The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [25]
Today, no such simple action is possible. On each political issue—decentralization or community control, the mix of low income and middle income housing, the proportion of blacks in the city colleges, the location of a cross-Manhattan or cross-Brooklyn expressway, etc.—there are dozens of active, vocal, and conflicting organized opinions. The difficulty in governing New York—and many other cities as well—is not the “lack of voice” of individuals in city affairs, or the “eclipse of local community,” but the babel of voices and the multiplication of claimants in the widened political arena.
Even if “the city had had prudent, statesmanlike financial management over the last decade or two,” David Stanley wrote in Cities in Trouble, “it still would have been in trouble—not so deep or so soon, but clearly in trouble.” Probably.
But to blame historical or social and economic forces, everything and everybody, is to blame nobody. We run the risk of learning nothing from what happened to New York. That’s where the other school of thought comes in. In my view, New York is much more the victim of self-inflicted wounds than it likes to admit. After a searching analysis of the city’s economy and budget, the Mayor’s Temporary Commission on City Finances issued a June 1977 final report which debunked what its authors called the “captive-of-events” theory of the fiscal crisis: the belief that the city had “little or no control over the events leading to the fiscal crisis.” Such a theory was “popular,” according to the report, because “it tends to absolve local political leaders of responsibility for the fiscal crisis and buttresses the also-popular view that the solution to the City’s financial problems lies in increased Federal and State aid rather than local political reform. The ‘captive-of-events’ theory thus has political as well as theoretical underpinnings that provide a justification for previous City policies and a rationale for not changing them in the future.” Pretty strong stuff, particularly when you consider that those signing the report included former Mayor Wagner, Governor Rockefeller’s former Chief of Staff, Alton Marshall, former City Corporation Counsel Leo Larkin, and the head of the Central Labor Council, Harry Van Arsdale.
The following pages attempt to isolate some of the key events and city, state and federal decisions which helped cripple New York. Some of these decisions were bad; some were good, some neither. All had profound consequences. At the risk of overdramatization, they might be called the “original sins.”
Growth of the Suburbs
Americans were shocked in the mid-1970’s when the Marxist government of Cambodia harshly ordered the resettlement of a nation. Millions were forced out of cities and into the countryside. The intention of the ruling claque, backed by a murderous militia, was to yank Cambodia back into an agrarian, preindustrial society. An entire people was uprooted at gunpoint.
America experienced a voluntary but no less massive migration, as poor blacks and Hispanics moved north and middle- and upper-income whites fled to the suburbs. The causes of the fiscal crisis cannot be fully comprehended without charting this exodus of wealth and flood of poor people. Admittedly, population shifts were inevitable. They result from “progress”—air conditioning and superhighways and the airplane helped open the South. People’s natural desires for newness and space and property are not easily satisfied in aging, congested cities.
But a good deal of this population shift was foreordained by city, state and federal policies promoting highways and low-interest government-sponsored home loans. Such policies did not originate with masterbuilder Robert Moses or the federal government,