Bill De Blasio | Biography & Facts - Britannica

Mayor of New York City

In January 2013 de Blasio announced outside his Brooklyn home his intention to run for mayor of New York City. Underestimated during much of the Democratic Party primary, de Blasio secured the nomination with more than 40 percent of the vote, 14 points ahead of second-place finisher William Thompson, the former city comptroller. De Blasio was again underestimated by his opponents in the mayoral race, but his campaign gained traction as he came to be seen as the embodiment of change in a city led for more than 12 years by independent Michael Bloomberg.

Support for de Blasio transcended class and racial divides. Under Bloomberg’s mayorship, New York City had become safer, more prosperous, and arguably more pleasant (notably through bold urban development projects) but also infamously unaffordable for all but the wealthiest New Yorkers. De Blasio placed economic inequality at the centre of his campaign, adopting the theme of New York as a tale of two cities where a few do incredibly well while the many struggle to pay for life’s necessities. More concretely, de Blasio promised to raise taxes on New Yorkers earning more than $500,000 a year and to use the resulting monies to improve education in the city, notably by providing universal prekindergarten. De Blasio also vowed to promote affordable housing and to better protect renters against abusive landlords.

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Another key element of de Blasio’s campaign was his commitment to reform the so-called stop-and-frisk program of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) authorizing police officers to stop, question, and search individuals suspected of criminal activity without the need of probable cause. Seen by some as an effective crime-reduction tool, the NYPD stop-and-frisk practice was decried by many, including de Blasio, for unfairly targeting African Americans and people of Hispanic descent.

Republican Party mayoral candidate Joe Lhota and other critics warned that de Blasio’s policies would lead wealthy taxpayers to leave the city (negatively affecting tax revenues) and jeopardize the drastic reduction in violent crime achieved in the city by the previous two administrations, but in November 2013 de Blasio won the mayoral race in a landslide, receiving almost three-quarters of the vote. He was the first Democrat to win the New York mayoral election in more than two decades. At his inauguration in 2014, de Blasio was sworn in by former U.S. president Bill Clinton.

As mayor, de Blasio undertook a number of progressive initiatives, including his campaign pledge of universal prekindergarten. The program, which made “pre-K” available to every four-year-old in the city, was widely seen as a success. He also oversaw a continued decline in the police’s use of stop-and-frisk. Despite critics’ prediction of an upswing in crime, the city’s crime rate fell. In addition, de Blasio focused on income inequality. However, his efforts to impose a “millionaire’s tax” on wealthy New York City residents met resistance from state legislators, who were responsible for approving tax changes. In 2017 de Blasio was easily reelected mayor.

Quick Facts Original name: Warren Wilhelm, Jr. (Show more) Born: May 8, 1961, New York, New York, U.S. (age 64) (Show more) Title / Office: mayor (2014-2021), New York City (Show more) Political Affiliation: Democratic Party (Show more) See all related content

In May 2019 de Blasio announced that he was running for president the following year, joining a crowded field that included 22 other Democrats. However, he was unable to garner much support, and he dropped out of the race in September.

André Munro The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica