The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [27]
But the automobile was the wave of the future. On June 29, 1956, the Federal Highway Trust Fund was created. Over the next twenty-one years, $90 billion was raised and $80 billion spent on 38,000 miles of new federal highways, with $2.2 billion of that total spent in New York State to construct 1,246 miles of road. In the program’s first ten years, notes Caro, 439 miles of federal highways were constructed in the city—but not one mile of new subway.
America was transformed. People poured out of cities, creating new markets. Businesses followed. A 1977 study prepared by the Academy for Contemporary Problems for the federal Commerce Department describes why:
In earlier stages of our national development, firms and individuals were willing to pay the higher costs of living and doing business in the Northeast’s centers of high population and economic concentration because the more primitive transportation and communications of an earlier day made such proximity of suppliers, producers, clients and supporting businesses essential. The benefits of close proximity outweighed the costs. But modern transportation, together with electronic communications, have eroded the once-premium advantage of concentration. Instead, they are underwriting a decentralization of our national economy and population.
By 1970, the average household income of the New York City suburbs ($17,062) was more than 50 percent greater than that inside the city ($11,269). In Breach of Faith, Theodore H. White sketches the profound impact of highways on America and New York:
… the nation, invited by the new highways to become guzzlers of gasoline, had learned to drive five miles for a six-pack of beer or a pound of butter. Twenty years later, their appetite for driving had become the Energy Crisis.… One can follow the thread of this single Highway Act on to politics: the reasoning behind the Federal Highway Act was so seductive as to melt resistance. It ran thus: the entries to and exits from big cities were so congested that a way had to be created for people to move into and out of such cities easily and to go wherever they wanted to. But where more and more Americans wanted to go was the suburbs; and suburbia was to change American politics just as much as the opening of the West a century before. The new highways became not simply holiday routes for Fourth of July and Labor Day weekends, or highball expressways to bring food and supplies into the hearts of the cities. They were arteries of a new way of American life.
Rent Control
“Rent control is metaphysical,” sighs George Sternlieb, who has studied it for years. “The subject stops all thinking.” There are many who believe it stopped construction and invited the abandonment of apartments in New York City.
On November 1, 1943, every apartment in America was rent-controlled. To dampen inflation and provide housing for returning veterans, on that day the federal government put a ceiling on rents. It was a temporary act and was rescinded in 1948. For the purpose of preventing speculation and what it called unwarranted and abnormal “increases in rents and evictions during a period of housing emergency,” the State of New York passed its own stringent rent control law in 1950. Meant to be temporary, the law was administered by the Temporary State Housing Rent Commission. In 1962, the state granted the city the option to enact its own statute. In February of that year, the city passed a stricter law of its own, stabilizing rent controls and making it more difficult for landlords to raise rents. This law, declared Mayor Wagner, would create a “slumless city.” The government, not the free market, would