{"id":344359,"date":"2026-09-11T21:34:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T21:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/344359\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T21:34:19","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T21:34:19","slug":"missing-the-mark-on-new-yorks-fiscal-crisis-recovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/344359\/","title":{"rendered":"Missing the Mark on New York’s Fiscal Crisis Recovery"},"content":{"rendered":"

City of Fortune: Inequality and the Making of Contemporary New York<\/a>, by Mason B. Williams (Norton, 400 pp., $38.99)<\/p>\n

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s most consistent opponent has never been a political rival. Rather, it\u2019s a concept: \u201causterity.\u201d In his anti-austerity philosophy, the mayor relies on a growing canon of academic reconsiderations of the city\u2019s 1970s fiscal crisis and its aftermath. The most prominent of these treatises was Columbia history professor Kim Phillips-Fein\u2019s 2017 Fear City: New York\u2019s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics<\/a>. A new book by Williams College political science professor Mason B. Williams, City of Fortune: Inequality and the Making of Contemporary New York<\/a>, ably complements Fear City, while sharing its core defect: the history is (mostly) right, but the thesis is not.<\/p>\n

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As a candidate and as mayor, Mamdani has defined himself against what he and other democratic socialists see as modern New York\u2019s original error, as laid out in Phillip-Fein\u2019s book: responding to the 1970s fiscal crisis with sharp cutbacks in social spending as well as a reliance on the private sector, particularly the banking and real-estate sectors, to grow the economy. It was a mistaken approach, the narrative says, because it harmed lower-income residents. Mamdani would break from this history in governing \u201cin working people\u2019s interests, rather than at their expense,\u201d as he put it in his January inaugural address.<\/p>\n

Williams picks up where Phillips-Fein left off. City of Fortune spans New York\u2019s recovery from, and revival after, the fiscal crisis, from the Ed Koch mayoralty of the late 1970s and 1980s through the end of the Bill de Blasio administration in 2021.<\/p>\n

The argument is stark: New York\u2019s post-1970s recovery\u2014some fiscal discipline brought to bear on municipal spending coupled with an embrace of the high-paying, white-collar private sector to generate more tax revenues\u2014\u201cfacilitated the political interventions that laid the groundwork for the city\u2019s reconstruction on frankly inegalitarian terms,\u201d Williams writes. \u201cFor poor and working-class New Yorkers, the resolution of the fiscal crisis via austerity . . . and a renewed growth politics oriented toward the expansion of the middle and professional classes only exacerbated the challenges of everyday life.\u201d The answer to the puzzle of \u201chow to live together when the terms that had been established were terms of inequality\u201d has been \u201cmass poverty\u201d as well as persistent racial segregation in neighborhoods and schools.<\/p>\n

Williams advances this argument through three lenses: crime, housing, and education. On crime, across five mayors, he observes, New York embraced the Broken Windows theory of policing, which holds that controlling disorder will prevent more serious crime, and consistently targeted \u201cquality of life\u201d offenses. This singular focus encompassed everything from Koch-era efforts to bust open-air drug and stolen-goods markets on the Lower East Side to Michael Bloomberg\u2019s reliance on the \u201cstop and frisk\u201d practice and the continued enforcement against illegal street sales of untaxed cigarettes under the de Blasio administration.<\/p>\n

The city pursued this strategy because it wanted to preserve its middle class and affluent tax base and couldn\u2019t do so unless it made its public spaces livable again after the disorder and danger of the 1970s and 1980s. But the \u201cburden\u201d of this policing \u201cfell overwhelmingly on communities of color,\u201d Williams writes, via unwanted police attention as well as incarceration, as well as police shootings of unarmed civilians.<\/p>\n

On education, Williams praises public school decentralization and the \u201csmall schools\u201d movement that began, in the 1970s, to challenge an unresponsive Bureau of Education bureaucracy. An experimental school in East Harlem, as well as the city\u2019s creation of magnet schools, gave city parents, including poorer ones, some control over their children\u2019s education. Classrooms in such well-managed and competitive schools were full of engaged pupils.<\/p>\n

But he laments the move within the school system toward more competition, particularly the charter school networks that emerged in the late 1990s and in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Charter systems like the Success Academy campuses enforce strict attendance and behavioral standards and follow basic reading and math curricula. But they \u201cintroduced a new division within communities of color, with homeless, low-achieving, special needs and English-learning students less likely to be represented in the most successful charters than in surrounding schools,\u201d Williams writes. He further criticizes Bloomberg\u2019s strategy of closing failing public schools to turn over their buildings to principals of start-up public schools, calling it disruptive to communities.<\/p>\n

On housing, Williams targets New York State\u2019s partial deregulation of the city\u2019s rent-regulation laws starting in the 1990s. These Albany policies, which allowed owners of rent-regulated apartments to assess 20 percent rent increases on vacant units, and to deregulate such vacant units once they passed through a high-rent threshold\u2014beginning, in 1993, at $2,000 a month\u2014were responsible for mass displacement, Williams claims. Meantime, multiple mayors built insufficient new housing for the middle class as well as for poorer residents, instead focusing zoning and tax benefits on developers building market-rate units for affluent newcomers. \u201cIt all added up to . . . a man-made displacement of people from their homes more commonly associated with civil strife than with everyday life in one of the world\u2019s richest cities,\u201d he concludes.<\/p>\n

If we indulge his wild exaggeration and crude conclusions, though, Williams tells an engaging story in the details. He does not focus on personalities. You get no deep portraits of Gotham\u2019s tabloid characters, or expositions of seminal events\u2014whether the Crown Heights riots or 9\/11\u2014or tales of downtown discos and artists.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not a bad editorial choice. Readers looking for that have lots of other options, including Jonathan Mahler\u2019s 2025 The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990, and Thomas Dyja\u2019s 2021 New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation.<\/p>\n

Williams\u2019s remove from personalities allows him to give the reader something more subtle and valuable: an overview of the infrastructure of New York politics and policy. Prosecutor Rudy Giuliani won the mayoral election in 1993, for instance, not only on the force of his personality and the public\u2019s discontent with crime and disorder but also because the state\u2019s Republican leaders convinced him and Senator Al D\u2019Amato to bury a feud. Otherwise, intraparty infighting would have held back the insurgent. A year later, New York State got its first Republican governor in two generations, George Pataki\u2014not because Pataki possessed sparkling charisma but because D\u2019Amato, carefully working with pollsters to check off a list of electable Republican traits in a Democratic state, chose him as the best fit.<\/p>\n

Two decades later, the animosity between Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio wasn\u2019t (just) the byproduct of clashing personalities. It also sprang from calibrated political calculations. De Blasio, pushing hard for tax increases in 2014 and campaigning for progressive candidates in 2015, was too early in anticipating the progressive, and, later, democratic socialist, political revolution that would come as a response to Donald Trump\u2019s election to the presidency in 2016. Meantime, Cuomo, holding out as a moderate until progressives swamped the state legislature in 2018, was too late.<\/p>\n

Likewise, Williams finds forgotten policy details in the archives. Few students of modern New York likely remember, or ever knew, that partial deregulation of the city\u2019s housing-rental market was once a bipartisan goal. Then-governor Mario Cuomo signed into law the modest deregulation of vacant units in the early 1990s, a law later expanded by Pataki. Similarly, school choice was once a more ecumenical endeavor than it is today: \u201cnational-level conservatives tended to come to the concept of school choice later than Great Society liberals and community control advocates,\u201d Williams notes.<\/p>\n

And though Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg often figure as cartoon villains of the city\u2019s alleged over-policing, Williams scrupulously reminds us that the city\u2019s two progressive modern mayors\u2014David Dinkins and Bill de Blasio\u2014remained largely faithful to Broken Windows-based preventative policing. Both men expanded the ranks of the NYPD. Even under de Blasio, changes came in degree and tactics, not in overall strategy. (The Manhattan Institute and City Journal figure in this history, as the font of Giuliani\u2019s policy ideas on education and crime, and as a leader of various coalitions for school choice.)<\/p>\n

Williams is too honest an academic to avoid acknowledging New York\u2019s spectacular crime drops beginning in the early 1990s, \u201ccoinciding\u201d with more effective policing, and to note that crime fell faster here than in the rest of the country. His argument that Giulaini\u2019s policing revolution was mostly a better-funded extension of Koch and Dinkins strategies may be an attempt to undermine the mayor\u2019s place in history as the impetus behind New York\u2019s 1990s turnaround. But it is also a reminder that New Yorkers generally like order and safety on their streets, and mayors respond to that preference, if not always with equal success in results.<\/p>\n

Similarly, on education, when de Blasio pledged to end the Bloomberg practice of closing failing schools, some such schools \u201cperformed so poorly that de Blasio . . . reversed course and closed them.\u201d This move wasn\u2019t so much a flipflop as a pragmatic nod to what works. And though Williams sees the 2019 rollback of rent deregulation, enacted by the newly progressive state legislature, as a victory for a new era, he also notes that the law, by constraining property owners\u2019 income, \u201craised new questions about how the housing stock could be maintained.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for Williams, if not for the reader, these well-sourced details undermine his broader argument. The fact that multiple mayors with different ideologies, governing during different eras, eventually settled on similar broad strategies\u2014private housing investment, school choice, and effective policing\u2014doesn\u2019t indicate a catastrophic groupthink error that ignored a credible alternative. It suggests that these solutions were the only viable ones.<\/p>\n

And Williams never identifies an alternative path. In strategy if not tactics, he never quite tells us what, exactly, any of these mayors were supposed to do differently. As he acknowledges, there is no pot of federal or state money to provide unlimited housing for poorer New York natives and newcomers. The NYPD has for decades policed small-scale crimes not because of some plot imposed from above, but in response to resident complaints. Polls show<\/a> that most people like assertive policing of their neighborhoods. Finally, charter schools perform well, as he notes, and parents like school choice: even as public school enrollment drops, charter school enrollment remains<\/a> robust.<\/p>\n

On inequality and poverty, the fact that New York benefited from the financialization of the economy to replace manufacturing jobs, as well as the globalization of finance, is well known. Should the city have turned such money away in an attempt to cling to jobs that no longer existed? Wall Street denizens and other professional classes have consistently provided the funds for New York\u2019s high spending\u2014but should the city have raised taxes even further over these decades to fund even higher spending? As Williams notes, Dinkins did raise taxes\u2014to pay for more police. Bloomberg, too, hiked taxes after 9\/11. City and state taxes are already high, and spending is thus concurrently high. The city\u2019s $88.7 billion<\/a> in annual tax revenue far surpasses the $5 billion<\/a> ($31 billion in today\u2019s dollars) it took in annually in 1975, and the marginal growth has been in education spending as well as rising pension and benefit costs for public-sector workers. The share of the city budget for basic public services, including policing, has shrunk<\/a>.<\/p>\n

New York\u2019s persistently high poverty rate owes partly to the city\u2019s continual importation of new immigrants, who prefer the city\u2019s opportunity to those available in their home countries. Public housing, which assesses low rent as a proportion of low income, further encourages intergenerational poverty. As for desegregation, there\u2019s no evidence that New York City parents dream of sending their kids to schools with more white kids, or that the city\u2019s new immigrants in Queens and the Bronx wish that more white people lived in their neighborhoods. And, even if they did, there aren\u2019t enough white people to go around in New York City.<\/p>\n

Williams is a careful researcher, but he makes some errors that reveal his status as an outsider. (Though he holds a Columbia degree, he teaches at Williams in Massachusetts.) He confuses the Metropolitan Transportation Authority with a non-existent Metropolitan Transit Authority, a rookie mistake. Serious crime on the subways in the 1970s and 1980s wasn\u2019t \u201crelatively uncommon;\u201d more than a dozen people a year regularly died in mostly random incidents on the rails, a number the city later reduced to one or two per year.<\/p>\n

City of Fortune ends before the Mamdani mayoralty begins. But Williams does note that the \u201cnew progressivism\u201d heralded by Bronx-Queens Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other insurgents poses \u201cthe most profound challenge yet to the governing arrangements that had emerged in the aftermath of the fiscal crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Does it? Mamdani, despite his rhetoric, shows flickers of absorbing New York\u2019s half-century of post-fiscal-crisis orthodoxy rather than repudiating it. He seems to realize that public safety comes before anything else: more than half a year into his mayoralty, he has yet to launch his \u201cdepartment of community safety\u201d to move some policing responsibilities to civilians, and he has retained Jessica Tisch, a late Eric Adams-era appointee and a proponent of preventative policing, as police commissioner. On housing, Mamdani has yet to propose any mass-scale public building program; instead, like his predecessors, he is gingerly working<\/a> to encourage private development. (The mayor remains markedly uninterested in education, as opposed to childcare.)<\/p>\n

What Williams writes about de Blasio in one instance\u2014the mayor \u201chad yet to realize a clear alternative\u201d to the status quo\u2014could sum up the unanswered question at the heart of City of Fortune: What were they all supposed to do instead?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"City of Fortune: Inequality and the Making of Contemporary New York, by Mason B. Williams (Norton, 400 pp.,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":344360,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10],"class_list":["post-344359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}