Believe it or not, there are head-spinning stories about dysfunctional New York politicians that do not involve Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio are in a forced marriage. Their partnership, such as it is, takes its cues from congressional Republicans and President Obama: They will play up their disagreements and bitterly snipe at each other in the press for as long as they both shall serve. And oh—they’re both Democrats.
Cuomo is the standard-issue liberal in the relationship, and the former attorney and tough guy. De Blasio is a full-blown progressive, the one-time “young leftist“, and someone Cuomo’s office characterized Thursday as a whiner: “Everyone is tired of hearing about what the mayor ‘feels’—he should just try to do his job,” a Cuomo spokesperson was quoted as saying in a New York Daily News story about de Blasio’s many criticisms of Albany after the legislative session concluded last week.
As an official with a long background in housing policy, the mayor listed as one of his top action items for state lawmakers an expired real-estate tax break for the construction of affordable residences. For decades, developers wanting to build in some of the city’s zoned, high-density and high-cost areas (“exclusion areas”) could use an exemption called 421-a to subsidize their projects, as long as their buildings included 20 percent affordable units. The policy helped boost de Blasio’s goal of putting up 80,000 new such dwellings.
But when it came time to extend the tax provision last year, it hit a snag thanks to the mayor’s ambition to expand the program from a 20-percent requirement to as high as 30 percent—and Cuomo’s alliance with union interests that wanted higher wages for working publicly subsidized assignments. The New York Times reports about how the issue proceeded last June:
The parties forged a tentative deal, but it fell apart after the governor learned the compromise would extend the credit to condo projects, requiring further legislative wrangling. The exemption was allowed to expire, all because Cuomo found himself to the left of one of the most prominent progressive officials in the United States.
De Blasio has spent 2016 trying to rally support for reviving the program. “People are now getting used to the fact it’s not there. I think for a lot of people that’s discomfiting and that may create some of the good pressure toward a solution,” he said in March, around the same time the city reached a deal on zoning reform favorable to de Blasio’s affordable housing plans.
In May, he joined a trade group specializing in subsidized rental properties to encourage advocates and, typically, jab the governor’s office: “I am a believer that when something makes this much sense, it actually can get done, even in Albany, New York.”
The state legislature adjourned June 18 without addressing the matter. But the mayor won’t let it be—particularly when Cuomo is still at the center of it.
“A very slippery slope was started by the governor last year,” de Blasio told the Daily News Thursday.
