He's smart, he's ballsy, and he's the best mayor New York City has had since who knows when. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg has, while radically rezoning and transforming the City in cooperation with developers, destroyed much of the middle class, exiled poor people to the further reaches of the five boroughs, and further entrenched the poverty class. What's a mayor to do? It's obvious that in New York you have to squeeze as much money from the rich as possible—and his unprecedented use of private-public partnerships have kept the City running. But what will happen when the current recession starts to make its impact on the rich, and the philanthropist money slows? This financing game has succeeding in making New York City more like Gotham than ever before. And now today, says the New York Times, over the course of the spring, "city-supported food pantries served 1.39 million meals, up 9.3 percent compared with the 1.27 million during the same period last year." And soup kitchen meals are up "8.8 percent from the same period last year."

Last month we learned that a third of New Yorkers are struggling to obtain food, a number that has gone up and up over the past few years.

All this comes at the same time that Bloomberg's administration announced a new way to count poor people, releasing numbers that simultaneously make Bloomberg look terrible (nearly 25 percent of the City lives in actual poverty), while also being a preemptive strike against criticisms and something of a national attention grab.

But that plan to count the poor wasn't just opportunism on Bloomberg's part, not just a preparation for his next job. Still, the national effect is that Bloomberg looks like he's doing something for the poor. In his managerial style, as he says, you have to know the extent of a problem before you can fix it.

But the fact is that it's too late in his second term for the actual as well as actuarial problem of the poor to be fixed. While the City is busy with eminent domain seizures of homes and small business to improve not-particularly blighted districts of the city, we get yet another a callback to historical lowlights of decades gone by. The City is more starkly divided by race as class than ever: 50 percent of Latinos, according to the Food Bank for New York City numbers, now have trouble affording food.

What's more, in the last quarter of real estate results, we've seen a sudden upswing in office space vacancies and a downswing in property values in non-Manhattan boroughs; we see the big corporations that fund the City exhibiting massive anxiety about the expenses of maintaining offices. This eating away at the middle class's resources and the entrenchment of the poor, mixed with anxieties and real troubles for the rich who actually keep the City afloat, means that the next Mayor—one surely to be less competent—is going to get an absolute disaster dumped in his or her lap.