted in lampooning his attempt to fight obesity by banning restaurants and cafeterias from serving soda and other high-calorie beverages in cups larger than 16 ounces.
But his audacious initiatives reshaped the way policymakers nationwide think about government's role in protecting people from an unhealthy lifestyle, experts said.
"When you think back to when he first started saying 'we might ban smoking in these public areas' people looked at that and just thought it's kind of madness and kind of craziness and it wasn't going to work. And he did it," said Zaino.
His public health plans, which banned trans fats and tried to do the same for large sodas, have been credited with helping to increase New Yorkers' life expectancy by three years since 2002.
Largely apolitical, Bloomberg stayed out of petty partisan fights until the recession of 2008 prompted him to push to overturn a rule that limited mayors to serve just two terms. He first succeeded in overturning the city charter and then won narrowly at the ballot box in 2009, but his reputation with a large swath of the city never recovered.
His sometimes-angry defense of the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk tactic, which allows police to stop anyone deemed suspicious, has also hurt him. Though crime has fallen to record lows and the city has avoided another terrorist attack, blacks and Hispanics say they have been unfairly targeted by the tactic. Civil liberties groups also criticized the NYPD's Muslim surveillance program, which was revealed by The Associated Press.
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