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In
The Long Crisis, Benjamin Holtzman shows how local New Yorkers, struggling to improve distressing urban conditions in the face of instable political and economic circumstances of the late 1960s and 1970s, steered the process of neoliberalism as they rebuilt their city.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Low-Income Housing in Crisis
- Chapter 2: From Renters to Owners
- Chapter 3: Remaking Public Parks
- Chapter 4: Patrolling City Streets
- Chapter 5: The Trouble with Development
- Chapter 6: The Governance of Homelessness and Public Space
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
About the author
Benjamin Holtzman is an Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College.
Summary
Across all the boroughs, The Long Crisis shows, New Yorkers helped transform their broke and troubled city in the 1970s by taking the responsibilities of city governance into the private sector and market, steering the process of neoliberalism.
Newspaper headlines beginning in the mid-1960s blared that New York City, known as the greatest city in the world, was in trouble. They depicted a metropolis overcome by poverty and crime, substandard schools, unmanageable bureaucracy, ballooning budget deficits, deserting businesses, and a vanishing middle class. By the mid-1970s, New York faced a situation perhaps graver than the urban crisis: the city could no longer pay its bills and was tumbling toward bankruptcy.
The Long Crisis turns to this turbulent period to explore the origins and implications of the diminished faith in government as capable of solving public problems. Conventional accounts of the shift toward market and private sector governing solutions have focused on the rising influence of conservatives, libertarians, and the business sector. Benjamin Holtzman, however, locates the origins of this transformation in the efforts of city dwellers to preserve liberal commitments of the postwar period. As New York faced an economic crisis that disrupted long-standing assumptions about the services city government could provide, its residents--organized within block associations, non-profits, and professional organizations--embraced an ethos of private volunteerism and, eventually, of partnership with private business in order to save their communities' streets, parks, and housing from neglect. Local liberal and Democratic officials came to see such alliances not as stopgap measures but as legitimate and ultimately permanent features of modern governance. The ascent of market-based policies was driven less by a political assault of pro-market ideologues than by ordinary New Yorkers experimenting with novel ways to maintain robust public services in the face of the city's budget woes.
Local people and officials, The Long Crisis argues, built neoliberalism from the ground up, creating a system that would both exacerbate old racial and economic inequalities and produce new ones that continue to shape metropolitan areas today.
Additional text
The Long Crisis is an engaging empirical study of New York between the 1960s and the 1990s. Chapters on how city parks came to be maintained by private citizens, on how the growth of private security allowed affluent residents and business owners to police public space, and on how tax incentives spurred the private development of luxury housing provide richly textured descriptions of often opaque processes that should interest urbanists from all disciplines. Chapters on housing and houselessness offer nuanced, deeply humanized accounts of what readers might (incorrectly) anticipate will be familiar stories. The book is recommended for anyone interested in late twentieth-century urban, social, or political history.
