Seen from afar, the politics of New York City present a paradox. The city is a hotbed of liberalism, and votes heavily Democratic in national elections. Yet the Democrats have not won a mayoral election in almost twenty years (and, as of this writing, Mike Bloomberg is coasting to his third term). Why has liberalism been eclipsed as an electoral force in this liberal city? Alex Vitale goes some way to answering this question, in his misnamed book (a more accurate title might have been 'the roots of the turn to punitive approaches' or 'the collapse of corporate liberalism'--he has much more to say about how we arrived at quality of life campaigns than about how the campaigns themselves affected the city). He has a clear, forceful explanatory framework which he fills in with well-chosen details (what more can we ask for?). The basic framework is this: corporate liberals used to rule New York City. They prioritized government interventions to facilitate the growth of business in the city. In theory, this would help everyone, but it did not. It often produced unemployment, or low wages, or housing shortages. But corporate liberals did not support interventions in labor or housing markets to address these problems, since this would have frustrated the growth strategy. Rather, they favored ameliorative measures by funding social service agencies and occasional housing projects.
In the seventies and eighties, this all became unraveled. The businesses favored by the corporate liberal strategy--the finance and real estate sectors--tended to exacerbate these problems because apart from those on top, they are low wage industries. So the 'problem' portion of the population grew. Meanwhile the city faced a budget crunch (in part because of fears about raising taxes on business) and so less money flowed to the ameliorative agencies. And the 'quality of life' sank. At first, this term referred to the life of all New Yorkers, including the rising number of homeless. But more and more, it referred to those inconvenienced by the presence of the homeless and the general rise in crime, which shot up in the seventies and eighties. This included the middle and upper classes, but also a considerable portion of the working class. With liberals offering no broad solution to the problems based on interventions in the labor or housing markets (or even, dare we mention, through the socialization of capital), this population grew increasingly frustrated with what they experienced most directly every day--deteriorating, scary street life filled with prostitution, drug dealing, mentally ill homeless people. Centralized approaches of corporate liberals, which often involved landing homeless shelters on neighborhoods 'in the middle of the night' (i.e. with no input from the neighborhoods) seemed to make the problem worse. Meanwhile the 'law and order' approach to policing, which focused on serious crimes, failed to help. And so from the bottom up (although one must include the Grand Central Station Business Improvement District as part of the 'bottom' here), communities organized to demand the police and the city deal more aggressively with the 'problem' population that was wreaking havoc on their day to day lives. This logic frayed the traditional commitment to liberalism in communities as diverse as the East Village and East New York (the text offers many more details that make it worth reading in its entirety). More and more the social service professional beneficiaries of Democratic patronage stood isolated from the communities they were embedded in. This is the context for the rise of Giuliani and punitive approaches to homelessness, in which social services are doled out only in the context of meeting certain behavioral requirements, and prison looms much larger as an alternative. Through this analysis, Vitale gets us very far from glib formulations that the middle class turned mean and selfish during the eighties (maybe too far?). His alternative is that liberals should turn into populists, and champion economic justice for all, rather than ameliorative measures. As is usually the case, this alternative is not nearly as detailed as the real-life picture he describes, and, for example, he says little about the national (and even global) constraints that make it difficult to imagine NYC moving along a radically different path. He is also entirely negative about the anarchists who sought to make common cause with the homeless in Tompkins Square, but weren't they, in grassroots fashion, pushing for the sort of alternative he is advocating? I wish the book talked a little more about the fate of the homeless and the poor under the Giuliani and Bloomberg regimes, but overall, an excellent read.
