City of Disorder - How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics (Hardcover)

"In City of Disorder, Alex Vitale provides a wise and balanced analysis of the preoccupation with social order in New York City that flowered under Giuliani's watch. On the one side, neoliberal housing and employment markets were increasing the numbers of people who were displaced and homeless. The failure of government on all levels to regulate the market forces driving this development, or to intervene to provide alternatives for the people affected, meant that people coped as they always have, by camping on the streets and panhandling, and by turning to drugs and drink. These behaviors in turn created popular political support for the coercive social controls that came to characterize city policy in the nineties. But neither the homeless nor the public were responsible for the limited alternatives which drove this mean result."
--Frances Fox Piven, author of The War at Home: The Domestic Costs of Bush's Militarism

"Vitale presents an important critical analysis of 'quality of life' and 'zero tolerance' policing that have serious civil rights and civil liberties implications and are too often accepted, without careful scrutiny, as the solution to urban problems."
&m#8212;Donna Lieberman, Executive Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union

New York in the 1990s faced a aquality of lifea crisis of homelessness and public disorder. In response, frustrated local residents embraced the neoconservative ideas of Rudolph Giuliani, who pledged to restore order through aggressive policing and punitive social policies, shifting the focus of government from improving the lives of the needy to protecting the welfare of themiddle and upper classes. In exploring this development, Alex S. Vitale shows why historically liberal New York has voted against Democrats in the last four mayoral elections.

In City of Disorder, Vitale uses neighborhood case studies and city-wide economic development data to investigate the rise of punitive urban social policies. His findings show that the neoconservative backlash against the homeless and poor was a direct result of urban liberalismas embracing of neoliberal economic development strategies and its unwillingness to use local resources to respond to the disorder it helped create in a way that empowered communities and brought positive change to those on the margins.

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