The Opinion Pages  | EDITORIAL 

Bill de Blasio’s Big Plans for New York 

By 
Bill de Blasio delivering his State of the City address on Tuesday. Damon Winter/The New York Times 
Give Mayor Bill de Blasio time and he can toss out a lot of numbers. It’s what he did in his State of the City Address on Tuesday: nearly half-a-million potholes filled in 2014, a plan to cut greenhouse gases by 80 percent by 2050, a 65 percent drop in marijuana arrests, 1.6 million calls answered by the New York Fire Department.
But the most important number in the speech was 200,000. That is how many affordable housing units he says the city will build (80,000) or preserve (120,000) over the next decade.
Mr. de Blasio is entering the monumental phase of his mayoralty, taking the lofty yet vague theme that guided his campaign — ending inequality — and promising to make it concrete, literally. He laid out a vision of a denser but more affordable city, via a construction binge that would somehow solve the apparent paradox of New York: a city so appealing that nobody can afford to live in it. Mr. de Blasio’s speech was a ringing defense of the interests of what he called “our people,” the individuals and families who live in constant worry about the day the rent comes due or the lease is up.
The speech was broad-brush, as it had to be, but it offered an abundance of intriguing proposals. It called for rezoning in six neighborhoods — East Harlem, East New York, a stretch of Jerome Avenue in the Bronx, Long Island City, the western part of Flushing and Stapleton on Staten Island — where new construction will have to include some mandatory percentage of housing priced below market rates, so that people within a range of (modest) income levels can afford it. Mr. de Blasio also promised that the city would set aside money for free legal representation for tenants in rezoned areas who have to fight abusive landlords in housing court.
Perhaps the most vaulting ambition is a plan to build big at Sunnyside Yards, the convergence of railroad lines in Queens that would yield 200 acres for development if a roof were built over it. Mr. de Blasio’s aides say a study on how to do that will soon begin in earnest. The mayor also announced plans for expanded five-borough ferry service and more express buses, a recognition that all this new housing will surely strain existing transportation.
In one sense, the de Blasio strategy is Bloombergism with a twist, given that the former mayor also committed himself to affordable housing, rezoned vast stretches of the city and turned his three terms into a glorious era for developers. But while Michael Bloomberg was a businessman who dreamed of things like football stadiums, Mr. de Blasio says he is focused on affordable housing and will fight harder for it — taking on reluctant developers, predatory landlords and skeptical neighbors.
His goal is to persuade New Yorkers that only by building more, and building higher, will the city be able to hold onto its working and middle classes. While he acknowledged that the city needs more of all kinds of housing — his plan envisions 160,000 new market-rate units, including luxury apartments — his speech, and heart, were clearly aimed at working-class neighborhoods like the Rockaways and the South Bronx, and ordinary New Yorkers like the city workers who had a role in Tuesday’s ceremony.
Mr. de Blasio deserves credit for accomplishing some big things in his first year, notably the prekindergarten expansion, and he gives every indication of focusing just as intensely and productively on housing in the years to come. But it almost goes without saying that his ability to focus on one big thing will inevitably be tested.
Running the city is like living in a batting cage, with high heat coming from all directions. Mr. de Blasio skated lightly over and around nonhousing challenges on Tuesday. He made no mention of last year’s bitter struggle with the Police Department, or the spike in shootings and homicides in January that runs counter to the crime statistics he cites so proudly and often.
There was very little talk of street homelessness, though he did mention a renewed effort to house homeless veterans. Also left unsaid was how he was going to enlist state government in fulfilling his ambitions. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who seems to love cutting the mayor down to size, wasted no time in declaring on Tuesday that the Sunnyside Yards plan was unworkable, because the state has other plans for the property.
Mr. de Blasio shouldn’t fold, or accept the way things are, just because the governor says no. He should think big and fight on.