Overview

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.

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9780190843700

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Reviews

The Long Crisis is an engaging and revelatory history of New York's transformation into a neoliberal metropolis. Going beyond well-worn stories led by national politicians, technocrats, and corporate leaders, Holtzman takes us from housing to parks to policing to show how the efforts of New Yorkers shaped a privatized, market-oriented city from the bottom up. A book filled with colorful characters and rife with irony, this is a much-needed and novel explanation of how a city once known for the generosity of its public sector came to serve the market first. * Brian D. Goldstein, author of The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle Over Harlem * Reacting to a period of crisis and decline in the 1970s, New York City increasingly turned to market solutions and public-private partnerships. In The Long Crisis, Benjamin Holtzman deftly eschews simplistic or conspiratorial narratives of this turn toward marketization and traces its rise to more complex and surprising forces. As the city now confronts a new set of crises, The Long Crisis forces us to think deeply about what roles both private and public sectors should play in urban life. * Vincent J. Cannato, author of The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and his Struggle to Save New York * How did we get to a point wherein the United States not only has such paltry public services but the fundamental belief in public institutions and public places is so discredited and disdained? Holtzman uncovers surprising wellsprings for the sweeping ascendance of privatization, market ideology, and elite political power in the 1980s. From Mayor Koch onward, city leaders opted for policies that invited corporate and monied elites to take control, push working-class and poor people out of the way, and reap the rewards of tax exemptions, release of rent-controlled apartments, private contracts, and Business Improvement Districts - market 'solutions' that spread well beyond New York. Dive in to the rich social struggles and political fights of The Long Crisis and find out how the wealthy took over Central Park and market triumphalism subverted municipal need. * Jennifer Klein, Yale University * Holtzman has written a compelling account of how ordinary New Yorkers navigated the 1970s financial crisis that eventually gave the private sector far more control of city services. He masterfully shows how South Bronx renters' eagerness to take over buildings, Queens residents' decision to volunteer, and Manhattanites' willingness to use business donations to clean up public parks were just as important as the spending cuts and tax breaks that brought an end to working-class New York. * Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Loyola University Chicago * In New York City, the failure of government to overcome the sustained urban crisis from the late 1960s through the 1980s inspired an ideologically diverse range of residents and civic groups, not just corporations and conservative elites, to 'take matters into our own hands.'The Long Crisis charts how liberal policymakers and grassroots activists embraced policies of marketization that included privatization of rent-regulated apartments, private management of public parks, citizen security patrols, and tax incentives for luxury real estate development and affordable housing construction. Holtzman demonstrates persuasively that Mayor Rudy Giuliani's neoliberal privatization agenda was the culmination, not the cause, of this profound shift toward private-sector solutions that ultimately accelerated social inequality. This is political history at its most capacious and creative. * Matthew D. Lassiter, University of Michigan *

Author Information

Benjamin Holtzman is an Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College.

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