Robert Fitch argues that, within a generation, New York City has
been transformed from the richest city in the world to one of the
poorest in North America. The pillars of its economy-Macy's, the
Daily News, Citibank, Olympia and York, the Trump organization-have
cracked or collapsed. Today, the officially poor in New York number
nearly 2,000,000 and more than 400,000 residents of the city are
without jobs. In this indictment of those who have wrecked New
York, Robert Fitch points to the financial and real-estate elites.
Their goals, he argues, have been simple and monolithic: to
increase the value of the land they own by extruding low-rent
workers and factories, replacing them with high-rent professionals
and office buildings. The planning establishment has been able of
raise the value of real estate inside the city boundaries over
twenty-fold. In doing so, Fitch suggests, it effectively closed New
York's deep-water port, eliminated its freight rail system,
shuttered its factories and destroyed its capacity for incubating
new business. Now the real-estate values have collapsed. The city
is left with 65,000,000 square feet of office space-enough to last,
without any new building, to the middle of the twenty-first
century. In pursuit of those who are responsible, Fitch arraigns
the great and the bad of the city's establishment: Roger Starr,
architect of "planned shrinkage" (the withdrawal of fire, police
and mass transit services from black and Latino neighborhoods); the
Ford Foundation, which proposed converting vast tracts of the South
Bronx into a vegetable garden; City Hall fixers like John Zucotti,
Herb Sturz and James Felt, who cut the deals between government and
real estate by working for both sides; and the Rockefeller family,
whose involuntary investment in the Rockefeller Center became a
gigantic "tar baby," nearly swallowing up their entire fortune.
Drawing on never-before-published material from the Rockefeller
family archives, as well as other archival documents, this book
aims to expose those responsible for the demise of New York.
General
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