Long Crisis
New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism
«Holtzman is a thoughtful, careful, even-handed writer, and makes a compelling case that New Yorkers, whether poor people living in abandoned Bronx tenements or CEOs worried about their employees safety in Bryant Park, turned to their own market-based experimentation not out of top-down ideology, but out of bottom-up desperation. His book is worth reading.»
Nicole Gelinas, American Compass
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. Les mer
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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.
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.
Detaljer
- Forlag
- Oxford University Press Inc
- Innbinding
- Innbundet
- Språk
- Engelsk
- ISBN
- 9780190843700
- Utgivelsesår
- 2021
- Format
- 17 x 24 cm
Anmeldelser
«Holtzman is a thoughtful, careful, even-handed writer, and makes a compelling case that New Yorkers, whether poor people living in abandoned Bronx tenements or CEOs worried about their employees safety in Bryant Park, turned to their own market-based experimentation not out of top-down ideology, but out of bottom-up desperation. His book is worth reading.»
Nicole Gelinas, American Compass
«As crises of different sorts continue to define our current moment, we would do well to not just learn from Holtzman's history but to follow its model.»
Claire Dunning, The Metropole
«A history traced with precision and care... The Long Crisis soars... in its granular mapping of the experimental, ad hoc, and contingent initiatives cooked up by an abandoned populace...By parsing these complexities, The Long Crisis, which refuses to put bounds on the temporal frame of crisis, offers a guidebook and a cautionary tale for those organizing today.»
Bench Ansfield, Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History
«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
«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
«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
«An impressive blending of social and political history, The Long Crisis chronicles the labors ofurban homesteaders, tenant organizers, neighborhood watch groups, and park volunteers who, fed up with dysfunctional city governance, worked to improve city life through sweat equity and private investment...The many accomplishments of The Long Crisis...should be read by scholars of contemporary social history, urban history, and the history of neoliberalism.»
Sarah Miller-Davenport, The Journal of Social History
«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
«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 H
«The Long Crisis is an engaging empirical study of New York between the 1960s and the 1990s. Chapters on how city parks came to be maintained by private citizens, on how the growth of private security allowed affluent residents and business owners to police public space, and on how tax incentives spurred the private development of luxury housing provide richly textured descriptions of often opaque processes that should interest urbanists from all disciplines. Chapters on housing and houselessness offer nuanced, deeply humanized accounts of what readers might (incorrectly) anticipate will be familiar stories. The book is recommended for anyone interested in late twentieth-century urban, social, or political history.»
Tracy Neumann, American Historical Review
«An impressive blending of social and political history, The Long Crisis chronicles the labors of urban homesteaders, tenant organizers, neighborhood watch groups, and park volunteers who, fed up with dysfunctional city governance, worked to improve city life through sweat equity and private investment....The strength of The Long Crisis lies in how it explains why so many New Yorkers adopted the practice of market solutions to urban problems, even if they did not agree with the conservative theory behind the city's neoliberal turn....Based on meticulous research...[it] should be read by scholars of contemporary social history, urban history, and the history of neoliberalism.»
Sarah Miller-Davenport, Journal of Social History
«Holtzman describes how New York City rebounded from urban decline and loss of faith in municipal governance in the last decades of the 20th century. City officials and neighborhood associations embraced marketization, namely greater reliance on private-public partnerships to 'save' New York from crime, decaying housing stock, corporate abandonment, and white flight....Yet, as Holtzman effectively points out, this neoliberal strategy, which replaced New Deal liberalism, produced greater income inequity, led to the decline of rent stabilization and increased homelessness, ended free public college tuition, led to higher bus and subway fares, loosened zoning restrictions for developers and gave them more tax abatements, and weakened overall city services....Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.»
Choice
«Holtzman's is a fresh, lively account that adds new complexity and detail to the narrative of how New York emerged from austerity and bankruptcy in the 1970s to become a playground for the wealthy today. The book also raises fascinating and urgent questions about how, exactly, privatization shapes governance.»
Nick Juravich, The Nation
«At a time when all cities are struggling to come to terms with a new reality, inThe Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism, Ben Holtzman provides an important and timely analysis of how one of them was transformed by a concerted socio-economic project.»
Glyn Robbins, LSE Phelan US Centre Blog
«Benjamin Holtzman's political history brilliantly complicates while reasserting neoliberalisms dominance over urban geographies by detailing how the political and social practices that are associated with neoliberalism emerged and, in some cases, originated among the groups it most adversely affected...Holtzman's book provides plenty of well researched and new topics about New York Citys neoliberal history to discuss, debate, and cite for years to come.»
Michael Villanova, Capital and Class
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