NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio delivers seventh State of the City address

A tax on landlords who keep storefronts vacant for long periods. More NYPD ticketing of motorists for speeding, running red lights and failing to yield to pedestrians. Legalizing, and bringing up to code, now-illegal apartments and other housing in places like basements, to alleviate a home shortage.

These are among two dozen or so policy ideas unveiled by Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday at his State of the City address, titled “Save Our City,” delivered in year seven in office.

“We're at a point where we have to be saved,” said de Blasio, a Democrat. “This city and everything it stands for must be saved. And we are the ones who have to save ourselves. We have to save ourselves from the forces of greed.”

His rhetoric was a variation on the theme of his first run for mayor in 2013: that New York had become a Dickensian “Tale of Two Cities,” one for the rich and the other for the poor.

On Thursday, beneath the 21,000-pound fiberglass whale at the American Museum of Natural History, de Blasio spoke for more than an hour explaining how he'd save the city.

"Our enemy in this struggle is an economic one," he said. "It’s not that we have to fear street thugs; it’s that we have to fear bad landlords.”

The presentation was his seventh such address since becoming mayor in 2014. He outlined what he hoped to accomplish during the two years left in his mayoralty.

"I'm going to devote myself for these two years to getting all of these things done, and I need your help," he told the audience of hundreds.

The format Thursday contrasted with his past State of the City addresses in which he spoke mostly from a traditional lectern and delivered a speech off a TelePrompTer. On Thursday, he stood in the center of an audience on four sides, speaking loosely from an outline projected on a television.

Among his other ideas: helping hire 1,000 nonwhite male teachers for the city’s public schools, making all vehicles in the city’s fleet electric by 2040, helping people rent without paying a security deposit by using a form of insurance, expanding “3-K” to 26,000 more 3-year-olds, raising the public school graduation rate, and banning the city from buying single-use plastic bottles and restricting their sale from city property.

And the NYPD unit to make the streets safer, via enforcement, would assign about 100 officers to the task, he said.

“Over a hundred officers that will make sure our streets are safer for our pedestrians, our cyclists, and our motorists alike,” he said.

Not all of his ideas can be accomplished by the city alone: the vacancy tax, for instance, would need to be greenlighted by Albany, as would his plan to limit how much residential landlords can raise rent, and commercial rent control, which he said he was open to.

 De Blasio's wife, Chirlane McCray, introduced her husband and described how a forthcoming city program would help new parents, including on such subjects as breastfeeding, maternal depression and other health needs.

Invoking the African proverb that it takes a village to raise a child, McCray said, "Well, if you're a full-time parent, New York City is going to be the village.”

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.