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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