From One Mayor to the Next: Know Where You're Going

NEW YORK CITY-Rudolph Giuliani, who began a 20-year era of Republican mayoralty in a predominantly Democratic city, had news Thursday evening for the next man to take his old job: ideology and effective government don't mix. Giuliani advised Bill de Blasio—elected mayor in a landslide Tuesday, albeit a landslide of the smallest voter turnout since the city's Board of Elections began keeping track—to take his campaign promises, throw them in the trash and govern as a centrist.

Giuliani said he would not have succeeded as mayor if he had stuck to a strictly Republican agenda. “A rigidly ideological Democrat will fail as badly,” the two-term mayor told a well-filled room at Thursday's event, sponsored by CoreNet Global's New York City Chapter.

In a discussion moderated by Esther Fuchs, director of the urban and social policy program at Columbia University, Giuliani advised de Blasio to know in advance where he wanted to take his mayoralty. Prior to taking the oath of office in January 1993, Giuliani mapped out the key issues and how he planned to address them, and he told the CoreNet audience Thursday that de Blasio would do well to follow suit.

Under Giuliani and then Michael Bloomberg, “New York City has been run like a business for the past 20 years, not like a political organization,” said Giuliani. He advised de Blasio to take a similarly pragmatic approach as well as business-level sophistication on fiscal matters.

The city's next mayor campaigned on a platform that included addressing the city's shortage of affordable housing, and Giuliani wondered aloud how the program would be paid for. De Blasio has proposed increasing taxes on the wealthy to help fund the new housing stock. However, Giuliani pointed out that aside from property taxes, any tax increases de Blasio would hope to enact would need to come through Albany.

“I do not see Gov. Cuomo raising taxes on the rich in what for him is an election year,” he said. Further, he cautioned against alienating the hyper-wealthy, who could easily decamp to other states. “Wall Street doesn't need to be here” to complete trades, said Giuliani. “It can be done virtually online from West Palm Beach.”

Further, Giuliani said that the issue of affordable housing "can't be solved. You can ease it." For example, developing untouched areas of the city can result in apartment stock at reasonable rents, at least in the near term. Eventually, those areas--such as the Financial District and, more recently, Williamsburg in Brooklyn--become gentrified and the issue persists.

Although he warned that keeping the city's crime rate low is key to its economy and quality of life and expressed concern over de Blasio's stop-and-frisk rhetoric alienating rank-and-file police officers, Giuliani did not see replacing police commissioner Raymond Kelly as the next mayor's first hiring priority. Instead, he said, the first position de Blasio should fill is that of budget director, to begin devising a strategy to contain the municipal budget's looming $2-billion shortfall.