What about on healthcare? The Long Island College Hospital was a huge issue during his first campaign; he even got arrested for protesting in front of a SUNY building about the sale of the hospital. There were multiple bids put in by developers, with 2 of them promising to keep a full-service hospital & renovating the satellite buildings as housing. de Blasio pushed for these proposals to move to the forefront to save jobs & keep health services for the community. Once he was sworn in, all of his public support went out the window, & the hospital heard f**k all from him. Backdoor dealings went through, & the hospital was sold to a real-estate developer who chose to tear everything down & barely maintain a glorified clinic.
That's not good from any perspective, let alone a left-wing one.
Yeah that's bad. I'd like to hear more and on more structural issues, but that's definitely a fair reason to vote HP.
Let's start with ineffectiveness. De Blasio regularly gets owned by Cuomo. Part of this is because that's how it's supposed to work, & also because de Blasio is just bad at PR. Universal Pre-K was a big deal & something that de Blasio was out in front of, but Cuomo batted him aside like a kid & passed the project, taking all the credit. Instead of just saying "we won, let's go," de Blasio whined about how it wasn't the best version, but people didn't care; they had Pre-K for their kids.
Vision 0 is his program to reduce pedestrian fatalities, & it hasn't exactly worked. In fact, pedestrian deaths in 2019 were up over 2018. The program has a few really unpopular features too: speed cameras, a 25 mph speed limit (especially unpopular in the more conservative fringes of the outer boroughs), & bike lanes in places where many locals don't want them.
His relationship with the NYPD also constantly causes him problems. At points, he wants to be able to distance himself from the actions of individual cops (i.e. Eric Garner's death) but wants to take credit for crime statistics. This pisses off both cops & people who have high opinions of the NYPD.
And his record on homelessness has been abysmal. The homeless are perceived to be everywhere & he has increased funding to seemingly no effect. His administration also allowed hotels to be converted into homeless shelters, & the city just pays $50 million/yr for homeless people to be warehoused in hotels without access to the basic services they actually need to stay off the streets. The sites of these hotel-shelters is also very controversial, & de Blasio has done next to nothing to meet with leaders in affected communities.
Another problem is one of corruption. de Blasio has been under investigation for his fundraising practices. He established a PAC/fund after his first election that his campaign fundraiser managed & solicited donations for. The people that gave to this fund were major lobbyists & their clients, particularly from the real-estate industry, & those donors have been rewarded. Rivington House was turned from a medical facility into luxury condos by a big donor & de Blasio's office gave the permission necessary for it to happen, & that's not even the first medical site to be converted (remember: the Long Island College Hospital) & even though he was arrested protesting planned conversions during the campaign, he just hasn't governed the same way. The Brooklyn-Queens connector is a tram that nobody asked for, wouldn't relieve much congestion, & would only benefit luxury condo developers along the Queens & Brooklyn waterfront. Those same developers that are backing the project are also hefty campaign donors to de Blasio. A corrupt restaurant owner who was a big political donor also got a controversial lease on a city-owned property in Queens after having given $54,000 to the mayor. He also allegedly helped his donors to sidestep election laws when giving to State Senate candidates he liked during the 2014 elections, which triggered an investigation.
And then there's the horse thing: horse stables (for the horses which are a part of the Central Park carriage rides) sit on very valuable land on the West Side, & developers wanna buy that land, but the stable owners won't sell. So developers funded NYCLASS, a group that went all out against Christine Quinn in the 2013 primary, & their consultants went on to get in trouble for breaking election laws because of data sharing & expenditures between campaigns. de Blasio said that he wants to ban the horses, but his motives have been questioned &, thus far, he hasn't been able to get it done. He has raised rates for horserides though.
So yeah. Seriously, it's some very structural issues that de Blasio has been bad at.
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