The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [131]
Imagine a similar experiment in New York. It is practically inconceivable that once in operation the Dial-A-Ride would have been terminated. Attempts to curb the buses would be greeted by outraged protests. Public officials would be condemned for making secret deals with the highway lobby. Or the oil interests. The poor and the public employees, it would be chanted, were sold out by the politicians! The issue would have been not cost but convenience, not what was affordable but what was desirable.
New York’s special political culture would not have tolerated it. Why is New York different? Unlike anywhere else in America, New York is a city of renters—75 percent of its residents pay rent. Many receive housing subsidies. A homeowner usually sees a direct connection between government spending and property taxes—as California’s 1978 Jarvis Amendment proved—creating popular support to hold down costs. But in New York the property tax leans on unpopular landlords and commercial interests. Residents came to believe that services were “free.” They also believed that government was a friend, and it was. New York is the capital of liberal compassion and concern. New York was the entry point and the social laboratory for the country. New York is also blessed with an unusual number of Jews—about 25 percent of its population and half the country’s total. The Jewish tradition stresses that government is a friend of the needy; government work, an honor; education, a necessity; compassion, a badge of virtue; voting, an obligation of citizenship. Because Jews overwhelmingly identified with the Democratic party and voted in greater numbers than any other group, until recently the liberal Jewish tradition dominated New York Democratic primaries. Since primary victories were usually tantamount to election, more conservative and numerous Catholic and Protestant voters lacked similar clout.
New York’s politics were invested with a moral mission. Not only did we wish to do good, we wanted, as Irving Kristol once wrote, to feel good. Immediately. Questions about cost or budget limitations were often equated with the voice of right-wing reaction. Either you want to help people or you don’t. The question was whether, not how; whether you were pro or con, good or evil. In New York, a city with four registered Democrats for every Republican, there was no two-party system to constrain the debate, no organized home owners, no coordinated business community. The press, more often than not, focused on the conflicts; on what was said, not what was done. Not surprisingly, people feared being attacked, being called heartless, reactionary, perhaps evil.
“The fundamental causes of the fiscal crisis are shared by many cities,” says Donna Shalala, Assistant Secretary of HUD, whose responsibilities include urban research. “But the way New York dealt with its declining economic base was unique. Other cities had declining economic bases. They all raised taxes. They all begged the state and federal government for more money. Or they cut services. New York did all of those things, except it really didn’t cut services. We pretended we did. Instead we borrowed and borrowed. That was our unique contribution to the urban crisis.”
She continued: “New York has a different political philosophy about what the role of government is. When I was a kid growing up in Cleveland [where there are no Republicans on the thirty-three-member City Council], we didn’t expect our garbage to be collected every day. It was, and is, good politics in other cities to have a balanced budget. It wasn’t in New York. In New York, we saw the role of government as helping to redistribute income from the rich to the poor. Places like Seattle and San Francisco didn’t view their city government that way. New York constantly searched for money and revenues to do the things they wanted to do.” Even if it