Low-Income Housing in Crisis

During the late 1960s and 1970s, extensive disinvestment and an eviscerated real estate market led landlords of low-income housing to walk away from their real estate holdings, leaving thousands of buildings unoccupied and often city-owned due to nonpayment of taxes. In response, Latinx, African American, and some white residents protested the blight these buildings brought to their neighborhoods by directly occupying and seeking ownership of abandoned buildings through a process they called urban homesteading. Activists framed homesteading as a self-help initiative, often emphasizing their own ingenuity over state resources as the key to solving the problems of low-income urban neighborhoods. Such framing was understandable given the unstable economic terrain of the 1970s and won activists support not just from the political left, but also the right. But it also positioned homesteading as demonstrating the superiority of private-citizen and private sector–led revitalization in ways that left homesteading projects vulnerable as it became clear how necessary government resources would be to their success.

The Trouble with Development

This chapter traces how, with limited federal and city funds at their disposal, Democratic and liberal officials in late 1960s and 1970s New York came to embrace generous tax and incentive policies to directly spur sagging development and rehabilitation. Though municipal officials had for decades used tax exemptions, these new incentives empowered the private sector to take the dominant role in economic development with little government oversight. As these policies began to face criticism for unnecessarily subsidizing development in gentrifying neighborhoods, officials turned to a new strategy: binding subsidies to developers’ commitments to make local improvements (such as street repairs). Doing so at once continued to diminish tax coffers and helped shift neighborhood improvement projects from the public to the private sector.

Remaking Public Parks

This chapter examines the decline and subsequent revitalization of major parks through their control by public–private partnerships in the late twentieth century. The extensive private sector involvement in parks was far from the elite-initiated takeover that has been depicted. In contrast, this shift dates back to community residents’ organizing in the late 1960s and 1970s to revive degenerating greenspaces that had suffered municipal neglect. What first began as community park revitalization efforts in neighborhoods throughout New York spread to initiatives that involved broader elements of the private sector. Indeed, the subsequent involvement of businesses and corporations in the care and management of parks was spurred by years of campaigns by concerned residents, nonprofits, cultural institutions, and officials who had lost faith in the ability of local government to maintain parks, ultimately catalyzing the growth of public–private partnerships to manage city parks by the end of the century.

Introduction

The Long Crisis explores the origins and implications of one of the most significant developments across the globe over the last fifty years: the diminished faith in government as capable of solving public problems. The origins of this transformation are found in city-dwellers’ efforts to preserve liberal commitments of the postwar period. New York faced an economic crisis beginning in the late 1960s that disrupted long-standing assumptions about the services city government could provide. In response, New Yorkers—organized within block associations, nonprofits, and professional organizations—embraced an ethos of private volunteerism and, eventually, of partnership with private business in order to save their communities from neglect. Local liberal and Democratic officials came over time to see such alliances not as stopgap measures but as legitimate and ultimately permanent features of modern governance. Local people and officials, this book argues, built neoliberalism from the ground up.

From Renters to Owners

After numerous failed state-led initiatives to stem the exodus of middle-income residents in postwar New York, in the late 1960s landlords and major real estate associations proposed their own solution to increase homeownership and retain the middle class: converting rental housing into cooperatives. The middle-income tenants of this housing, however, initially widely rejected apartment ownership, preferring the security of rent-regulated housing. This set off a decade-long battle over the control and nature of moderate- and middle-income housing. This chapter traces how over the 1970s middle-income tenants came to embrace apartment ownership, a shift that pushed the housing stock toward market-rate condominiums and cooperatives and exacerbated the city’s mounting affordable housing crisis.

Conclusion

This conclusion highlights the major arguments and contributions of The Long Crisis. It describes how New Yorkers helped transform their broke and troubled city between the late 1960s and 1980s by taking the responsibilities of city governance into the private sector and market. In doing so, local people and liberal and Democratic officials built neoliberalism from the ground up. The changes accompanying this new system exacerbated old racial and economic inequalities and produced new ones that continue to shape metropolitan areas through to today, raising fundamental questions about how and for whom cities have been remade over the preceding decades.

The Governance of Homelessness and Public Space

In 1980s New York City, residents and officials grappled with the extraordinary growth of people experiencing homelessness residing in public spaces. Public homelessness emerged at a time of rising value of public spaces, which finally began to receive infusions of public and private capital after years of neglect—a development homeless bodies seemed to threaten. The city’s seeming inability to stem public homelessness led private sector actors and the quasi-public officials who oversaw the subways and major Manhattan transportation centers where the homeless resided in the greatest numbers to implement more punitive policies as a solution to public homelessness. Buttressed by new legal measures that expanded private sector governance over public space, these tactics ultimately influenced officials’ adoption of similarly aggressive measures toward public homelessness to protect the enhanced value of public space.

Patrolling City Streets

In the late 1960s and 1970s, New York became engulfed in rising rates of crime and the belief among residents that navigating city streets was no longer safe. In reaction to the perceived inadequacies of governmental responses to crime, city-dwellers formed citizen patrols in which neighbors joined together to surveil their residential streets. Businesses and institutions also began to forge their own initiative to deter street crime by hiring private guards to patrol the streets of their districts. These efforts grew alongside one another and reinforced a similar logic about the need for private action against crime. Both helped to perpetuate and ultimately normalize the patrolling of public streets beyond the police. By the early 1980s, however, resident patrols slowly began to fade from the city, whereas the presence and role of private guards expanded, transforming the policing of city streets.