New Mayor of New York

This Assembly sends congratulations to Bill de Blasio, newly elected Mayor of New York City. Commentators have noted that the outgoing Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, leaves a city that “works extremely well if you make somewhere in the six figures”, but one where the “rampant inequality that characterizes every aspect of…life is…a threat to New York’s economic viability and social peace”.

This Assembly notes that there are strong economic parallels between New York and London, where the richest tenth of the population have 273 times the wealth of the bottom tenth; where at 28% the poverty rate is seven percentage points higher than the rest of England; where 57% of adults and children in poverty are in working families; and where 375,000 people were unemployed in London in 2012, up more than 40% since 2007.

Given the scale and similarity of the challenges London and New York face, this Assembly calls on the Mayor of London to work with Mayor de Blasio to identify solutions to the high levels of economic inequality in our cities and the numerous social problems such inequality causes.