Metro

Does Bloomberg deserve a third term?

But they've also had some puzzling oversights -- like his refusal to push the parties at Ground Zero to get things solved more quickly.

But they’ve also had some puzzling oversights — like his refusal to push the parties at Ground Zero to get things solved more quickly. (AP)

Not in my lifetime has New York City seen the prosperity and serenity it does today, and I am nearly 60 years old. If you’re of the delusional, “But something has been lost” crowd, move to another page. Nor is this to whine that City Hall is spending too much and that fiscal doom lies around the corner. Maybe it does — but when a city adds 293,000 people, nearly the population of Pittsburgh, from 2001 to mid-2008, as New York did, something seriously good has been going on. This although the place is widely regarded as frightfully expensive and the world’s No. 1 likely repeat terror target — to say nothing of its citizens bearing the highest tax burden in America.

Whatever bad news might lie ahead, how much better a place the city is to live and work in astounds me every time I step out the door. Better not just than in the hellish era that did not decisively end until Rudy Giuliani’s second term, but better than on the bitter morning of Jan. 1, 2002, when the mayoralty changed hands. The streets are safer than ever, most parks resplendent. The simmering racial edginess once present in every subway car — a reality long impolite to mention — seems a ghost of eras past.

I ride the trains at all hours, and I’ve never known blacks and whites, Hispanics and Asians, to treat each other so respectfully and even warmly. The tolerance is contagious. Never has the town been more cosmopolitan, with more hard-working immigrants revitalizing one neighborhood after another.

Then there are the baby bellies. A habitual walker, I spend many hours every week observing people, streets and buildings. I ride subway lines to unfamiliar stops and stroll around. Everywhere, I see children on the way — in privileged Manhattan precincts; on the M train platform at Metropolitan Avenue; in Bedford-Stuyvesant bodegas under the Broadway el; and along Guyanese-dominated Liberty Avenue in Ozone Park.

That women want to have babies here is a glorious fact. Annual live births are up by nearly 5,000 from 2001, when there were 124,023 births. People enjoy raising families here, and they’re not fleeing.

But so much remarkable fortune in a city some idiots gave up for dead after 9/11 raises a very large question. We who appreciate the stirring recovery after the terrorist attack, miraculously low crime, and the manifest improvements in the physical state and quality of life in most neighborhoods can only marvel, and wonder:

For how much, if any, of the good news can we thank Michael Bloomberg?

He’s been mayor for eight years. His tenure has been marked by alternating interludes of high purpose and petty obsessions, by impressive victories over systemic rigor mortis but also by crushing defeats.

For a self-made, multi-billionaire who should know better, his most inexcusable blunder has been not only a failure to reduce municipal spending, but to actually spend more — even as the recession has caused tax revenue to plummet. As the Manhattan Institute’s Steven Malanga noted in these pages recently, Bloomberg has been more profligate even than David Dinkins was in swelling the payroll. He’s given unionized city workers unconscionable pay hikes without putting up a fight.

As a result, the city, which by law must have a balanced budget, faces its gravest fiscal crisis in decades. Without rebounds of far-fetched magnitudes both on Wall Street and in the shattered real estate market, we are in for reduced services that could, in theory, rival those of the 1970s.

But that has yet to happen. The question remains: how much credit does Bloomberg deserve for the city’s splendid condition until the shoe falls? Is it largely due to him? Or to Bloomberg in spite of himself?

Or has he — and have we — just been lucky?

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How responsible any elected official is for events that occur on his or her watch is a constant riddle. Would the Soviet Union have fallen if Ronald Reagan hadn’t put thesqueeze on for eight years? Would the city have had a record 2,245 murders in 1991 even if Dinkins had been the toughest law-and-order guy around?

The question is especially murky for “pragmatic” Bloomberg, a “Republican” given to promoting big business and large-scale real estate development but also to Democratic-style spending and social tinkering. Plus, filling in the scorecard on any New York City mayor is inherently problematic. The job comes with surprisingly limited legal clout. Albany has sway over most taxes and controls a fat chunk of the municipality’s treasury. Albany dominates the MTA and the Port Authority. It plays an imposing role in city land use through eminent domain.

Even so, Bloomberg has managed to assert himself despite the statutory straitjacket more than any mayor before him. His record speaks for itself — but it’s not a record instantly interpreted. That’s because just about anything positive or negative one might say of him immediately brings to mind an equally weighty, countervailing argument. Think of Charlie Chan’s “Contradiction, please,” uttered over and over.

For example: There’s something uplifting that a man with a $20 billion fortune took on the enervating daily grind of “the second hardest job in America.” And, despite his power, he can be a comforting leader for the city, particularly in moments of tragedy. Reading from the Koran might not be what he had in mind when he took the job, but doing that at the prayer service for members of two Muslim families killed in a 2007 Bronx house fire was appropriate and admirable.

But — contradiction, please! — Bloomberg can be annoying enough to overwhelm one’s appreciation. It isn’t only his notorious “nanny” meddling in the lives of citizens and businesses — like madcap traffic rerouting and the bans on trans-fats in restaurants and cupcakes in schools. He can be as mean-spirited in public as Rudy Giuliani ever was; Bloomberg’s unforgiving rebuke of a wheelchair-bound reporter who dropped his recorder at a press conference was more cruel than Giuliani’s radio tirade at a ferret owner.

Beyond personality quirks, his vaunted political and managerial gifts have often deserted him. He was all thumbs trying to circumvent Albany over a West Side stadium/convention center and congestion pricing. Both initiatives fell as humiliatingly short as President Obama’s bid to bring the Olympics to Chicago on sheer charisma (not that Bloomberg has Obama’s charisma).

The entrepreneurial genius that made him one of America’s wealthiest people in the private sector often seem absent on the job. True, $23 billion of the city’s current, $59.5 billion budget is beyond his control, as it’s obligated for Medicaid, pension obligations and debt service.

But Bloomberg can blame himself for swelling the budget from $44.6 billion in his first year in office. He gave DC 37 and the police sergeants union plum contracts, which threaten to set the pattern for teachers as well. Meanwhile, the city is saddled with a 6 year-high unemployment rate of 10.3%, and battered by the loss of 100,000 private-sector jobs since August 2008. Tax hikes and service reductions seem inevitable.

Their impact won’t come home until next year. Bloomberg could have gone out on top. Instead, his over-generosity has set him up for a miserable third term if he wins. In that light, his zeal to keep the job can be viewed, not as unbridled power-mongering, but as grasping an obligation to fix the mess he made — or take his lumps if he can’t.

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Yet — contradiction, please! — Bloomberg’s defeats at Sheldon Silver’s hands must be weighed against a feat that will long outlive the stadium dispute: mayoral school control, for which he somehow secured Silver’s approval. Bloomberg’s belief that, contrary to decades of wisdom to the contrary, public education can be managed for pupils’ good surely ranks with Giuliani’s conviction that streets could be safe again.

His supporters and detractors can quibble over test scores. But the system is at last accountable. The legacy will survive his mayoralty. His successors will be held to improving upon the results.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg rezoned nearly one-fifth of the entire city — another momentous accomplishment with long-term implications. The word “rezoning” can make eyes glaze over. It’s a subject out of step with the daily drumbeat of round-the-clock news coverage. It tends to make the news only when it involves a high-profile Manhattan district, or when activists mount a noisy protest.

But New Yorkers were so long accustomed to certain precincts going under-utilized, they regarded them with misplaced nostalgia — like Manhattan’s far-west side jumble of warehouses and tire-repair shops and stretches of Brooklyn’s once derelict Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront. Bloomberg has made residential and commercial development possible in those backwaters and others previously zoned for manufacturing use, even though there was no manufacturing left.

“It’s amazing how Bloomberg has modernized land use,” says NYU urban affairs guru Mitchell L. Moss. “I’ve studied mayors around the country for 35 years, and most of them know nothing about land use.”

The railroad trestle along 10th Avenue was for decades an industrial-era relic that Giuliani wanted to demolish. My friend Steven Greenberg, owner of the 230 Fifth Rooftop lounge, once ran the Roxy Roller Disco beneath the tracks. He recalls a night when vandals used the trestle as a platform to lob Molotov cocktails onto his roof just for fun.

To ascend the stairs to what’s now the High Line Park — a dream Bloomberg made real when he put the city’s money and clout behind it — is to be transported. On the streets astride it, rezoning made possible the rise of handsome apartment buildings, restaurants and stores that blossomed in anticipation of the park.

But most of the impact is in the outer boroughs. It allowed Ikea to open a huge store in Red Hook — which in turn generated creation of a popular waterfront park. “They made neighborhoods outside Manhattan very attractive,” says Moss.

Rezoning re-invented Park Slope’s Fourth Avenue, where chop shops and gas stations gave way to, “not beautiful, but very livable and affordable apartment buildings,” Moss said. It has brought big, new stores to Bronx residents long deprived of shopping options.

In other areas — Willets Point and parts of Jamaica in Queens, Coney Island, the lower Grand Concourse in the Bronx — the full impact won’t come for years. But come it will.

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All that, and yet — big contradiction, please! — Bloomberg let down the most important neighborhood of all since 9/11 — Downtown. Despite a commitment to a quixotic, “green,” “24/7” downtown of the future, he’s been less interested in fixing the rotting streets, sidewalks and security obstacles that are of the city’s own making.

He “abdicated responsibility” for the World Trade Center site, as Joyce Purnick writes in her new biography, “Mike Bloomberg — Money. Power. Politics.” The fact that the state held most of the cards at Ground Zero hardly absolved Bloomberg of the need to stick his neck out. He’s rarely raised a peep about the disgrace of Ground Zero or about the hulks of 130 Liberty St. or Fiterman Hall — all mainly the state’s responsibility, but on city ground, for God’s sake!

When Bloomberg has gotten involved, it’s rarely been constructive. (An exception is the once-stalled 9/11 memorial, which he rescued with some of his own money and by arm-twisting companies to pony up.) In 2005, NYPD security concerns over the Freedom Tower design sent it back to the drawing board, delaying the stalled project further. The cops had known of the problem for a year. While there was blame to share with then-Gov. George Pataki, it’s unfathomable that Bloomberg didn’t pick up the phone right off the bat to say, “George, my cops won’t let it get built that way.”

For years after 9/ll, Bloomberg opposed rebuilding the lost office space in favor of such inappropriate uses as “affordable” housing. He recently changed his tune and now supports commercial reconstruction. He even backs Silverstein in his financing dispute with the PA. But it’s too little, too late.

While Bloomberg dithered, city bureaucrats were busy working over the neighborhood with hammer and claw when it needed tender loving care. Barricades and endless, uncoordinated street excavations — look at Fulton Street — make life hell for residents and workers and continue to do so.

The nightmarish Wall Street Area Water Main Project is the product of three city agencies — among them, the out-of-control Department of Transportation, which Bloomberg gave rein to install little-used bicycle lanes and hideous “pedestrian plazas” of schoolyard asphalt all over town — even in Times Square.

But indispensable, routine street maintenance takes a back seat. The recent Mayor’s Management Report boasts that the city fixed twice as many potholes this year than it did in 2001. It doesn’t say, though, how many new potholes have been created — a question that will occur to anyone driving up Madison Avenue or innumerable other stretches.

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And yet, and yet — biggest contradiction, please! — there’s the department whose performance matters more than all the rest combined — naturally, the NYPD.

Too many newly arrived and young New Yorkers have no idea what things were like not long ago. They think lyrics of the Rolling Stones’ “Miss You” — “I’ve been walking in Central Park/singing after dark/people think I’m crazy” — were about how strange it is to sing in public.

They don’t get it — because they can’t. That Times Square, Washington Square Park and most waterfront areas were dangerous mugging grounds seems remote. That poorer neighborhoods were free-fire zones and that menace lurked behind every parked car even on Fifth Avenue seems absurd. Yet, for decades, the most influential man in town was the one presumed waiting in the shadows with a knife or gun.

Giuliani tamed the lawless streets, but it wasn’t necessarily bound to last. Maybe because Bloomberg doesn’t bluster on the subject, the media and too many citizens take his accomplishment for granted — as if he’s done nothing more than scrub and oil the crime-control engine Giuliani built.

Of course, all it takes to undercut law enforcement is a wrong signal from the top, as when Dinkins took too long to enforce a court order to end the illegal Korean deli boycott in Brooklyn.

Bloomberg sent the right signals to top cop Ray Kelly. And the city is not only safer, but much safer, than the one he inherited. The drop in crime is the envy of the nation — with murder down 25.5% compared to 2001 and most other categories down over 30%. Murders this year (363 to date) might well be fewer by year’s end than the all-time recorded low, 496 in 2007.

All this despite a uniformed force nearly 4,000 short of its 39,297 strength in 2001 — and with a considerable share of its resources now devoted to terrorism-related duties.

Business Council of New York state president Kenneth Adams told Crain’s, “The first priority for the economy is public safety, and Mayor Bloomberg has been relentless on that front.”

Public safety is also first priority for everything — for coming home late from work; for raising kids; for shopping in an unfamiliar neighborhood; or visiting an elevated park where trains once ran, that few believed would ever be completed.

Moss again: “Public spaces are everything in New York. Most people are living boxes of 1,200 square feet, and eventually they must leave the box. The streets, schools and parks are safe and welcoming.”

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We can bicker over Times Square’s plazas. We can weigh Bronx shopping malls against Downtown’s empty hole. We can fight over test scores and the budget.

But there can be no arguing that every corner of town is largely cleansed of the dread that long inhibited life and commerce. A city safer than it was is a better, happier city. Maybe it isn’t all due to Bloomberg — but if crime had gone up, he’d surely have taken the rap.

A different mayor might have done things differently. But if Bloomberg could have done it better, there are a million ways he could have done it worse.

A mayor who lets us get through the day without sweating over threats to life and limb is to be allowed the occasional tantrum. Because of that, and because of all those baby bellies reflecting confidence that New York won’t be over any time soon, I’m willing to give him all the credit — without contradiction.

Steve Cuozzo is an editor and columnist for The Post.