After the Urban Crisis: New York and the Rise of Inequality Edited by Themis Chronopoulos and Jonathan Soffer Forthcoming as a special issue of the Journal of Urban History Table of Contents and Abstracts Introduction. After the Urban Crisis: New York and the Rise of Inequality by Themis Chronopoulos and Jonathan Soffer “I am Not Co-Op!” The Struggle over Middle-Class Housing in 1970s New York by Benjamin Holtzman In 1970s New York, some landlords and major real estate associations argued that New York could stem the exodus of middle-income residents by creating greater opportunities for homeownership in a city that had long been dominated overwhelmingly by renters. They proposed converting middle-income rental housing into cooperatives, a process that would also enable former landlords to profit handsomely. Tenants, however, widely rejected apartment ownership, preferring the security of rent-regulated housing. This article traces the ensuing struggles between tenants, the real estate industry, and city officials over the nature of moderate and middle-income housing in New York. The eventual success of the real estate industry enabled cooperative conversions to expand dramatically in the 1980s, but only by bargaining with tenants and activists, offering tenants non-eviction plans, and heavily discounted insider prices. This process helped to transform the city by underwriting a momentous turnaround in the real estate market, while signaling a larger embrace of market deregulation. “A Shelter Can Tip the Scales Sometimes”: Disinvestment, Gentrification, and the Neighborhood Politics of Homelessness in 1980s New York City by Ariel Eisenberg In the 1980s, visible homelessness became one of the most pressing problems in New York City. While most New Yorkers expressed sympathy for the homeless, many of them also resisted efforts to site shelters and service facilities in their neighborhoods. But far from being simply a case of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) sentiment, protests over the placement of these facilities arose in the context of decades-long neighborhood movements against urban disinvestment, and the beginning of gentrification in some New York City neighborhoods. I argue that understanding this history is crucial to parsing the complex politics of anti-homeless facility protests in the 1980s, and to understanding the 1 rise of “quality of life” policies that would govern many neoliberal urban spaces by the 1990s. The Guardian Angels: Law and Order and Citizen Policing in New York City by Reiko Hillyer This article explores the rise of the Guardian Angels, a community patrol organization founded in 1979 in New York City by Curtis Sliwa and composed mainly of black and Latino youths. The group emerged in an era of economic restructuring coupled with a rising fear of crime. The Guardian Angels merit attention because of their peculiar relationship to the rise of law and order politics. They demonstrate that the fear of crime was neither the monopoly of the white middle class nor merely a construction of politicians. Black and Latino Guardian Angels were agents of community crime control who drew on existing customs of self-determination and distrust of the police. Ultimately, however, the activities and the rhetoric of the Guardian Angels contributed to the rise of a conservative discourse that justified the strengthening of the police state, anxiety about crime, and the gentrification of neighborhoods. The Rebuilding of the South Bronx after the Fiscal Crisis by Themis Chronopoulos This article explores the rebuilding of the South Bronx from 1977 to 2013. This rebuilding represents an important public policy accomplishment, since the South Bronx was one of the most physically devastated areas in the United States. In terms of economic policy, the rebuilding of the South Bronx defies linear narratives. On the one hand, public-private partnerships, which represent some of the most important features of urban neoliberalism were used heavily in the revitalization of the South Bronx. Community organizations that had been rebuilding areas in the South Bronx in the 1970s and the 1980s were required to conform to the requirements of the market, if they were to continue participating in urban development. On the other hand, the building of housing for low- and moderate-income people is not exactly a neoliberal economic policy, since these housing units were built with public subsidies and regulated by government agencies. In its insistence to rebuild the South Bronx as well as other physically devastated areas, the city government of New York became involved in creative financing by incorporating non-government organizations that were ran by accomplished businesspeople but remained non-profit. And whatever the original intentions of city administrations in building and preserving affordable housing in the South Bronx may have been, the accommodation of so many low income people performing low-paying but essential jobs, has contributed to the making of a more vibrant urban economy, even if these same people are not necessarily the ones benefitting from New York’s economic dynamism. 2 Contributors Themis Chronopoulos is a lecturer in American History and Culture at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom. He is the author of Spatial Regulation in New York City: From Urban Renewal to Zero Tolerance (New York: Routledge, 2011). He is currently writing a book titled When the Government Disappears: Inadequate Municipal Service Delivery and the Decline of New York City, 1945–1985. Ariel Eisenberg is Assistant Professor of History and Interdisciplinary Studies at Kennesaw State University, where she teaches women’s history and women, gender, and sexuality studies. She is currently writing a book entitled “Save Our Streets and Shelter Our Homeless”: The Homeless Crisis in Urban America in the 1980s. Reiko Hillyer is an assistant professor of history at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Her first book, Designing Dixie: Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New South, concerns the uses of public memory and tourism in fostering sectional reconciliation and economic development in the American South in the decades following the Civil War. Benjamin Holtzman is a historian trained in the intersections of political, social, and economic histories of the twentieth century, with particular focus on politics, capitalism, cities and suburbs, social movements, and race. His research has appeared in Space and Culture, Radical Society, and several edited collections. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Brown University where he is completing his dissertation, Crisis and Confidence: Reimagining New York City in the Late Twentieth Century. Jonathan Soffer is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of Technology, Culture & Society at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. He is the author of Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) and currently working on a study of Tammany Hall and its relationship to New York's infrastructure. 3 Introduction. After the Urban Crisis: New York and the Rise of Inequality Themis Chronopoulos and Jonathan Soffer It’s important to keep rich people in the city of New York. Because they have all the money. And they have the entrepreneurs and we want them to invest. And they have two or three houses they can fly the coop at any time and therefore I have to be very respectful of their comfort in a sense. So when people said: ‘Why are you fixing the roadbed on Park Avenue?’ I said ‘because if we don’t fix it they’re gonna leave. They pay a lot of rent. And if they think they’re getting shafted and not attended to, and that all that we’re going to spend money on is the poor, then they’ll leave.’ --former New York City mayor Edward I. Koch1 Mayor Ed Koch’s explanation of the class bias in service delivery during his administration illustrates the key theme of this section: policies that promoted New York as a place for the wealthy. This was not necessarily his goal. Koch justified better service delivery to the rich in order to retain its tax base as a precondition to making the city a better place for the middle class. He did his best to deliver by rebuilding the South Bronx and other devastated areas as affordable housing, as Themis Chronopoulos’s article in this section illustrates. Over time, Koch’s promise of a middle class New York faded. In 2013, Mayor Michael Bloomberg summed up his policies designed to promote the city as a preserve of the rich, and dismissed concerns about income inequality and the increasingly rigid control of public space that he imposed: “If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend that would create a much bigger income gap,” which, he argued, was good for the whole city, because it would raise its tax base.2 The shift from ideals of “socialism in one city” that predominated until the 1970s, to Koch’s idealized “middle class” New York, to Bloomberg’s twenty-first century vision of the city as a playground for the 1 percent, was over-determined by a larger shift in the world political economy of the 1970s and 1980s, toward increased income inequality and the de-politicization of economic management to make it less democratic.3 It is also important to remember that New York’s troubles did not begin in the 1970s. As Thomas Sugrue has demonstrated, the “urban crises” of the 1970s in cities across America resulted in part from the complex interplay of structural and contingent local forces set in motion long before. Deindustrialization began in some cities as early as the 1920s. Pressures for political conformity, structural racism, and actively discriminatory housing policies throughout the post- World War II period led to disinvestment in the urban core and subsidized racial segregation.