“Together,” he told cheering supporters on election night, “we will usher in a generation of change.” At his inauguration, he said that “a moment like this comes rarely. Seldom do we hold such an opportunity to transform and reinvent.”
You might want to excuse him for resorting to a little bombast. But it’s fair to point out that his two predecessors, Eric Adams and Bill de Blasio, took office with very similar promises of change. “This is our moment as a city,” Adams declared as he took office in 2022. “In four years, this city is never going to be the same.”
Eight years earlier, in front of City Hall, de Blasio predicted equally dramatic change. “There are some,” he said, “who think now as we turn to governing — well, things will just continue pretty much like they always have. … We need a dramatic new approach.”
It would be unfair to suggest that neither Adams nor de Blasio accomplished anything significant while they were mayor. De Blasio brought the city nearly universal free kindergarten. Adams presided over a modestly declining crime rate. But did the city change in some apocalyptic, indelible way? No. That was rhetoric. It did not result in fulfillment.
A bit of reflection tells us that just about all incoming mayors talk in apocalyptic terms. They promise the moon, vowing that they will be awesome change agents. Very few of them achieve that.
So why the exaggeration? Well, one simple answer is that this is what mayors think they are supposed to say as they move into city hall. But such talk is also what the electorate seems to be asking for. They like the notion of dramatic overhaul even when, as in de Blasio’s case, they are replacing a successful and popular predecessor. They like to hear new mayors call themselves change agents, heedless of what was promised the last time and what was actually accomplished. Urban electorates are nearly all victims of governmental amnesia.
GIVEN ALL THAT, it’s worth going back to examine the careers of a few mayors who, whether they promised it or not, really did turn out to be genuine change agents. Some promised drastic reforms and got them; others simply moved in and went to work.
It’s hard not to begin with Fiorello La Guardia. He was a mayor who promised and delivered. During his 12 years as mayor, he crippled the crooked Tammany Hall machine, roaming the streets in company with the local police. As the Great Depression ground on, he worked with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to bring huge sums of reconstruction money to the city and launch a building program that lifted New Yorkers’ spirits to a level that mayors of other cities couldn’t match. He used personal charm and public appearances to make himself an icon of energy and competence that won him the allegiance of most of his normally cynical electorate. He told voters that New York would never be the same, and it wasn’t.
At the opposite pole of change-agent mayors stands Joseph P. Riley of Charleston, S.C. Mild-mannered and seemingly deferential by nature, in 1975 he took a relatively nondescript southern city still recovering from Civil War resentments, and over 40 years as mayor made it a show place that attracted millions of visitors from all over the country. The downtown was revitalized, waterfront parks were created, an annual music festival became world-famous, crime went down and affordable housing went up. Riley didn’t promise to make Charleston into a totally different place, but he did that. He demonstrated that bombast and hyperbolic promises are not necessary to bring about permanent change.
When you consider Neil Goldschmidt’s career as mayor of Portland, Ore., all you really need to do is look around the city. A somewhat dingy relic of the industrial era when Goldschmidt took office in 1973, it became an urbanist icon as a result of decisions he made. The overwhelming one was the decision not to build a new freeway along the city’s waterfront but to turn the waterfront into a park, which catalyzed the city’s revival. Next was the conversion of an unsightly downtown parking lot into Pioneer Square, which became the focus of central Portland. The money that was to have been spent on the freeway went into the creation of an extensive public transportation system, one of the most sophisticated in the country. While presiding over those changes, Goldschmidt launched a community revival program that gave each of the city’s neighborhood commercial districts an identity that few of them had had before. If you left Portland in the early 1970s and came back a couple of decades later, Rip Van Winkle-style, you would not believe what you were seeing. That’s the sort of thing that genuine change agents do. Late in life, Goldschmidt’s legacy was tarnished by a sex scandal. But that doesn’t invalidate his accomplishments as mayor.
CHANGE-AGENT MAYORS NORMALLY WORK IN LARGE CITIES, but they perform in smaller ones as well. The best recent example is Jim Brainard of Carmel, Ind., who took over a conventional, rather nondescript suburb of Indianapolis in 1996 and re-created it as an urbanist gem over 28 years in City Hall. Brainard zeroed in on transportation, using roundabouts, underground parking and other traffic management tools to create a city where people felt comfortable walking along the streets and where visitors came to shop and to live. He built a European-style concert hall, extended a walking/cycling trail to connect to Indianapolis 15 miles to the south, and expanded the city’s park system dramatically. All this was done while keeping Carmel’s tax rates among the lowest in the state. Carmel had a population of about 25,000 when Brainard took over; today it has more than 100,000. There are those who disparage Brainard as a one-man government, but Carmel has consistently won awards as one of America’s most livable cities, large or small.
I struggled with the question of whether to put New York’s Rudy Giuliani on my list of change agents. His behavior as an ex-mayor in the last few years has been bizarre, to say the least. He was a hard man to like even at the peak of his influence in public life. But as a magazine headline once proclaimed, sometimes it takes a mean man to make a gentle city. I wouldn’t use the word “gentle” to describe New York in the late 1990s, but I would use the word “safer”: Giuliani took office with a single-minded determination to reduce the crime rate, and his tough law enforcement tactics, most controversially “stop and frisk” policing, helped to bring about the change he promised. The city’s murder rate was 21 per 100,000 residents when Giuliani took office in 1994; when he left in 2001 it was 8 per 100,000. Crime overall declined by 56 percent. I’m not foolish enough to credit Giuliani for all these numbers, but it would be equally foolish to argue that he wasn’t a prime catalyst. If we were discussing kindness or generosity or humility, Giuliani would be near the bottom of the mayoral rankings. But he promised change and got it. I can’t justify leaving him out.
YOU CAN’T REACH ANY FIRM CONCLUSIONS ABOUT MAYORS merely by recounting the exploits of a few who accomplished major change. But you can find some common threads. The circumstances have to be right. New York City was sick and tired of corruption and scandal when La Guardia emerged on the scene in 1934. Portland was ready for an urbanist revival when Neal Goldschmidt took over in 1973.
But there is something else just as important. The late George Latimer, mayor of St. Paul, Minn., for 14 years and a man of unusual political wisdom, used to tell new mayors to look for opportunities, not problems. Don’t vow to end child abuse if nobody knows how to do that. Don’t promise to eliminate the achievement gap in public education when generations of educators have failed. Promise to improve trash collection or create a park that most of the city wants. Then you can move on from there.
Probably the greatest urban change agent of all time was the Roman Emperor Augustus, who ruled for 41 years and brought his city peace, order and stability after decades of violent conflict. He also created monumental architecture. Toward the end of his reign he made a boast that has come down through the ages. “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.”
Lots of American mayors take office promising the metaphorical equivalent. Their problem is they are not Roman emperors.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
