“I don’t hold that against him,” said Samuel Washington, 65, who attended a Bloomberg rally in Chattanooga, Tenn., on Wednesday. “At the time there were a whole lot of murders and he apologized for it. It takes a real man to apologize.”
The critiques of Mr. Bloomberg’s comments on housing point to an issue that is at the heart of his lengthy tenure as New York’s mayor. During his three terms, Mr. Bloomberg oversaw vast redevelopment as well as widening inequality, leading his successor, Bill de Blasio, to paint New York as a “tale of two cities.”
More broadly, affordable housing advocates agreed that predatory lending practices, not the end of redlining, were responsible for the 2008 economic crisis. Though Mr. Bloomberg’s comments echoed conservative talking points that were popular at the time, experts noted that most of the problematic subprime loans went to people who were already homeowners who paid their loans on time, not new home buyers who were overreaching.
Pinning the crisis on the end of redlining was “a very inaccurate description” that “really mischaracterizes the dynamics of what was happening,” said Debby Goldberg, the vice president of housing policy at the National Fair Housing Alliance, a nonprofit group.
“I would have expected somebody who had their finger on the pulse of what was happening in New York and cities and neighborhoods elsewhere to have had a more sophisticated analysis at the time,” she said. “And now it’s clear it completely missed the mark of what was actually going on.”
Jesse Van Tol, the chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group, called Mr. Bloomberg’s comments “problematic then, and problematic now.”
“Suggesting that basically lower income people caused the crisis by taking out more they could afford is a deflection from Wall Street. It’s a defense from the fact that, pure and simple, Wall Street caused the crisis,” Mr. Van Tol said.