In the Atlantic, de Blasio's affordable housing record gets a casual cheer

From Molly Ball's article in the December Atlantic, The Equalizer: Bill de Blasio vs. Inequality: The New York City mayor has some big ideas, but they may be too much too fast.:

Under de Blasio, the city has also mandated that employers offer paid sick leave, raised the minimum wage for certain workers, and created a new ID card that helps undocumented immigrants get access to banks and other services. The card has proved hugely popular—more than half a million have been issued. Some rents have been frozen, for the first time in half a century—providing relief to more than 1 million New Yorkers—and more than 20,000 units of affordable housing have been created or preserved. Together with Police Commissioner William Bratton, the community-policing pioneer who held the job under Giuliani in the 1990s, de Blasio has dialed back the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy and stopped arresting people caught with small amounts of marijuana.

De Blasio, in other words, is making the city less unequal, little by little, just as he promised to do. “The sheer amount of dollars de Blasio’s policies has shifted into the hands of working class New Yorkers is truly staggering,” the Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez wrote in September. “No wonder the 1%—those who had it so good for so long—want him out.”

As I wrote in September regarding another national profile of de Blasio, in Vanity Fair, if only Ball had actually delved into de Blasio's willingness to champion unaffordable affordable housing, as in Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park, claiming the 535 Carlton building was a template.

This, by the way, was Gonzalez's sole reference to the housing plan in his column:

After spending his first 20 months at City Hall launching ambitious programs to reduce income inequality, establish universal full-day pre-K and after-school programs and kicking off a massive affordable housing program, while also keeping the crime rate low, de Blasio is taking his case to the voters.