Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration released its annual analysis of City Hall operations on Thursday evening, a 420-page document tracking everything from rat sightings to bike lane construction to police response times. Known as the Mayor's Management Report, the sprawling municipal report card is a requirement under the city charter dating back to the fiscal crisis of the 1970s.
This year's report offers a snapshot of a city in crisis once again. It begins with a special section on the response to COVID-19, which claimed the lives of 23,767 New Yorkers, and now represents the "largest mass fatality incident in modern NYC."
The true death toll may be much higher. According to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the number of fatalities reported in fiscal year 2020 — from the start of July to the end of June — surged to 65,712, up from 30,964 the previous year, per the report. (The city has acknowledged that "excess deaths" may be directly or indirectly tied to the pandemic.)
The cascading impacts of that public health disaster have destabilized nearly every aspect of city government — with the most vulnerable New Yorkers bearing the worst of the burden.
"Over half of adult New York City residents live in high-poverty communities," the report states. "These areas tend to be predominantly communities of color and have been hit especially hard by COVID-19."
At the same time, the city, and poor neighborhoods in particular, have seen an alarming spike in some violent crimes. There were 352 murders during the last fiscal year, a five-year high. In the same period, 4,252 juveniles were arrested for major felonies, 50 percent more than in any of the last four fiscal years, according to the report.
As the number of people in the city's jails continued to decrease, conditions inside the facilities have grown increasingly brutal. The number of violent incidents among the incarcerated went up by 16.3 percent last year, according to the report. The rate of serious injuries to those in the city's custody increased nearly fourfold.
The time it took for the NYPD to respond to a crime in progress also increased, with the end-to-end average response time for the most serious crimes jumping a full minute. The lag in response times has continued since the height of the protests against racist policing, prompting allegations of an NYPD slowdown.
Other core government functions have suffered dramatically as well. The average time to resolve non-emergency complaints in NYCHA buildings shot up 42 percent in the last year, from 19.4 days to nearly a month, as a result of limits to in-person apartment visits during the pandemic. The wait time for emergency complaints increased nearly a third, according to the report.
The city's street homeless population also increased this year, reaching 3,857 people, according to a survey conducted in January. But the number of New Yorkers seeking placement in shelters decreased during the fiscal year, which officials chalked up to the ban on evictions keeping more people inside their homes.
The report touted the mayor's success in Vision Zero, after slight decreases in traffic fatalities (211 in this fiscal year, compared to 218 last year). The city installed 21 miles of protected bike lanes in the fiscal year, on par with the previous two years. Just 642 bike lanes were built in the last fiscal year, a drop of 1,000 from the previous year, and a fraction of the roughly 3,000 new racks installed annually under Bloomberg.
Certain projects, like the long-delayed Queens Boulevard bike lane, remain stalled, which the city has blamed on COVID-19 delays in federal approval for projects receiving federal funding.
As a result of the construction standstill, total new housing units built for special needs population, including homeless and senior New Yorkers, dropped nearly 40 percent from the previous fiscal year.
While active rat complaints have increased in much of the five boroughs, the city's health department completed 36 percent fewer pest control inspections in this fiscal year.
The report claims that fewer streets were deemed "filthy" this year, despite significant cuts to the Department of Sanitation's budget. The agency later acknowledges in a footnote that their cleanliness ratings have been suspended since mid-March.
"This data tells the story of how the City has delivered, despite a year unlike any other," de Blasio said in a statement. "As trust in government becomes more important than ever, we’re proud to maintain our commitment to open access and transparency.”