192 44 17MB
English Pages 288 Year 1999
Remaking New York
Globalization and Community Dennis R. Judd, Series Editor Volume 12 Remaking New York: Primitive Globalization and the Politics of Urban Community William Sites Volume 11 A Political Space: Reading the Global through Clayoquot Sound Warren Magnusson and Karena Shaw, Editors Volume 10 City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty Ananya Roy Volume 9 Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India's High-Tech City Smriti Srinivas Volume 8 Fin de Millénaire Budapest: Metamorphoses of Urban Life Judit Bodnár Volume 7 Latino Metropolis Victor M. Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres Volume 6 Regions That Work: How Cities and Suburbs Can Grow Together Manuel Pastor Jr., Peter Dreier, J. Eugene Grigsby III, and Marta Lopez-Garza Volume 5 Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City Christopher Mele Volume 4 Power and City Governance: Comparative Perspectives on Urban Development Alan DiGaetano and John S. Klemanski Volume 3 Second Tier Cities: Rapid Growth beyond the Metropolis Ann R. Markusen, Yong-Sook Lee, and Sean DiGiovanna, Editors Volume 2 Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change Jan Lin Volume 1 The Work of Cities Susan E. Clarke and Gary L. Gaile
Remaking New York Primitive Globalization and the Politics of Urban Community
William Sites
Globalization and Community I Volume 12 University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London
M IN NE SO TA
An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as "Primitive Globalization? State and Locale in Neoliberal Global Engagement," Sociological Theory 18, no. 1 (March 2000): 121-44; copyright 2000 American Sociological Association; reprinted with permission. Copyright 2003 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sites, William. Remaking New York: primitive globalization and the politics of urban community / William Sites. p. cm. — (Globalization and community; v. 12) ISBN 0-8166-4155-2 (HC : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-4156-0 (PB : alk. paper) 1. City planning—New York (State)—New York. 2. Community development— New York (State)—New York. 3. Community organization—New York (State)— New York. 4. Political participation—New York (State)—New York. 5. Municipal government—New York (State)—New York. 6. Globalization—New York (State)— New York. 7. New York (N.Y.)—Politics and government. 8. New York (N.Y.)— Economic policy. 9. Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.)—Social conditions. 10. Lower East Side (NewYork, N.Y.)—Economic conditions. I. Title. II. Series. HT168.N5 S57 2003 307.1'216'09747—dc21 2002154596 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction: Globalism and the City
ix
1. Primitive Globalization? State, Economy, and Urban Development
1
2. Building an Urban Neoliberalism: The Long Rebirth of New York
31
3. Public Action: Gentrification and the Lower East Side
69
4. Urban Movements, Local Control: Fighting over the Neighborhood
101
5. Beyond Primitive Globalization: Policy, Activism, and the Metropolis
137
Postscript: Rebuilding after 9/11
165
Notes
173
Select Bibliography
229
Index
241
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments
My first real introduction to the political economy of the city was provided by fellow organizers at the Metropolitan Council on Housing, a New York City tenant union that has fought for affordable housing for more than forty years. I wish to acknowledge, among many others, Bob Angles, Jane Benedict, Mark Brody, Tito Delgado, Carol Donohue, Mike Elliot, Jenny Laurie, Marty Lipowitz, Ed Liszewski, Patricia Pavez, Millie Rodriguez, Paul Wagner, and Jane Wood for educating me in housing politics and the city. Met Council's voice and work remain indispensable. The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a vital urban institution, was a stimulating place to be a graduate student in sociology. While there, I had access to a remarkable array of New York scholars. Robert Alford and William Kornblum, as well as Norman Fainstein and Ira Katznelson at the New School for Social Research, taught me much about theory, policy, and the city. Janet Abu-Lughod created a research community and provided, along with an initial opportunity to write about the Lower East Side, the attentions of a careful editor. William Tabb guided, with high standards and intellectual acuity, a doctoral dissertation that first addressed many of the issues of this study. Since moving to Chicago, I have been fortunate to work at the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration. Among a number of supportive colleagues, Evelyn Brodkin is deserving of special mention for encouragement and sage counsel. Many people provided help with research for this study. Public officials, community leaders, organizers, and residents shared their insights into the Lower East Side story. I was also aided by administrators and workers at many New York City agencies (especially the Division of Real Property, vii
viii • Acknowledgments
the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and the Department of City Planning) and by staff at Manhattan Community Board 3. Research librarians at the New York Public Library, the New York University Libraries, and, above all, the City of New York's Municipal Reference Center furnished expert and patient assistance. Along the way, careful readers have encouraged or sharpened my analysis. They include Robert Beauregard, Larry Bennett, Neil Brenner, Craig Calhoun, Robert Fisher, Peter Marcuse, Margit Mayer, Marisa Novara, Brian Prager, William Robinson, Saskia Sassen, Brian Waddell, and John Walton, not to mention a host of unnamed reviewers. Carolyn Fuqua supplied invaluable aid with manuscript preparation, and Christopher Winters, of the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library, lent crucial guidance in mapmaking. Special gratitude goes to photographers Donna Binder, Rena Cohen, Andrew Lichtenstein, and Marlis Momber, whose images add much to the story of the Lower East Side. Several other individuals made major contributions to the quality and completion of this project. Since my days at CUNY, Frances Fox Piven has been both supporter and insightful critic of my work, and I acknowledge her influence with gratitude. Dennis Judd has been an energetic benefactor and saw promise in the manuscript when it was still rough around the edges. I thank Dennis, and the University of Minnesota Press, for including this book in the Globalization and Community series, as well as Carrie Mullen for her attentive editorial oversight. A special debt is also owed Stan Luger, whose reading of the entire manuscript (on top of many conversations about the issues it addresses) contributed focus and clarity to the finished form. Lower East Siders and New Yorkers, past and present, made this book possible. I would also like to recognize my parents, family, and friends, in New York and elsewhere. And finally, I thank Suzanne—for intelligence, humor, and patience. The next book is hers.
Introduction
Globalism and the City
The city appeared as such a wondrously complex and complete organism that only a god could have created it. —Paul Lampl, Cities and Planning in the Ancient Near East
This book examines how urban politics and community action influence the development of an American city in a global age. Through a series of analyses of New York City that move between the local, the national, and the transnational, I attempt to provide a counterframe to accounts of globalization as a singular, structural phenomenon. These "globalist" accounts emphasize an economic logic of transformation; at each level, neighborhoods, cities, and even nation-states yield to market currents that operate under a variety of names—gentrification, reurbanization, globalization—but which are seen to remake communities with a similar disregard for politics, history, or place. Such accounts have much to offer. Indeed, the remarkable impact of economic forces on a city like New York is hard to deny. Yet the stark rhetorical power of "globalization" often discourages observers, particularly in the United States, from fully grasping the many ways in which states and politics—new public alliances to rebuild cities, conflicting neighborhood activisms, intensified government powers—also shaped national and urban development during the final decades of the twentieth century. The politics of urban development takes place at multiple scales: nation, city, neighborhood, and transnational arena. Conceived as a vertical case study, this book consists primarily of a series of analyses, conducted at different levels, of the evolution of New York since the 1970s. These analyses focus on such issues as the relationship of federal policies to the redevelopment of New York, the role of city government in the gentrification of ix
x • Introduction
Manhattan's Lower East Side, and the tensions between pragmatic and militant strategies within the Lower East Side political community. Each analysis examines, in its own fashion, a dynamic and complicated sequence of events over the course of this same turbulent period. Several chapters investigate the implications for cities of the broader U.S. reaction to international economic challenges. Taken together, these nested analyses compose a collective study of the contemporary role of government and community action in relation to the redevelopment of the city. Yet by approaching these issues one at a time, we will be able to examine at each level—in the international positioning of the United States, in the transformation of New York City, in the gentrification of the Lower East Side—the room for maneuver that emerged, the responses of political and community actors, and the kinds of outcomes that ensued. None of these topics represents, by itself, wholly uncharted terrain. New York has served as the subject of an insightful body of work on urban transformation in a globalizing era. Certain of these studies, notably Saskia Sassen's pathbreaking work The Global City, set out the claim that the latetwentieth-century resurgence of New York exemplified the growing influence of economic and cultural globalization over the city.1 More recent work, while tending to endorse the important impacts of global restructuring, has used a number of conceptual and methodological strategies to explore the mediated relationship between city and larger environment. In a comparative study of London and New York, for example, Susan Fainstein found considerable parallel in the development politics of the two global cities; she also recognized diverging elements, however, related in part to the dissimilar political structures of the cities and their nation-states, and these contrasts appear to have sharpened in recent years.2 Employing a different approach, Janet Abu-Lughod investigated the historical evolution of the three largest global cities in the United States (New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles) in an effort to differentiate between global and local causes of urban development. Although Abu-Lughod's study focused primarily on how differences in seminal growth phases shaped the subsequent evolution and "personality" of each metropolis, her analysis found that local factors (such as different racial and immigrant communities, spatial forms, and political cultures) as well as national policies were important influences in the development of the three cities.3 Meanwhile, community-level studies of New York also have investigated globalization from above and from below within an integrated analysis. Jan Lin, for instance, examined the fluid interplay between transnational and local economies, external and internal actors, cross-border migrations and community factions, all of
Introduction • xi
which—along with the maneuverings of the state—were involved in "reconstructing" Chinatown.4 In various ways, then, urban researchers focusing on New York have launched new explorations of how state policies, politics, and community actors tend to influence the relationship between global and local change. It is possible to build on insights from this research while also approaching these issues in a new way. Moving from a global view to the neighborhood level and back again, the following chapters examine distinct layers of urban change, one at a time, in order to investigate in different contexts a single question: What is the scope for political and community action to shape the economic city? Each chapter focuses on the ways in which the responses of political actors to the economic challenges of the late twentieth century tended to create, foreclose, or capitalize on opportunities for managing a frequently volatile process of urban change. These investigations do not ignore the constraints on cities, but they do reexamine and challenge them in key respects. By framing its subject in this fashion, the study aims to move away from certain self-limiting assumptions—such as that economic forces are invariably structural, politics merely local—in order to expand the potential to discover and take advantage of opportunities for making better cities. At the same time, my approach does not define away the quite powerful forces generated by capitalist economies in the twenty-first-century world. By finding underexplored analytical space between what are often seen as antithetical strategies of investigation, I hope to bring together and contribute to discussions between community activists, urban researchers, political theorists, and critics of globalization. The central thrust of this book is to theorize how politics and the state contribute to the often-destabilizing impacts of international integration on U.S. cities. This conceptual approach sets the foundation for a fresh analysis of New York's redevelopment over the past quarter century. By focusing on the logic of state action at both national and local levels, this work identifies a pattern of reactive policies—ad hoc measures to deregulate and subsidize business, displace the urban poor, and dismantle the welfare state—that serve to uproot social actors and facilitate short-term-oriented economic activity. In this way, a distinctive neoliberal politics can be seen to advance a singular and damaging type of economic globalization.
Contesting Globalism At the center of any inquiry into these issues is the question of globalization. Embodying strong claims of international integration, globalization implies a profound alteration in the development of places and societies,
xii • Introduction
and therefore in the contemporary capacity for political action. In its starkest versions, a new international environment—in which capital, technology, production, and images "flow" without respect for borders—sweeps aside old historical actors and structures, or reconstitutes them with new economic functions and identities.5 In certain circles, then, the notion of globalization implies that cities and even entire nations can only develop by disregarding the needs and distinctive qualities of local communities. The intellectual and practical implications of this kind of globalism are disturbing: the scope for alternative policies and the impacts of local political action, long small, seem to have become even smaller. For intellectuals, for activists, for policy makers and citizens, these developments, if true, raise major challenges with respect to the pursuit of social equity, political accountability, and urban community over the coming decades. My study develops the concept of primitive globalization in order to challenge many of the claims of this kind of globalist logic. This term reconceptualizes neoliberal responses to international economic integration in order to reinterpret the nature of contemporary urban revival. The concept adapts from classical political economy the notion of primitive accumulation, a term that Marx used ironically to refer to the historic role of state power during the early modern period in preparing the ground for the subsequent economic development of the mature capitalist era.6 Many of these early forms of state power—royal and parliamentary measures to disrupt feudal economies, coercive acts that uprooted traditional setdements, "bloody legislation" to punish the poor—suggested an important level of agency, yet one that was also reactive and undeveloped. A concept of primitive globalization seeks to draw attention to a similar relationship between the economic sea changes of the late twentieth century and the politics of the U.S. response. Here, a dramatic restructuring—not an entirely new economic system, to be sure, but a significant reorganization of the international economy all the same—has been met by state policies that can be read, in their own right, as ad hoc and disruptive reactions with major impacts on economic activity. Overturning key patterns of development and settlement from an earlier post-World War II era, these measures serve to clear the ground for bursts of dynamic, poorly regulated, and short-termoriented economic gain. Government power in the United States, far from simply eroding in response to globalization, plays a powerful and often destructive role in facilitating a distinctive, "neoliberal" path of economic development.7 Central to this conception, then, is the claim that the state remains a powerful force in shaping national responses to globalization. This argu-
Introduction • xiii
ment builds on insights from researchers in a number of fields. Scholars such as Robert Boyer, Linda Weiss, and Stephan Leibfried, writing from within different traditions in international political economy and comparative politics, have strongly asserted the continued importance of states and nation-based institutions in a global era.8 These commentators point to the developmental states of East Asia, or to the persistence of corporatist or welfare-state institutions in Continental Europe, as evidence of state agency as well as continued cross-national divergence. In such approaches, the state in neoliberal contexts is often viewed as a casualty or "victim" of economic globalization, its already-limited powers eroded by the crossborder flows of a new era. While capturing elements of truth, this characterization tends to restrict our ability to see the peculiar powers of this kind of state, especially its capacity to act in ways that are not strategic or constructive but, rather, destructive. Understanding these activities as partly the consequence of a distinctive and coherent set of neoliberal state policies— rather than as a result of state "weakness" or of globalization writ large— promises to sharpen our sense of the political possibilities inherent in the current age. By analyzing how governmental institutions, policies, and politics influenced processes of economic development over the final decades of the twentieth century, this study attempts to uncover how the state in the United States has operated both as facilitator and as victim of neoliberal globalization. It is not my intention to propose a new theory of the state. Efforts to conceptualize the state apart from particular social and historical contexts have not been especially useful for understanding its dynamic, conditional, and interactive relationship to economic development. Yet debates over globalization often resort to simplifying or circular notions when characterizing the relationship between a dominant international economy and dependent nation-states. For this reason, there is value in reconnecting selectively with earlier work focused on "bringing the state back in." What is generally recalled from those older debates is the insistence, still salutary, that states are actors—institutions that pursue goals that are not simply reflective of the demands or interests of social groups, classes, or society. Less often remembered is the contention that states, understood more "macroscopically," are also structures, and as such influence patterns of economic development and the politics of social groups.9 What remains important today, and constitutes a major point for further exploration, is that states are both agents (actors with voluntary powers) and structures (recurring patterns that shape behavior). Borrowing from Marx's analysis of an earlier historical transition, the term primitive globalization is intended to apply
xiv • Introduction
this insight to the state within a conceptual approach that also recognizes the complex interdependence of political and economic processes. In an analytical framework that examines globalization as a historical transition, state and political actors respond contingently to economic changes within a field of constraints that also include the shifting institutional configurations of the state itself. This makes it possible to locate key moments when, even within a neoliberal "regime" or pattern of development as in the United States, state actions may move beyond neoliberalism's emphasis on unfettering markets. Such an approach can be used, as Colin Hay has suggested in the case of Britain, to understand how state policies—neither the fully intentional product of state-led actors nor the indirect expression of structural dependency—may anticipate and reinforce the short-term preferences of business and other economic actors.10 In this sense, primitive globalization is intended both to enlarge our sense of the ways in which societal development is shaped by subglobal political processes and to sharpen the visibility of a specific historical pattern, or political logic, that has emerged within particular cases. One of the major limitations of debates over globalization and the nation-state is that they often take for granted the national character of the state and politics. Research with an urban focus is forced to confront and to complicate this assumption. Because social structures are contextdependent, urban studies provide an opportunity to situate social actors within locality, and to recognize these settings, as Andrew Sayer urged, as constitutive rather than merely consequent.11 This kind of research in urban sociology and geography has increasingly sought to distinguish between different "localizations" of global projects, often analyzing from the ground up the interplay between state politics and the often translocal networks in which people create their own communities and act upon the urban landscape.12 In much of this work, then, the significance of politics and of place-based agency is reaffirmed, leading to characterizations of cross-border linkages as more heterogeneous, contingent, and evolving than either globalist or statist visions typically suggest. Two recent works suggest, in contrasting ways, the insights to be gained from urban approaches to globalization that also focus extensively on politics and the state. Abu-Lughod's macrohistorical and comparative study of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, mentioned earlier, provides a remarkably wide-ranging investigation, over several centuries, of the relationship between urban development and the larger environment. Her analysis is especially concerned to track how the seminal growth phases of the three cities shaped their subsequent evolution, but the study demon-
Introduction • xv
strates as well that each city's distinctive racial and immigrant communities, spatial patterns, and political cultures have played a powerful and enduring role in particular trajectories of urban development. Despite the work's focus on the longue durée, Abu-Lughod also manages to position the three cities within a distinctively American urbanism, in which "intentional political policies" are seen in their own right to have important, and often quite polarizing, urban impacts.13 In a very different kind of analysis, Michael Peter Smith has also challenged many of the sweeping claims of globalism. Smith's theoretical intervention begins with the bold assertion that globalization is not a material economic structure but a social construction. His study's purpose is to develop an agency-oriented theoretical perspective that connects macroeconomic and geopolitical transformations to the micronetworks of social action that people create in everyday life. Unlike globalism, his own conception of "transnational urbanism" insists on the continuing significance of borders, state policies, and national identities even as these are often transgressed by communication circuits, migrant communities, or cross-national political movements; here, the nation-state and transnational practices are seen as mutually constitutive. Thus, Smith's retelling of the modern development of Los Angeles departs significantly from standard global-city narratives, focusing instead on the role of multiple states, media representations, and migrant social networks in reconstituting the sociospatial diversity or "racial and ethnic landscape" of contemporary L.A.14 The two works are clearly quite different. Abu-Lughod's historical treatment examines the structuring of urban differences. Smith's theoretical intervention focuses on the agencies of transnational social networks. Yet both set out approaches to globalization that take politics very seriously. One documents how structuring forces may be mediated, not mechanistically, but through historically contingent processes in which national and local patterns of race, space, and politics emerge; the other reconceptualizes how the vital agencies of subordinate actors may be tracked, not in a "wish-fulfilling triumph of the local" but as cross-border social networks that, in contention with state projects, actually constitute the urban landscapes and transnational structures of the current age. Although the two studies do not exactly complement one another—their respective theoretical commitments and research strategies are too divergent—they do enlarge, when viewed together, our sense of the different kinds of conceptual and investigative work that contribute to moving beyond a simplistic globalism. By rethinking global and local in more nuanced ways, then, it becomes possible to pursue a number of analytical approaches into the political
xvi • Introduction
processes that undergird, construct, localize, or historicize different kinds of globalizing projects.
Locating Politics, Changing Places The present study represents a different yet related effort to investigate the politics of globalization. By examining the multiple levels of a single case, my study seeks to understand how political capacities and actions evolve. The following chapters attempt to locate the relationship between state activities and economic change within a range of spatial contexts: within the U.S. system of cities, within New York, within Manhattan's Lower East Side, and within the latter's neighborhood-based movement factions. This set of spatialized frameworks makes it possible to examine highly fluid historical processes within the concrete social circumstances of particular environments. These frameworks also enable an analysis to pose important but often abstract questions of opportunity, agency, and contingency within distinct forms of spatial or territorial change, such as urban redevelopment, gentrification, and the emergence of local movements. Each of these "place-making" processes has been examined in its own right, of course, often within different subfields that focus on different levels of the urban system. To varying degrees, each subfield has developed a range of useful insights based on a growing body of case studies and midrange theories. Nevertheless, these literatures have also run up against certain barriers, resulting from the self-limiting focus of their initial propositions or merely the specialized nature of academic work, that constrain their effectiveness in responding to globalist challenges. In clarifying these problems or limitations, the present study, by resituating the insights of a number of literatures within a different conception of state activity, hopes to move beyond recent signs of impasse. The American metropolis today is often seen as a "comeback city," a hardy survivor that has perfected new strategies of growth and development to pull itself up from decline. Although perspectives on urban revival have varied, contemporary scholarship in the United States tends to center on the local politics of urban development. This focus may stem from the desire to define a manageable investigation, or to specify the contributions of local actors, or, as in several important studies of New York, to accord with certain theoretical propositions about urban or local autonomy.15 Studies guided by "urban regime theories" emphasize the influence of local coalition building on patterns of urban growth and governance, though several analyses integrate more extensively the ways in which global or national systems establish key conditions for urban development. There has
Introduction • xvii
been little sustained examination, however, of the evolving, mutually constituting linkages between national and local policies under recent international conditions.16 Exceptions that do exist generally have not attempted to track the historical reconstruction of these policy linkages, in both directions, within the scope of a single narrative. By investigating the interplay of federal and local policy measures over a period of several decades, it is possible to examine directly the role of these political linkages in reshaping the city, particularly New York's striking amalgam of economic dynamism and disparity. Beyond this question, such an approach can also explore more broadly whether these linkages helped to reconstruct a distinctive national pattern of redevelopment and governance. Gentrification is a hallmark of urban revival, and seemingly well understood. A discrete urban subfield has analyzed gentrification as a species of neighborhood transition, yielding considerable insight into its economic mechanisms and consequences. Early studies defined this type of change in market-oriented terms, distinguishing gentrification from the governmentdirected initiatives of postwar urban renewal. Political-economy approaches soon criticized notions of market sovereignty and linked neighborhood change to larger processes of urban restructuring, yet empirical research continued to focus mostly on gentrification as an economic or spatial logic and much less on state actors as central agents that might influence, for better or for worse, processes of neighborhood change.17 As a consequence, the relationship between state initiatives and the spatial dynamics of neighborhood revitalization—and thus the prospects for influencing such a process at the community level—has not been carefully investigated in U.S. cities. Through tracking local state actions, as well as their impacts on neighborhood conditions, researchers may push beyond notions of "market-led" and "state-centered" renewal to understand gentrification as a type of sociospatial change guided by public action.18 In the process, this approach might locate new opportunities for partnership, as well as productive conflict, between government and community actors. Community actors and their own capacities for organization (or disorganization) are typically addressed in still other urban subfields. Embodying divergent traditions in the study of community action, one literature on urban social movements analyzes the continuing conditions for mobilization and conflict while a second body of work focuses on the prospects for self-sustaining community development. Long at strategic loggerheads, conflict and community-building strategies alike now seem threatened by extreme fragmentation, perhaps stemming from processes of globalization that appear to challenge all place-based strategies to enhance the power or
xviii • Introduction
welfare of local communities. Yet the structural basis for conflicts over the terrain of the city has not disappeared, even as shifts in state institutions have also strengthened community attachments to place.19 What calls for further exploration is the relationship between a decentralizing state and movement actors at the neighborhood level, where important sources of power as well as division continue to emerge. How has a neoliberal state repositioned the political opportunities for movements to shape the city? Does a movement's neighborhood base affect its capacities to project power or mediate tensions within the movement itself? By investigating the tensions between conflict and community development within a neighborhood-based movement, it may become evident how neighborhood strategies under certain political conditions can weaken the leverage of grassroots actors. Such a focus might also clarify the implications of neoliberal politics for community activism in a globalizing city. These research strategies may contribute to each of the various fields in which redevelopment, gentrification, and movements are studied. But they also raise questions about the relationships between respective phenomena, and by extension the implications for broader generalizations about globalization and urban possibilities. The fact that urban processes and geographic settings in this case study are in part nested, or overlapping, provides a good opportunity to search for shared logics of interaction across a range of seemingly disparate phenomena. How do the impacts of various political actions move across different spatial scales? Influential work from a decade ago tended to produce exogenous, or top-down, visions of urban transformation, as when world-city conceptions explained local development processes largely in terms of translocal forces.20 More recently, certain urbanists have reasserted that distinctly local actors and conditions play important roles in global/local connections; others have pointed, more emphatically, to local spaces of resistance to global capitalist hegemony. In response, Manuel Castells observed that even though the local state has emerged as an important anchor of democratizing resistance, its capacities to shape the new global order are distinctly limited.21 Yet a weakness of many of these approaches, including the work of Castells, is that they underestimate the ways in which national states continue to operate—for better and for worse—at the center of global/local linkages. Although this reality should not discourage research from focusing directly on local states, it does suggest that "global" generalizations about local prospects across a complicated cross-national political geography may be difficult to sustain. It also implies that efforts to grasp the logic of influence across spatial scales—top-down? bottom-up?—need to be richly contextual-
Introduction • xix
ized, recognizing how certain historical moments recalibrate the spatial dynamics of cities. The urban terrain is shaped from above, from below, and, as others have pointed out, from in between. Thus, at certain moments in the following analyses, international economic forces will be seen to contract the political space for national and local policy; at other moments, however, neighborhood-based actors emerge to influence the direction of city policies; at still others, a city crisis spurs and helps to shape a major reordering of national urban priorities. Given this mix of findings, broad generalizations about a singular, thoroughgoing process of globalization, whether of the top-down or bottom-up variety, are not supported by the empirical cases that follow. Nevertheless, the structure of the present study, in which different but overlapping spatial settings also can be seen as components of a larger field, permits a search for common patterns of interaction between state and economic change at multiple levels of a single case. These patterns, in turn, do suggest a certain crosscutting interpretation of the politics of neoliberal globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To develop this interpretation, it is useful to return to the overarching conception of the work.
Restating Globalization The theory of primitive globalization is intended to orient an investigation of state capacities and actions in response to economic globalization. This concept is designed to bring together and emphasize three elements of contemporary change: the destructive as well as constructive roles played by states and political actors in engagements with globalization; the continuing variations in subglobal arrangements across nations, regions, and localities, including the ways those differences are linked to specific relations between state levels; and the transitional, open-ended aspects of contemporary globalization. This term is not meant to suggest a universal theory of globalization. Nor is its purpose to draw substantive historical parallels between latetwentieth-century developments and the much earlier transition from feudalism to capitalism addressed by Marx and by subsequent debates.22 It is quite obvious that, unlike the earlier period, current developments do not involve a shift from one socioeconomic formation to another; in any event, my conception rejects the idea of a transhistorical logic within capitalist evolution. Instead, the appeal of adapting the notion of primitive accumulation is that it provides a suggestive reconceptualization of state and economic actors—one that recognizes more fully their complex independence
xx • Introduction
and interdependence—that is also well suited to guiding provisional, differentiating analyses of dynamic periods of change. Beyond this, the concept of primitive globalization is useful because it comments critically, but not dismissively, on a preexisting term (globalization) that often obscures as well as illuminates. Because globalization, as certain writers have noted, is constituted not merely by material social forces but also by a set of discourses (referred to earlier as globalism), this critical function challenges the rhetorical strategies whereby notions of market change and economic convergence are too easily posed and ratified. Primitive globalization is intended to open up greater possibilities for understanding the relationship between economic actors and contemporary neoliberal states as being, in part, constructed by subglobal politics. Following the international economic crisis of the 1970s, a central aspect of the state's relationship to globalization in the United States came to consist in policy measures that facilitated the "separation" of social actors (corporations, citizens, residents) from the sociopolitical conditions and spatial patterns anchoring an earlier era. In this way, governmental restructuring during the 1980s not only tended to discharge market actors from social and statutory constraints but also shifted economic development policy to state and local levels; social policy in the 1990s comprised a kind of "bloody legislation," which mandated increases in incarceration, abolition of welfare entitlement, and privatization of public housing. Through such actions, state priorities concentrated less on constructing globalization per se than on severing a host of social obligations (stretching across class, race, region, and generation) that might stand in the way of short-term economic activity. Government actions that uproot or "dis-embed" (detach from place) have also led to certain kinds of detachment or separation of social actors from the state itself. Thus, even while state measures continue to perform a number of constructive activities, recent tendencies have enhanced the potential for a recurring process of "vicious downward spiral"—composed of alternating bouts of politically induced fiscal strain and welfare-state retrenchment—that threatens to chronically weaken capacity and social support for longer-term public tasks. Primitive globalization also provides insight into the sometimes puzzling combination of integration and fragmentation posed by recent changes in cities. In the United States, state policies and institutions account for a significant share of the interlocal competition (to lure corporate activity and to drive off the poor) that comprises a preferred "globalization" strategy for urban areas. Local elites have responded to translocal economic fluidity and state decentralization by seeking to exert more exclusionary forms of
Introduction • xxi
control over the urban populations most isolated from the benefits of economic development. The "separating" or displacing role of the local state— its actions that displace populations and chip away at the civic protections stabilizing communities of place—supports with state power the ad hoc initiatives that move globalization forward. In response, community actors have often mobilized, resisting displacement or seeking to secure benefits through partnerships with state agencies. Yet the short-termism of state policies, coupled with the inability of urban movements to build a base beyond the neighborhood, has limited the influence of mobilization and even, in crucial respects, contributed to further fragmentation. Politics and the state, then, have helped set the institutional foundations for neoliberal globalization. In the process, reactive, dis-embedding measures by the state produce unstable forms of national and urban governance even as they periodically provide openings for more constructive political projects. The following chapters employ this theory at different urban levels in order to investigate the politics of globalization within a single case. These chapters examine the role of politics and the state within a number of different processes, such as urban redevelopment, neighborhood gentrification, and social-movement conflict. To construct a vertical case study, this investigation builds a series of nested analyses, each focusing on a key vertical relationship (such as nation-state and city, or city and neighborhood) within the urban system. Each analysis stands on its own as a study of a particular urban phenomenon; taken together, the analyses also compose a multilevel study of a single, larger case: how neoliberal politics and community action have influenced the economic transformation of New York. Thus, while the different empirical components of this study focus on various sources of evidence (from economic data, government documents, and program evaluations to community archives and interviews with activists), the central framing questions for each chapter—what is the scope for state and political action to influence processes of urban change? how have actors made use of opportunities? what impacts have their actions produced?—explore parallel challenges at multiple scales. The shock of New York's most recent crisis—September 11 and its aftermath—has obscured, at least for a time, the remarkable story of the city's post-1970s renaissance. Over the span of several decades, New York was transformed from urban debacle to model metropolis, even as its economic base and income structure grew more precarious. Scholars focused considerable attention on the causes and implications of that transformation. Home to Wall Street, port of entry for immigrants, generator of international culture—New York seemed, to many observers at least, to have been
xxii • Introduction
revived by its many global functions, which were also said to account for the city's growing sociospatial divides. Other analysts emphasized the role of local politics, pointing to dramatic swings in public leadership (from mayors Koch to Dinkins to Giuliani) that made revival more like a rollercoaster ride. Both perspectives remain compelling but partial, with neither focusing sufficiently on the neoliberal state and its impacts on the city's redevelopment. From the 1970s onward, in fact, a new relationship between U.S. federal and local policies, forged in response to economic crisis and opportunity, came to occupy a central role in reshaping the city. Emerging from a complex interplay—in which national policy makers restructured urban options while local innovations also came to the fore—Washington and City Hall each took pivotal steps to remake New York, striving at times to rein in disruptive changes but more often employing public power to benefit affluent, short-term-oriented economic stakeholders. Government, in short, became a major contributor to the unstable prosperity and social inequality that characterized end-of-millennium New York, a metropolis in which the fastest-growing occupations paid too little for two-earner households to afford housing.23 By tracing the influence of multileveled government policies even on this "global city," it becomes clear that a political logic—beyond the effects of economic forces themselves—deepened many long-term urban problems. This logic contributed, as well, to a broader national pattern of growth and governance for U.S. cities, one that was increasingly wedded to a path of neoliberal globalization. But does this national/local tale of transformation tell the full story of late-twentieth-century New York? Important changes in the life of the city took place beneath the surface of conspicuous politics and policies, becoming visible only in the social and spatial transitions of its communities. Neighborhood gentrification was one such transition, spurring changes in New York's Lower East Side as dramatic as those in the larger city itself. Long known to be an immigrant ghetto, the area's more recent trajectory from slum to affluent playground has attracted a great deal of perceptive analysis.24 Whereas many observers tend to celebrate such instances of urban "uplift," studies of the Lower East Side have illuminated the severe social costs—residential displacement, destruction of affordable housing, loss of community—that often accompany relentless upscaling. Yet these analyses are less successful when they see gentrification as an economic inevitability, a species of structural transformation in which public actors are secondary or invariably linked to destructive agendas. Following New York's crisis of the 1970s, in fact, the impacts of new policies on the Lower East Side—and the responses of public officials to the changes there—were more
Introduction • xxiii
complicated than is often recognized. By tracking the sociospatial dynamics of the area, we can see how crisis-era policies and the collision of three different "ecological" processes—gentrification in a young white bohemia, abandonment in a Latino barrio, and residential succession in a Chinese immigrant enclave—helped to reposition public agencies at the center of a turbulent Lower East Side. Government initiatives often deployed this newfound leverage to promote a destabilizing "hypergentrification." But opportunity and pressure also led local officials, for a time, to pursue affordable housing as a significant priority before reverting again to disruptive policies. By tracing the emergence of this more balanced strategy, we can see how conditions of gentrification—not an economic structure but a complex, partly contingent process in which market and state intertwine—created vital opportunities for public action to promote neighborhood-level stability and heterogeneity. But when local officials denied these capacities or viewed community members merely as obstacles, public measures to displace and destabilize laid the neighborhood foundations for primitive globalization, shortsightedly harming the city. These foundations emerged, however, only in the face of contentious struggle. Although theories of globalization often address the city as a local space no longer able to generate significant movements, the Lower East Side became for a time New York's vibrant center of urban resistance. Grassroots actors mobilized against city policies and rehabilitated abandoned housing, deploying both conflict and community-development strategies to protect lower-income residents from displacement. Why did this Lower East Side-based movement—seemingly poised to launch a broader challenge to the city's development policies—then lose momentum, dissolving into factional disputes and desultory street battles with authorities? Although economic and political restructuring certainly contributed to this premature demise, larger forces and factionalism alone do not fully explain the political fortunes of this movement, which drew initial strength and ultimate weakness from its neighborhood base in the Lower East Side. Neighborhoodcentered activism, an understandable response to a decentralizing state, contributed significantly to the early success of a heterogeneous and mobilized coalition that was based in the neighborhood but not bound by it. Gradually, however, community groups came to view the neighborhood itself as privileged terrain and instrument for action, exacerbating schisms within the movement and encouraging rival camps to defend—and then fight over—the neighborhood. Of course, national and local politics were already charting the course, as we have seen, toward an unnecessarily destructive urban revival. Yet often the strategies of activists undermined their
xxiv • Introduction
own efforts, playing into political conditions that encouraged a self-limiting community agenda. Enhancing the attractions of "neighborhoodism" as a surrogate for a broader community-based movement, primitive globalization encouraged community infighting and grassroots strategies that were likely to fail. Tracking the multileveled politics of globalization, then, explains key elements in the mutation of New York City. Whereas globalism often conjures up an international economic transformation that ripples downward through a frictionless system, dissolving state capacity and political agency while fabricating a new spatial order, a careful examination of this American global city suggests a different and more complicated picture. Political actors and policy decisions helped to shape the reconstruction of New York—its redevelopment approach, its community dynamics, its vision of revival—at various moments and at many scales, from the neighborhood strategies of community activists to the broader U.S. response to international challenges. Taken together, then, analyses at multiple levels contribute to a larger interpretation: the inequality, instability, and community fragmentation that accompanied New York's celebrated economic revival were not simply the consequences of an integrated international economy. They resulted, as well, from a recurring use of public resources to support destructive forms of development. These actions and policies, while responding in part to real challenges posed by a changing economy, were not merely an expression of state dependency on a global system; state structures and agencies, as well as other political actors, continued to influence economic processes at various levels of society. Over time, and within a fairly distinctive national context, the operations of politics and the state served to benefit national and local elites and to exacerbate the invidious impacts of change upon the city. The predictions of globalism, therefore, may seem to be confirmed by certain urban outcomes, but a careful examination of New York suggests that primitive globalization has been at work. This legacy may also remain visible in the city's early efforts to rebuild from September 11. Primitive globalization clarifies the distinctive characteristics of a recurring American response to international challenges. Cross-national research demonstrates that social-welfare systems are not being dismantled in much of the developed world; indeed, systems of social protection remain strong in many countries and even prove capable of constructive adaptation. Comparative studies of urban and neighborhood change reveal that responses to globalization still vary significantly by country, and that these national responses shape differentially the capacities of cities to ad-
Introduction • xxv
dress economic polarization and social exclusion.25 Of course, transnational currents make obsolete certain twentieth-century economic strategies and increase the responsibilities of powerful nations to construct stronger foundations for global governance. Yet signs of persistent (and even newly evolving) differences between capitalist systems underline the enduring importance of national politics and culture, as well as the conspicuous unevenness in degrees of international integration. Such findings also heighten the suspicion that processes that go by similar names in different countries— such as neoliberalization or privatization—may not always constitute the same processes after all.26 Comprehending these realities may help inform more effective strategies of action. Growing numbers of activists and analysts alike have recognized the failure of political institutions to regulate constructively the international scale of economic change. During the past decade, an antiglobalization movement emerged, becoming—through street battles in Seattle, Genoa, and many other cities of the world—the central political challenge to neoliberal globalization. Even as this movement exerted vital pressure on international agencies to develop global standards of economic and social justice, however, the lessons of primitive globalization in the United States make clear that any long-term strategy will also depend on changing American politics from the inside out. In this regard, perceptive observers in the United States have seen promise in efforts to compel city, regional, and nation-state institutions to engage with social inequity and fragmentation. Urban scholars and activists, for example, have seen livingwage movements and new community-labor coalitions register significant victories within a hostile environment. Regionalists have offered strategies to curb metropolitan sprawl that also aim to reduce inequality and racial exclusion. Welfare-state analysts, for their part, suggest that an emerging "new politics" may sustain the social protections embodied in nation-based institutions and policies. Unfortunately, these strategies are often discussed in separate forums, unconnected to one another or to broader political analyses. To evaluate the relative advantages of such strategies, and to recognize possible points of connection between them, it is important to understand the multilevel conditions for political agency in relation to distinctive national contexts. In the United States, opportunities for useful activism and policy reform emerge at a number of different scales, but the nationstate remains (for better or worse) the crucial arena and instrument in the struggle for progressive change. Indeed, the extraordinary authority of the U.S. government—along with the substantial political rights still enjoyed by
xxvi • Introduction
many of its citizens—suggests that reshaping American politics may be the most consequential of contemporary challenges. By understanding the strengths and limits of current projects to improve the American city, and through forging new linkages between fragmented arenas of social action, U.S. efforts to move beyond primitive globalization could hold the key to broader democratic renewal.
1
Primitive Globalization? State, Economy, and Urban Development
Debates over globalization—perhaps like the world this concept describes— often appear to be confining and fragmented alike. In certain frameworks, a sweeping notion of globalization attributes a host of recent social developments to forces of international integration. Along with economic and cultural convergence, it is implied, comes the eclipse of state and politics, or at least a major shift in political influence from national to international arenas. In response, challenges to globalism assert that current levels of economic integration are hardly unprecedented and tend, in any case, to be too easily overstated. Faced with enduring cross-national differences in an economy that seems far removed from a seamless and homogeneous market, observers continue to disagree over whether states, particularly "developmental" states with strong institutional capacities, remain important actors in an unevenly internationalized order.1 Other analysts, focusing on cities, have developed a global/local framework in which notions of convergence are countered by an emphasis on the fragmentation and rearticulation of localities in the face of global flows. Certain of these analysts view global/local linkages as bypassing the nation-state, suggesting that states play little role in the economic and spatial reorganization of local communities. Others have contended that a resurgence of local identities and subglobal networks belies simplistic images of globalization as a logic of convergence.2 While often perceptive, much of this work has not sufficiently examined the role of the local state in global/local linkages, or it has addressed the local state as a would-be replacement for a nation-state in certain decline. In global/national and global/local frameworks alike, then, conceptualization of the state—as a centralized and national-level actor, which withers in the face of global 1
2 • Primitive Globalization?
flows or responds strategically to serve the national interest, or as a local actor that may be democratically accessible but inevitably constrained— tends to discourage full consideration of the multiple ways in which states and politics may be influencing processes of globalization. One important form of state activity that receives too little notice is the "dis-embedding" role of the state (national and local) within neoliberal globalization, in which states themselves contribute to the uprooting of social actors from inherited social conditions that obstruct short-term economic activity. This chapter provides a broad reconceptualization of the politics of globalization in order to set the stage for an analysis of New York's recent revival. Drawing selectively from literatures in sociology, political science, and urban studies, the following theoretical discussion contends that common depictions of globalization—as a self-generating economic logic, or as a myth belied by the persistence of national economic differences and strong states, or as a set of processes of localization before which national governments stand helpless—tend to overlook the ways in which states may be increasingly fragmented and yet remain highly significant actors in this social transition. This reconceptualization is intended to complement a number of recent works in urban studies that, in different ways, have examined states as differentially mediating forces within a global or transnational field.3 Although the chapter begins by reviewing dominant theoretical approaches, it is also useful to step outside of the globalization debates in order to develop this perspective. Turning briefly to earlier efforts to conceptualize a quite different historical transformation, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, I revisit the notion of primitive accumulation, an ironic term used by Marx to highlight the significant yet destructive role of the state in "separating" social actors from conditions that otherwise impeded the early development of capitalism. Employing the term primitive globalization as a conceptual frame, the chapter's focus returns to contemporary questions with the contention that certain states, neither circumvented by globalization nor resistant to it, instead actively facilitate globalization through the use of state power in highly destructive or "disintegrative" ways. Such a conceptual reframing makes possible a fuller consideration of the state as simultaneously facilitator and victim of globalization. This approach also draws attention to the important issue of fragmentation of the state— highly porous in its relation to society and disarticulated across national and local levels—which increasingly places subglobal political institutions, particularly the role of the national state in the local state, at the center of neoliberal global linkages. This reconceptualization is used to develop a broad interpretation of
Primitive Globalization? • 3
the politics of U.S. development over the past quarter century, one that focuses on how state policy has contributed (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly) to the process of clearing the social ground for neoliberal economic activity. By restructuring governmental spending and shifting economic development policy to state and local levels, and by pressing forward with a kind of "bloody legislation" that emphasizes coercion and abolition of support for the poor, the state has concentrated less on constructing globalization—in the sense of creating new forms of political and social regulation to sustain economic development—than on breaking down social obligations that might stand in the way of short-term economic activity. I argue that this kind of policy orientation also has had destructive consequences for the state itself, with important strategic implications for efforts to address social inequality and instability in a global context marked by both economic integration and political fragmentation. By moving freely across literatures and between different perspectives on international integration, this discussion aims to explore issues of politics and globalization that may be relatively neglected by the current division between global/national and global/local approaches. It does not propose a unified theory of globalization, nor is it concerned to address whether— given the heightened level of conceptual complexity introduced by consideration of international, national, and local factors—such an encompassing theory can be fashioned out of insights drawn from what are often disparate intellectual traditions. Instead, the attempt is to reconsider contemporary globalization as a transitional and partly contingent process (rather than an inexorable logic or fully formed social condition) in order to understand the logic whereby state institutions and political processes may be influencing, at multiple levels, the evolution of cross-national and interlocal linkages. This endeavor is intended, in turn, to lay the conceptual groundwork for the analysis of those processes in the chapters that follow.
Global Positioning Theories of economic globalization are centered on the claim that a contemporary internationalization of market activity, the culmination of the past several decades of capitalist development, is having an integrative and transformative impact on modern social life. This process of transnational market expansion and integration is manifested in a range of phenomena: a new international division of labor, the global spread of financial markets, an interpenetration of industries across borders, the spatial reorganization of production, a temporal acceleration in economic activity, vast movements of populations, a diffusion of consumer goods, and a
4 • Primitive Globalization?
welter of transnational cultural linkages. Taken together, it is often argued, these serve to significantly alter the nature of places, the relations of power, and the lived experiences of peoples in most parts of the globe.4 The actual extent of globalization in different areas of economic activity ranges from relatively advanced (such as capital markets, cross-border trading linkages, dispersal and decentralization of production sites) to relatively limited (the percentage shares of first-world economies dependent on foreign trade, the emergence of genuinely transnational labor markets), and even among globalists there has been considerable debate over the vectors of change and appropriate measures of integration. Yet in broad terms, it is argued, the direction and force of change are clear if not its precise pace, as a new international environment—driven by (depending on the observer) some combination of enhanced capital mobility, transnational corporate strategies, technological and communicational innovation, or neoclassical economic competition—can be expected, over time, to augur increasingly similar patterns of economic life around the world.5 Among critical globalists, two approaches to the relationship between globalization and state have been especially pronounced. One has been to emphasize the extent to which economic globalization bypasses the territorially bound nation-state: technological innovation, driven by profitseeking transnational corporations, permits levels of capital mobility that disempower the state regulatory structures (Keynesian, social-democratic, corporatist) that once guided, supported, and benefited from nation-based economies. Now reduced to bidding for industries, territories entice capital with increasingly deregulated and preferential economic environments; deregulation, in turn, furthers the process of globalization as corporate actors gain greater economic flexibility and political leverage. Taken to its conclusion, this position suggests if not the end of the nation-state or of politics per se, at least the severe decline of meaningful forms of national political influence over international market forces or corporate behavior.6 A second globalist approach to the state has been to focus on the development of supranational institutional structures—the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—which can be seen to serve, or over time may come to serve, many of the purposes (legal, regulatory, and perhaps eventually even redistributive) fulfilled by nationstates.7 Exploratory discussion here centers on the extent to which these institutions, or new kinds of cosmopolitan association produced by global civil society, might address more forcefully the widespread problems of in-
Primitive Globalization? • 5
equality, social instability, and lack of democratic accountability on an international or regional scale. In response to globalism, however, there is also an established body of work that is skeptical toward the broader claims regarding international integration as well as their implications for the nation-state. One major problem, according to this view, is a blurring of the distinction between modern social forces such as technological dynamism or capitalist expansion, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the singular properties of globalization, which should be delimited to claims about international scale of activity or intensity of cross-border linkages as a demonstrably powerful force in its own right. In this regard, critical commentators question whether contemporary international economic ties—to the extent that their importance is indeed measurable in economic terms—are either as historically unprecedented or as truly influential as claimed. More than one observer has pointed out that Marx noted the global tendencies of capitalism more than a century and a half ago, and other analysts indicate that international interdependence during the late 1800s and early 1900s may have equaled that of today.8 Conversely, although cross-border capital mobility now is claimed as evidence of imminent convergence, persistent country-by-country differences in rates of interest, savings, profit, and productivity may suggest that, as Robert Wade puts it, the death of the national economy has been greatly exaggerated.9 At the least, globalization is unevenly developed in an international economy that remains highly variegated and "niched" in terms of social infrastructures, organizational forms, and degrees of competition across sectors, nations, and regions. Realizing this, it becomes important, even when restricting discussion to economic parameters, to distinguish those developments in the capitalist economy not resulting from intensified international linkages (such as the problems within stagnating regions of the world that stem from lack of incorporation into international markets, or the share of economic polarization within nations related to problems with domestic markets) from those that in fact may be directly traceable to cross-border flows.10 To liberate notions of globalization from the conceptual straight]acket of self-sustaining economic forces and inexorable convergence, then, it becomes necessary to consider the kinds of political and social forces that undergird corporate behavior and market relations. Simply at the level of comparative description, it is clear that different nations understand globalization differently and possess inherited sets of state policies that mediate international pressures in distinctive ways. When countries as disparate as France and Japan engage in routine debates over "national character," they
6 • Primitive Globalization?
invoke visions of the meaning of globalization itself that are rooted in particular political cultures.11 The pressures of globalization may not simply erode those systems as much as compel rearticulation of national strategies of engagement. In certain cases, the confrontation with international influence can bring about a greater insistence on national differentiation—on the distinctiveness of national identity, on the need to sharpen indigenous practices, on the urgency of preserving social and institutional ways of life. The concept of "embeddedness" has been used to underline the ways in which particular networks of economic practices and state institutions set fairly deep national patterns of development, which in turn condition contemporary developments and impede convergence between, say, English and German patterns of corporate governance, French and German microeconomic policy, or Canadian and U.S. wage structures—not to mention between Western European countries and the United States.12 In this view, historic paths of national development are hardly erased by the competitive international climate of the past three decades. Whereas export pressures and adjustment strategies may have smoothed away the sharper differences between what were once social-democratic, corporatist, and Keynesian models of capitalism, they have neither collapsed distinctive national practices nor "selected" a single system for global economic success. The persistence of cross-national economic differences needs to be understood not merely as an inherent structural property of an unevenly integrated global system but, over the long term, in relation to national responses—past and present—to international challenges. This kind of approach reasserts the prospect, as well, that the state remains a major actor on the global stage. In several perceptive and strongly argued works, Linda Weiss distinguishes between the globalist claim of a "transnational" economy, in which locational and institutional constraints presumably would no longer matter, and a conception of an internationalized economy in which economic integration is being advanced, unevenly, by national governments and corporations alike.13 In this latter view, states may be "facilitators," rather than "victims," of globalization. Of course, national governments vary significantly in their ability to take advantage of the opportunities posed by international challenges. Yet in many parts of the world, Weiss argues, the capacity for industrial policy and national developmental strategy remains very much alive. It is precisely strong but embedded states—those that already possess effective government-business alliances or respond to the pressures of internationalization by constructing successful linkages of this kind—that act as catalysts, attempting to fa-
Primitive Globalization? • 7
cilitate rather than constrain the internationalization of corporate activity in trade, investment, and production. Thus, for Weiss, East Asian nations such as Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan can be singled out for their strong, adaptive behavior. Extensive linkages between highly developed administrative institutions and national capital enable these developmental states—unlike more weakly positioned states, such as the United States, which lack the coordinating institutions needed for collective purpose—to sustain nationally coherent and socially advantageous strategies of international engagement. For Weiss, therefore, world convergence toward a neoliberal model is seen to be highly improbable. Instead, the differential abilities of nations to exploit the opportunities presented by the international economy are more likely to heighten national differences in state capacity, reinforcing, over time, the existing advantages of developmentalism. Reintroducing the state as a central focus of analysis, Weiss contends that in the process of adapting to international pressures certain states may be contributing to the new environmental conditions. Yet while this reassertion of state agency is bracing, and while Weiss's emphasis on statesociety interdependence is also appropriate, reconceptualizing globalization through the lens of developmentalism fails to capture the facilitative qualities of a certain kind of "nondevelopmental" state, such as in the United States or Britain.14 Strong states, for Weiss, tend to be those that pursue socially constructive or economically productive endeavors; state actions that are socially destructive or divisive are not defined as successful exercises of state power even if, within the terms of a particular economic model such as neoliberalism, they do serve to cement strong alliances with dominant economic actors or perform critical tasks around economic accumulation. This restrictive notion of state strength thus also tends to conflate a state-society alliance to pursue economic growth or transformation (which accommodates conceptually a broad range of regimes including, potentially, neoliberal ones) with a state-society commitment to develop coherent national projects or broadly distributed social benefits (which is categorically narrower). What needs to be explained in the case of neoliberal engagements with globalization, as most strongly exemplified in the case of the United States, is the apparently paradoxical role of the state, which may pursue patterns of action disadvantageous to its own institutional capacities (as well as detrimental to many of its citizens). This state needs to be examined in terms that position the analyst to understand its peculiar, or even paradoxical, "strengths." If the state is conceptualized as a centralized national actor that operates outside of the globalization process, responding
8 • Primitive Globalization?
to pressures for international integration as the strategic leader of coherent national projects, this framework makes it difficult to understand national contexts in which states—because they are less coherently differentiated from society to begin with—become highly implicated in globalization by facilitating very different kinds of economic and political responses than those fostered under developmentalism. Subsequent sections of this chapter advance the claim that a distinctive relationship between state and economic actors constitutes a key element in the unfolding of processes of neoliberal globalization. For now, it is sufficient to observe that the concept of globalization, as qualified by the criticisms reviewed so far, still remains of value to the extent that it refers to contemporary processes of international integration that are understood to be uneven, partial, and—in the sense of incomplete or openended—transitional. Yet to recast neoliberal globalization as a transitional set of processes within a national context in which state policies play a certain kind of facilitative role, it is useful to step outside of globalization debates in order to develop a fresh conceptual frame. In the following section, I make several observations about efforts to conceptualize the state in relation to economic and social change before returning to an earlier discussion of a much different historical transition, one that nonetheless offers certain insights into reframing the relationship between state and international integration.
Revisiting State Theory How should we approach the relationship between the state and neoliberal globalization, particularly the tendency toward actions that may be destructive or disadvantageous to state capacities? One strategy might be to turn to theories of the state. Yet efforts to theorize the state apart from particular social and historical contexts have not always been well suited to understanding its complex and often ambiguous relationship to economic development. Here I examine briefly several tendencies in conceptualizing the state before shifting to a more provisional approach. Recent theories of the state and globalization often seem either overly constraining or insufficiently so. Much globalist work, for example, tends to emphasize a territorial conception, one in which the nation-state—a once sovereign entity or bordered "power-container," in the phrase used by Anthony Giddens—is now being eroded by cross-national flows. Even within the confines of the territorial approach, however, this kind of implication can be strongly contested, as we saw in the preceding section.15 Other, more pluralistic approaches tend to recognize that states are constituted across a
Primitive Globalization? • 9
number of dimensions: as territorially bounded sovereign entities, certainly, but also as sets of coercive and administrative institutions, not to mention as embodiments of a sense of belonging in national collectivities (or "imagined communities") ,16 Yet it can be seen rather quickly that each of these definitional criteria can be used to develop the contention that states have been experiencing internationalizing currents, or renationalizing currents, or both. For instance, just as cross-border flows and global governance institutions might be seen as undermining national territorial integrity, new governance-building initiatives, such as regionalization through NAFTA or the European Union, have enlarged the territory over which certain states (such as the United States or Germany) exert influence; in many cases these states have also tightened national borders to regulate certain kinds of flows. Or, to take a different point of departure: a number of governments that privatize administrative functions simultaneously have beefed up their coercive powers with respect to criminal justice, social welfare, and urban redevelopment. One can observe a similar point/counterpoint with respect to electronic media, which have enhanced transnational information flows and levels of awareness—all the while serving to give new life to many nationalisms, along with the state projects often attached to these currents. Clearly, then, the emerging relationship between globalization and "the state" (even if the latter is understood across a number of theoretical traditions) is complex and often ambiguous. Although there seems to be little point in attempting to resolve these complexities by theoretical fiat, it may be possible to suggest a conceptual strategy capable of opening them up to more nuanced analytical investigation. A larger and more systematic body of theoretical work on the state was developed, in fact, prior to the current concern with globalization. It is worth returning briefly to this work, which culminated in important debates from the 1960s through the 1980s, because conceptions of the state tended to be more sharply defined and because much of the work came to focus on the United States.17 Within these debates, theoretical disagreements hinged, as theorist Clyde Barrow has shown, on two basic sets of oppositions: first, whether the relationship between states and economic actors was ultimately constituted by actors or structures, and second, whether this relationship was fundamentally conjunctive (i.e., the interests of state actors coincided with, or resided within, those of economic actors) or disjunctive (i.e., they did not) ,18 Although highly schematic, this way of viewing the various theoretical approaches that emerged provides a convenient way to locate their potential contributions to the present task. Viewed within this schema, the various Marxian and Weberian
10 • Primitive Globalization?
debates over state theory can be characterized as different combinations of positions on the issues of structure/agency and conjuncture/disjuncture. For example, the Marxist debates of the 1970s, influenced by the competing approaches of Nicos Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband, concerned a fundamental difference between structuralist conceptions—in which social conditions ensured that state tasks were concerned with the reproduction of capital—versus more agency-oriented conceptions of the state as a direct instrument of class rule. Despite their disagreement over structure and agency, these positions shared an increasingly constraining emphasis on finding an economic and class basis for all significant state actions. Responding to these approaches, then, a new set of interventions, drawing generally on Weberian traditions and advanced under the banner of "bringing the state back in," attempted to develop more independent and differentiated conceptions of the state and to deploy them in historical investigation.19 In the most noted of these approaches, Theda Skocpol presented a strong assertion of state autonomy, contending that state actors pursue goals that do not simply reflect those of social groups, classes, or larger social structures. This agency-oriented conception emphasized the capacities of states to formulate and implement their own objectives and to realize them more or less effectively. Because economic constraints and instrumental pressures do not fully account for many policy outcomes, this general articulation of state agency was initially quite compelling. The fact that Skocpol attempted to make this case with respect to the United States— "autonomous state contributions to domestic policymaking can occur within a 'weak state'"20—was an important, if highly contested, contribution. Yet an overly rigid concept of state autonomy within these statecentered explanations tended to constrain the development of more fluid conceptions. The hard version of this perspective, as Fred Block has observed, diminished appreciation of the interdependency of state and society, even as state actors themselves were too often reduced to administrative and career officials.21 In response, one Marxian tendency was to continue efforts to resolve structure and agency problems through increasingly abstract theorization. Another engaged directly with Skocpol's challenge, seeking to disprove state-centered interpretations of key U.S. policies by demonstrating the primacy of business actors and the political organizations connected to them.22 While these latter debates often focused on quite detailed historical interpretations of specific pieces of legislation, Barrow has shown convincingly that disagreements ultimately hinged on divergent, and theoretically unresolvable, claims about conjuncture and disjuncture. While failing to do justice to the substantive complexity of much of the work, this kind of summary nevertheless suggests the limits of "state
Primitive Globalization? • 11
theory" per se for conceptualizing the kinds of tensions I wish to focus on within the state's relationship to neoliberal globalization. Positions within these debates tended to evolve, in fact, in ways that often severed the tensions between structure and agency, as well as those between conjuncture and disjuncture—tensions that constitute the very substance of the neoliberal characteristics it is important to understand. As Barrow makes clear, and as Adam Przeworski's different commentary also seems to suggest, theorists took these various positions not simply because of the polemical nature of academic debate; antinomies of structure/agency and conjuncture/ disjuncture, built into the very nature of conceptual thought, were pulled apart and developed in systematic efforts to overcome them.23 Yet for this very reason the abstract theoretical commitments established by these positions do not necessarily suggest the most useful approach for the present task. Furthermore, although these debates represent an exhaustive set of oppositional positions on the antinomies of structure/agency and disjuncture/ conjuncture, they do not tend to question a shared approach to understanding effective actions or structures as essentially "strengthening" or constructive: states are deemed autonomous when they pursue policies that strengthen the state; capital is deemed effective when state policies serve its interests.24 In the process, the theoretical ability to designate certain state actions or patterns of action as effectively destructive—in the sense that, while having effects, they also tend to undermine capacities or opportunities for future actions—seems not to be sharply positioned. Instead of moving further in this theoretical direction, therefore, I wish to suggest an approach that is more selective and provisional. This approach is intended to engage more directly with several of these tensions raised by the question of the state in relation to neoliberal globalization. In order to develop such a conception, I would like to return to Marx's discussion of primitive accumulation. The point is not to resolve the conflicts or antinomies raised by the theoretical debates, but to re-pose them within a more analytical, historicized discussion. Nor is this return to Marx an effort to "ground" my approach in historical-materialist theory; indeed, part of what is attractive about Marx's discussion is its uncertain theoretical status, which enables his concept to engage with the antinomies of the statesociety relationship in unusually productive ways.
So-Called Primitive Accumulation Globalization is sometimes presented as an inevitable economic structure that is also the product of key globalist actors. Richard A. Grasso, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, theorized globalization in just such a circular vein in a speech he gave in 1996 to the Executive Club of Chicago:
12 • Primitive Globalization? Those of us here today who work in the financial services industry, along with the tens of thousands of men and women nationwide whose collective intelligence, expertise and ingenuity make our markets the envy of the world, are fortunate in that we are privileged to participate in the most dynamic period of positive change in the history of the world's capital markets....Global markets, when they are realized in their entirety, are the ultimate result of trends now underway in my industry. The process of achieving that result—a process which accelerates daily—is called globalization.25 Such comments raise slippery questions of agency, causation, and level of analysis. These questions are quickly blurred and evaded, of course, in part through a dizzying succession of pronouns and possessives (us, our, we, my). A number of writers have subjected this kind of globalist discourse to incisive critique.26 Rather than recapitulate their observations, I return instead to a much earlier commentary on a similarly mythical account of how capitalism develops. Derived by Marx out of a critique of Adam Smith, the notion of primitive accumulation—a set of social forces or events that serve as a logically and historically necessary precursor to the development of early modern capitalism—occupied for a time a central, if highly contested, place in theories about the origins of capitalist societies.27 My intention in disinterring this term is not to revive those debates, but to suggest that the way in which the relationship between state and social change is handled conceptually in Marx's discussion in Capital can productively reframe a similar problematic raised by approaches to globalization. Of particular use is that Marx's discussion of primitive accumulation reasserts the facilitative role of the state not as a directive set of institutions "outside" of the transition itself but as a crucial yet destructive force within it, that is, a force whose constitutive qualities consist not so much in a strategic or constructive response to economic change as in the reactive use of political authority to uproot, or disembed, actors from inherited social conditions. Primitive accumulation was intended to provide an answer to the question, How did capitalist society develop (out of a noncapitalist society)? Smith posited an initial accumulation—a primitive or "previous" accumulation of means of production—by those producers who had been industrious or parsimonious enough to save. Thus an early weaver is presumed to have "beforehand stored up somewhere . . . a stock sufficient to maintain him, and to supply him with the materials and tools of his work, till he has not only completed but sold his web."28 By implication, capitalism owes its ori-
Primitive Globalization? • 13 gins to the abstinence or farsightedness of enterprising, and distinctly unfeudal, individuals who became primitive accumulators. Marx's discussion of primitive accumulation—or "so-called primitive accumulation," as Part 8 of Capital (volume 1) is titled—is a sustained attack on this myth of origins. He begins with a critique of the ideological implications of this sort of "theological" argument, which manages (much like the Grasso speech) to imply simultaneously the inevitability of capitalist development with the special privileging of certain actors. Smith's account lends itself to capitalism's self-serving myth of origins, fabricating an antecedent ur-capitalist—as in the Robinson Crusoe stories Marx criticizes elsewhere in Capital—to prefigure the modern captains of industry: This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote about the past. Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins.29 Hence Marx uses the term "so-called primitive accumulation," in which Smith's speculation is seen to be a pseudo explanation. To furnish his own provisional explanation for early modern development, Marx "sketches" a historical process (focusing mostly on the case of England) whereby the class relations of capitalism are established.30 This process involves a "separation of the producers" in which the use of state power plays a crucial role in the dispossession of the medieval peasantry of its land as well as, more broadly, in the destruction of a socioeconomic way of life that served to undergird the feudal, agrarian order. A centuries-long process involving the separation of agricultural producers from the land, "the basis of the whole process," this story of primitive accumulation emphasizes the particular role of force and state power, highlighting "the violent means employed," in the development of new economic relations.31 Thus, from the late fifteenth century onward, feudal retainers are disbanded and peasants driven from land and housing; common areas are sectioned off as pastureland and Crown lands privatized. "Bloody legislation," seeking to regulate the social consequences of these forced separations from traditional ways of life, punishes beggars and vagrants.32 Subsequent acts by king and Parliament sever the customary contracts between trades and disrupt moral economies established around work and settlement, putting
14 • Primitive Globalization?
ceilings on wage levels and prohibiting associations of workers. Now, it is important to acknowledge that Marx also refers to state actions, often coming later in the transition, that eventually erect a set of national institutions (tax systems, trade regulations, national debt, etc.) supportive of capitalist development in more constructive fashion. Yet the primary emphasis in his account is very much on the destructive actions of states that, by separating or dis-embedding social actors from a set of conditions that impede market-driven development, facilitate transition not so much by directly ushering in the new as by accelerating the dismantling of the old. In this way, capitalism was not self-producing, nor did it simply succeed feudalism or seamlessly evolve from the decay of feudal life, but rather was created in part by a series of often coercive measures by states that uprooted, and spurred the reorganization of, existing social relations. State actions, not reducible to an economic logic, are themselves seen as important forces in establishing the new order. In a fluid, transitional environment, political actors at multiple levels—from royal and parliamentary officials to local elites—influence and accelerate this process of social change, often through highly reactive or opportunistic measures that delegate coercive powers and legitimize land grabs. It is a conception of historical change in which state actions are implicated in setting the conditions for much subsequent development, but in response to changing economic circumstances and in ways that are not always intentional or transparent to actors themselves. "So-called primitive accumulation," which in Marx's hands never really loses its quotation marks, serves as the occasion to puncture the myth that capitalist entrepreneurs were the singular agents of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. By highlighting the role of coercion, Marx is able to reinsert the state as a significant actor that facilitates the conditions for new economic and social relations—not by hypothesizing a political sphere somehow separate from the economic but by locating a set of relational patterns. While he does not seem to want to propose, in any formal way, that the state plays this role in more than a provisional fashion, it is worth pointing out that in many of the chapters of Part 8 there is some ambiguity as to when this prehistory of capitalism ends and when its history proper (at which point economic forces alone account for capitalism's subsequent development) actually begins.33 Since Marx's time, of course, there has been a significant body of work on the importance of the early modern state, and city, for the development of distinctive national capitalisms. Debates within Marxism over primitive accumulation and the transition from feudalism tended to center on which historical force was the "prime mover" behind the development of early
Primitive Globalization? • 15
modern capitalism. While these analysts debated the relative importance of endogenous causes (economic crisis and class struggle in the countryside) versus exogenous ones (protocapitalist trade in the medieval city), aWeberian tradition concentrated instead on the ways in which states made capitalism. More recent commentators have suggested that all such efforts to develop a single or unilinear historical explanation are ultimately misguided and untenable. R. J. Helton's survey of comparative historical research, for example, emphasized the importance of nationally specific relationships between states and capitalist economies, and Ira Katznelson has proposed a complicated historical sequence in which economic structures, states, and cities all play crucial roles.34 The primary lesson of these historical debates for analysts of contemporary developments appears, then, to be a methodological one: by abandoning the search for a "prime mover," analysts can engage with the complex dynamic of independence and interdependence of political, economic, and urban change over time. This openness also frees up the conceptual suggestiveness in Marx's original account. For the purposes of the present discussion, the usefulness of this account resides in its conceptualization of the role of the state as a dynamic, yet often destructive force, one that, through disorganized actions of disruption and dispossession in the midst of fluid periods of change, serves to clear the ground for new kinds of economic development without immediately constructing the political and social conditions to sustain it.
Returning to Globalization What are the implications of this discussion of primitive accumulation for globalization? Earlier in the chapter, I suggested that a global/national frame has focused too narrowly on the question of the nation-state's strategic or developmental capacities. The following discussion, oriented by a conception of primitive globalization, redirects attention to the importance of destructive actions—as well as the state's own fragmentation or disarticulation—in shaping global engagements within a neoliberal environment. Beginning with a reconsideration of how states are implicated in processes of globalization, this focus on actions by neoliberal states that "separate" or dis-embed social actors from inherited conditions is used to help frame the dual role of the state—most applicable in a national context such as that of the United States—as both facilitator and victim of globalization. In general terms, the relationship between states and processes of international economic integration tends to be conceptualized in several ways. One is to envision states as largely external to economic globalization: transnational corporate actors, or global entrepreneurs, creating market
16 • Primitive Globalization?
linkages between hitherto unconnected actors and places, break free of national regulatory structures, exclude the nation-state from the universe of significant economic activity, and propel supranational strategies of governance. A second conception is that states, again seen as largely external to globalization, may respond to its challenges in distinctive, and sometimes relatively effective, ways. They can do so because, in certain cases at least, state power rests on a social foundation—a nationally organized statesociety alliance—that is seen to lie "outside" of processes of globalization. By responding in ways that constrain or catalyze internationalization, these states may also serve to reinforce their own power. Inasmuch as countries vary greatly in terms of both internal organization and international position, it is plausible that the aptness of fit of these two conceptualizations has varied cross-nationally. Perhaps in frameworks that identify emerging regional economies of the "triad" (Western Europe, North America, and East Asia) as the salient feature of globalization, the two conceptions successfully comprehend the broad differences in response to globalization between, respectively, Western European and East Asian models of capitalism.35 In certain national contexts, however, it is more appropriate to conceptualize the state as highly enfolded within processes of globalization. Here, unlike in the first conception, the state continues to play a very significant, if underappreciated, role in the articulation of global linkages; here, unlike in the second conception, this state influence over globalization consists not in a coherent strategy of national response but an ad hoc series of policy reactions to economic pressures. The central logic in such policies is that they mirror, yet in doing so also serve to encourage, the short-term orientation of economic actors themselves. Thus, the evident shifts in state policy in the United States over the past quarter century—privatization, business deregulation and subsidization, tax retrenchment, assaults on union power, displacement of the urban poor, initiatives to dismantle the social-security state—constitute a particular kind of national response to international pressures. Yet this response, strongly influenced by domestic political forces (especially political mobilization by business and conservative pressure groups),36 does not reassert state power or national economic strategy in the face of a supranational logic of the market but rather deploys state power, not always intentionally, in ways that lay the basis for a nationally distinctive kind of globalization. This conception opens up greater possibilities for understanding the relationship between market actors and contemporary neoliberal states as being at least partly constructed by subglobal politics. Without denying a context in which the powers of capital may be strong, such an approach
Primitive Globalization? • 17
makes plausible the contention that a distinctive politics continues to play a significant role in shaping the extreme neoliberalism in the U.S. national context, perhaps through a dynamic that Colin Hay has termed "preference accommodation."37 Here, state policies—seen neither as the intentional product of state-led interests nor as the indirect expression of the structural dependency of the state on capital—result from an established pattern in which state and party actors anticipate, accommodate, and thereby reinforce the short-term preferences of business and other economic actors. The U.S. state, in fact, has long been marked by highly porous boundaries with civil society, and these openings (along with the concentrated resources generated by social inequalities) have played a central role in elevating and sustaining well-organized interest groups that single-mindedly pursue economic advantage. The importance of this dynamic to American political development has been a recurring focus within a very extensive historical literature, and there is little evidence that these patterns of "domestic politics" have been erased by contemporary forces of international integration.38 Quite the contrary: perhaps even more than in past periods, state policies that cater to the short-term preferences of business not only inhibit state actors from attempting to mobilize society around broadbased developmental strategies or national goals but, over time, exacerbate fragmentation of the state itself. In this sense, the U.S. engagement with globalization in recent decades may extend, or rework, key historical continuities, with potentially disturbing consequences. A repeatedly reactive posture by the state undermines its capacities to engage with collective social responsibilities, abdicates performance of its strategic role, and frees up political leaders and state officials to forge interest-group alliances increasingly untempered by allegiance to governmental institutions. These alliances often tend to promote decentralization of those state functions that they do not attempt to abolish outright, in the reasonable expectation that local officials are even more susceptible to the influence of powerful social groups than national ones. These downward shifts do not necessarily form an irrevocable or structural adaptation to external economic conditions, particularly when their actual local impacts are not yet fully generalizable. And it is important to acknowledge that this porousness of the state—its penetrability by nonstate interests—does enable the state to respond quickly and flexibly to short-term economic opportunities and pressures; in neoliberal terms, of course, here lies the source of its strength. Yet these same qualities also disable the state from assuming a leadership role in fashioning coherent,
18 • Primitive Globalization?
broad-based projects that respond strategically to international integration over the long term. Instead, a central aspect of this state's relationship to globalization consists in its policy measures that facilitate the "separation" of social actors (corporations, citizens, residents) from the sociopolitical conditions and spatial patterns anchoring an earlier era. More than simply an economic pattern of activity, this earlier order—whether understood as a Keynesian social structure of accumulation or welfare state, a Fordist regulatory regime, or a postwar social contract—rested on a particular alignment of social and spatial relationships that not only supported national economic activities but also rooted them, and social actors generally, in certain patterns of civic life. Although limited in many ways, the political rights and spatial boundedness conferred by welfare-state expansion (from housing rights and minimal levels of welfare entitlement to labor-law provisions that anchored certain working-class communities) often constitute obstacles, in economic and spatial terms, to short-termist development because they root people in place as well as furnish political arenas of contestation.39 Many conceptions of globalization tend to explain the loss of these rights and benefits as an erosion in consequence of economic transnational ization, yet state policy has contributed—directly and indirectly—to the process of clearing the social ground for neoliberal economic activity. Thus, restructuring of governmental priorities during the 1980s not only extricated market actors from social and statutory constraints but also transferred economic development policy to state and local levels, sparking what Susan Fainstein and Norman Fainstein called a kind of "subnational mercantilism."40 During the 1990s, domestic policy launched its own kind of "bloody legislation," mandating large increases in incarceration, restrictions in civil and social liberties, abolition of welfare entitlement, and privatization of public housing; policy makers have also flirted with the dismantlement of the social-security system. Through such actions, state policy emphasizes not so much the establishment of globalization—in the sense of developing new forms of political and social regulation to sustain economic activity— as it does a severing of cross-class, cross-race, cross-regional, and intergenerational social obligations that might obstruct short-term economic activity. Although such actions do tend to promote certain kinds of cross-border linkages—in the narrow sense of facilitating short-term foreign investment in domestic capital markets or holding down the wages of certain strata of local workers—they fall well short of an internationalization of domestic policy. Nor do they represent an effective "globalization strategy" in the sense of establishing, at the subglobal level, the durable political and social
Primitive Globalization? • 19
conditions that will be demanded over the long term by the global/national and global/local linkages posed by international economic integration. This kind of relationship between state and globalization positions the state not only as facilitator but as victim of globalization. State actions that dis-embed also lead to certain kinds of detachment or separation of social actors from the state itself. I do not wish to exaggerate this trend. Even in the United States, of course, the state continues to perform a large array of important tasks, many of them contributing (through investment and support for physical infrastructure, public-sector institutions, and nongovernmental services) to collective social welfare as well as economic growth.41 Yet the political trajectory of the past quarter century, with its repeated turns to the right, suggests the potential for a recurring process of "vicious downward spiral"—with fiscal stress and welfare-state retrenchment spurring staggered bouts of poverty, social disorder, and further retrenchment—that chronically weakens collective social support for the strategic and custodial roles of the state, and without necessarily impinging on the use of state policy as short-term economic stimulus.42 This scenario suggests not the straightforward erosion of the state so much as a spiraling adaptation of state powers to tasks of diminishing the ties (rights and obligations with respect to work, housing, education, and community) that connect citizens to the state. Under these conditions, "separation" poses not the eclipse of state institutional capacities per se but the depletion of legitimacy. Weakened ties of legitimacy and accountability not only make it more difficult for politics to propose, or the state to consider, broad tasks of economic and social development, but over time diminish the relevance of the notion of legitimacy to a set of institutions that are seen to be "loaded up" with particularistic rather than collective responsibilities. This is not the only possible scenario, of course. If intrastate and state-society relationships are driven in part by the dynamics of national polities, then the emergence of other, less vicious political spirals does not have to wait for the arrival of enlightened governance at the supranational level. During the late 1990s, for example, a prolonged domestic boom and a moderating political climate obviously slowed the movement toward downward spiral in the United States, even while the international economy (if crises in Russia, East Asia, and Latin America were any indication) seemed to grow increasingly unstable. The point I wish to emphasize is that national linkages with the international economy—even neoliberal ones—are not fully explained as impositions of a global logic or strategic responses to external challenges. Rather, they are constructed in crucial respects by political forces in which the organization of nationally specific polities and
20 • Primitive Globalization?
ideologies play an important role even in the absence of developmentalism.43 Such an approach may be especially applicable to the United States, which would seem to be well positioned to successfully mediate the pressures of international competition (because of the size and strength of its domestic markets) and yet which also appears to have so easily embraced the most simplistic, disabling theses of globalization and convergence. This apparent contradiction has led to two mutually incongruous truisms in American social and political discourse: that the United States has no choice but to accommodate itself to globalization, and that globalization involves the convergence of the rest of the world toward the U.S. model of capitalism. Although it is not the task of this chapter to move further on diis issue, it would seem to be difficult to explain this incongruity without examining the American politics of globalization. A second implication, which I explore in the next section, is that the national/local dimensions of the state also play an important role in how countries respond to international integration.
State and City The preceding discussion draws attention to state actions that sever the social ties and political rights inhibiting intensified market activities. I have suggested that these actions raise the question of state fragmentation not simply as a consequence of a supranational logic of globalization but as a key influence in its own right on neoliberal development. To this point, state fragmentation has been understood largely in terms of its openness or porousness to civil society, that is, in terms of the relative ease with which powerful economic and social interests can exert influence over the state. Yet fragmentation of the state, particularly in the United States, is also reflected in the relative decentralization of state policy. An attribute with long-standing constitutional and legal roots, state decentralization—which through the principle of federalism devolves significant powers to lower levels of government—has recently been accentuated, with important consequences for the relationship between globalization and locality. Debates over globalization and the nation-state, as well as my own discussion here, have tended to take for granted the national character of the state. A global/local framework, however, foregrounds questions of locality—of places, particular communities, subnational politics, and the governance of cities. In many global/local approaches, considerable attention is given to the ways in which places are increasingly shaped by their positions in an international spatial economy. Most prominently in work on global cities, certain places, highly integrated into international networks of finance or production, serve as nodal points for cross-border flows.
Primitive Globalization? • 21
Such cities operate within a global urban hierarchy that supersedes more traditional relationships to territorial or national economies; the translocal functions of these cities, in turn, tend to drive internal patterns of urban redevelopment.44 Research has encountered difficulty in validating some of these broader claims, particularly in the case of U.S. cities.45 This topdown image of globalization may also be misleading to the extent that the role of distinctly local actors and conditions in the articulation of global/ local relationships is submerged. In taking up the latter point, researchers often propose notions of local or civic culture as a mediating factor. Others contend that globalization may increase the salience of place, as mobile actors come to rely on the particular local networks and institutional patterns of support embedded in place-based communities.46 Cultural theorists, following Arjun Appadurai, also give weight to the fragmenting or "heterogenizing" logic of global flows. Their analyses examine dynamics of localization, regionalization, and resistance that in various ways serve to reassert the particularity of social identity and local community rather than the imposition of global homogeneity.47 From diverse intellectual traditions, then, these works approach globalization as a more complex, dynamic, and disarticulated set of linkages across multiple levels. In certain cases, such approaches also pay heed to the local state. Manuel Castells, among others, has suggested that the local state may be reemerging as an important anchor of democratizing resistance to the new global order. But the overwhelming motif in Castells's vision of this order, it should be emphasized, is the dominance of an emerging "space of flows," an international network of megacities linked together through information technologies into a global system of production and consumption.48 Within such a system, nation-states, fatally undermined by the new fluidity of information and capital, tend (somewhat desperately) to decentralize their administrative powers to local levels. As an unintended consequence this downward transfer may mobilize citizen attachment, because local government (which remains the closest point of contact between state and civil society) can support neighborhood decentralization and nurture participation at the grass roots. Yet for Castells even these benefits come, in a harsh zero-sum trade-off, at the cost of further distancing citizens from the nation-state. Because nation-states—ineffectual gatekeepers in a sea of global flows—exert ever-diminishing influence over cross-border linkages and local states alike, then, the possibilities of localism are mostly a false promise, relentlessly undermined by the structural operations of an integrated planetary system. Meanwhile, history passes the nation-state by. The arguments advanced in the preceding section of this chapter,
22 • Primitive Globalization?
which posed not an erosion of the nation-state but a rearticulation, suggest a different approach. State fragmentation and the political dynamics of decentralization—which do vary significantly by national context—remain highly relevant to understanding the sometimes puzzling combination of integration and disintegration posed by globalization. In the United States, state institutions and policies, embodying historical legacies of a nationally distinctive class and racial politics, have long established key contours of the contemporary social and spatial terrain of the U.S. metropolis. Urban analysts of the post-World War II era, from Robert Wood to Michael Danielson, demonstrated how political decentralization so often served to support agendas of exclusion and segregation.49 For cities and regions in the United States, national context continues to matter because policies and the recently exacerbated fragmentation of the governmental system explain a significant portion of the interlocal competition (to lure corporate activity with tax and deregulatory privileges and to drive off the poor) that comprises the preferred local "globalization" strategy. As seen from the local end, for example, national initiatives to localize governmental responsibilities— as with the 1990s measures involving welfare reform, "wars" on crime, and privatization of public housing—tend to co-package impossible policy prescriptions (e.g., ending public assistance) with highly flexible options for local implementation. Beyond the impacts of capital mobility per se, these kinds of national/local initiatives do much to entrench the bid-down strategies, ad hoc deal making, and social dumping that remain the developmental norm in U.S. localities. Localities, in other words, forge translocal linkages that continue to be highly responsive to national political context.50 From this vantage point, national/local politics may help explain not only why American cities rarely succeed in sustaining stable, broadly beneficial or "community-oriented" global/local linkages (though there are, as globalists and others remind us, powerful and volatile economic forces that make this challenging under any political conditions) but, perhaps more emphatically, why they infrequently attempt to do so. There are other ways to read U.S. urban politics, of course. Recent work on urban governance has suggested that localities, forced by globalization to become innovative and internationally competitive, may be embracing broader sets of actors and new forms of public action to replace older, more government-directed kinds of local development.51 This work, while conceding the fragmenting impacts of some of these changes, contends nevertheless that broader governance networks—the recently observed proliferation of nongovernmental service-delivery agencies, new special-purpose bodies, and public-private partnerships—pose significant
Primitive Globalization? • 23
political opportunities for popular and community-based interests. These possibilities may indeed be quite real in certain environments, yet recent patterns in the United States suggest that local elites have responded to translocal economic pressures and the national politics of devolution by trying to exert more exclusionary types of control over the urban residents most disenfranchised by local politics and economic development. This has often meant diminished community influence—in the sense of broad, constructive forms of popular political control over developmental policy making—as distinguished from an upsurge in Nimby (not in my backyard) reactions or symbolic forms of community representation.52 Community groups, nonprofit organizations, and the like may be increasingly relied upon as service providers, yet their ability to participate in the setting of development priorities remains distinctly limited. If lower-income and community groups do not represent strongly mobilized political blocs, then local officials can afford to ignore them, particularly if linkages to other levels of the state do not provide political or fiscal incentives to behave otherwise. The negative consequences for U.S. cities are evident, reflected in persistent economic polarization, racial segregation, and poverty, as well as in more complex levels of inequality within strata.53 Yet the role of the local state in the processes of urban development that contribute to these conditions is often not fully appreciated. Responding to globalization and state decentralization, top local-state officials (in U.S. cities they are generally mayors) continue to view translocal as well as local actors not through a newly minted "global vision" but, prosaically, as engines or obstacles of short-term economic stimulus. An increasing demand for urban land by multinational corporations and affluent residents often collides with existing residents and users of urban space. These conflicts, as well as the financial uncertainty of development in a tightly time- and space-bound urban environment, require a resourceful, often case-by-case mix of coercive and coordinating actions by the local state to clear the ground for redevelopment and relocate unwanted activities to other places. Elements of this "separating" or displacing role of the local state—actions that physically displace vulnerable populations and chip away at the increasingly fragile civic protections and political claims stabilizing communities of place—are often observed in perceptive empirical accounts. Yet they are generally not strongly theorized or given sufficient analytical weight, despite the fact that this critical role, even when delegated to private actors, undergirds with state power the ad hoc projects that move globalization forward. It is most visibly at the local level, particularly in the United States, that the state in its current role may be caught between government and
24 • Primitive Globalization?
governance. On the one hand, the types of directive policy making or socially regulatory approaches of an earlier era are no longer sufficient, even though their more coercive forms are highly useful; on the other, the largely reactive, dis-embedding kind of state activity referred to here fails to suggest significant movement toward innovative and sustainable forms of public action propelled by new coalitions of social actors. Current forms of state fragmentation seriously undermine the ability of state and polity to consider or develop constructive institutional initiatives around new forms of governance. In this sense, globalization, failing to generate a new set of political and social relationships capable of stabilizing intensifying levels of economic interdependence, can be understood as protractedly transitional. Subnational policies and institutional restructuring in the latetwentieth-century United States did not signal the imminent emergence of new structures of governance. Instead, such developments are best understood as an ongoing "search for an institutional fix," one that fell short of any decisive shift or resolution.54 Although this search seemed to be suspended in the United States by a late-1990s economic boom, recent conditions have brought underlying tensions back to the surface. Of course, cities elsewhere in the developed world are also confronted by long-term challenges, many of them serious. Yet, as I suggested earlier in this chapter, these other regions of the world may be moving in somewhat different directions and at different speeds in their search for a more enduring stability. Research on urban Europe, for example, has seen the potential emergence of new forms of "polycentric governance" within which a broad array of local, regional, and national actors might interact.55 Of course, the diversity in subnational contexts within the European Union—not to mention the great uncertainties that adhere to ongoing processes of convergence and membership expansion—make it difficult to assess the general impacts of European integration on states and governance. What seems clear thus far is that most European cities and regions have not entered into a thoroughgoing, American-style "logic of competition." Instead, the local maintenance of welfare and social cohesion, along with economic development, of course, remains an important political objective. The contrast with U.S. locales is notable. Politics and the state, then, continue to set the institutional foundations for societal development in different ways. An advantage of the concept of primitive globalization is that, by highlighting the importance of destructive elements within the American response, we may better situate the U.S. case within a comparative field. As discussed in chapter 5, crossnational research indicates that social-welfare systems in much of the de-
Primitive Globalization? • 25
veloped world are not being dismantled. Comparative studies at the urban and neighborhood level also suggest that different national responses to globalization lead to important variations in how cities address pressures of economic polarization and spatial exclusion. As Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen, reviewing a large body of work, conclude, "In case after case we have found agency to have a major impact on structure: the actions of the state, of nation states, determined by the balance of power between/ among contending forces in the economic and political sphere, is a major determinant of a city's spatial pattern."56 Reconceptualizing the U.S. response to globalization sets the stage for investigation of the role of state actions and structure in New York's late-twentieth-century revival, a task taken up in the chapters that follow.
Limits to Globalization, Limits to Theory At this point, let me restate the core arguments of my conception and situate them briefly in relation to several influential approaches to globalization. I have contended that strong-globalist accounts may blur important distinctions between globalization and capitalism, overdraw the novelty and extent of international interdependence, fail to recognize embeddedness, or downplay the inability of any single national or regional system to demonstrate economic supremacy. More useful approaches suggest, instead, that national and subnational environments operate both as enduring structures that mediate the local impacts of global processes and as dynamic arenas where political actors reconfigure the economic and social subarrangements of international developments. A rereading of Marx's discussion of primitive accumulation was used to devise a conception of the (nonstrategically) facilitative role of the state as a destructive force within more recent episodes of economic transition. This theory contended that states, in certain national environments and at the behest (at least in part) of subglobal political forces, may respond to globalization in ways that exacerbate fragmentation and dis-embed social actors from inherited sociopolitical conditions and spatial patterns. In such contexts, the use of state power to propel neoliberal global linkages may actively forestall the development of constructive and stable modes of governance for cities. If this is true, several implications follow. One is that, because localities may globalize within a national context, a range of political actors (including states) at different subglobal scales remain potentially significant contributors for better and for worse to processes of globalization. A second implication is that because of the multiplicity of actors and environments as well as the instability of economic activity amid weak forms of governance, globalization—in the
26 • Primitive Globalization?
sense of a stable inter-national and interlocal system of economic and social development—is very much a work in progress. The usefulness of the term primitive globalization has been to bring together and highlight three elements of contemporary processes: the transitional, open-ended aspects of globalization; the continuing variations in subglobal arrangements across nations and regions, including the ways those differences are linked to specific relations between state levels in certain contexts; and the destructive as well as constructive roles played by states and political actors in engagements with globalization. None of these points is entirely unprecedented, and it may be useful to contrast my own arguments briefly with several important theoretical statements on globalization and the state. Castells, for example, has also emphasized defensive and destructive actions by nation-states—such as vestigial statism (Russia), nationalistic developmentalism (Japan), or antistate libertarianism and fundamentalist communitarianism (United States)—in response to what he sees as a globally integrated network society. Yet in the context of his strongglobalist argument, in which a full-fledged techno-economic revolution has fatally undermined the power of nation-states, destructive actions by states become a logical inevitability; the role of the nation-state, in other words, is expected henceforth to be historically retrogressive and nothing more. Such a characterization is not empirically convincing, nor is it entailed by the theoretical arguments developed here.57 Giovanni Arrighi, in the context of a quite different approach to globalization, has also developed several of the themes that I have underlined here: the current period as one of disorganization and transition; contemporary U.S. neoliberalism as particularly destructive and destabilizing; a once-enabling relationship between state and capital that now exacerbates structural economic weakness and postpones new forms of regulation.58 Yet because Arrighi's concern is to understand contemporary forms of globalization in relation to a macrohistorical succession of hegemonic regimes of accumulation, there is a heavy reliance on explaining national and regional developments in terms of international state-systems and "top-layer" actors. There is also an expectation, at best premature, that the economic powers of East Asia are at the epicenter of an emergent hegemonic regime.59 An earlier section of this chapter has already reviewed a significant body of work that questions whether current levels of international integration are really sufficient to displace domestic or local factors of development. Even within the terms of Arrighi's framework, however, it might be asked why periods of transition like the recent past could not be expected to loosen what are seen to be the normal constraints exercised by hege-
Primitive Globalization? • 27
monic structures, freeing up a range of actors at multiple levels of a persistently unstable international system. When coupled with the fact that current geopolitical circumstances do not appear to conform to the historical logic of past patterns—suggesting not so much regime transition as interstate stalemate or prolonged American hegemony—these questions introduce considerable uncertainty as to whether contemporary developments can be best understood at such a broad level of analysis.60 Perhaps more than Castells or Arrighi, the theories of the Regulation school address issues of instability and governance in ways that may relate more closely to the perspective developed here. By approaching globalization as simply one element in an ongoing crisis and restructuring of a midtwentieth-century Fordist mode of development, regulationist approaches highlight the emergence of a number of new market and labor processes— flexible labor, heightened competition, financial deregulation, state retrenchment, and specialized consumption—while questioning whether these new economic and social practices are regulated sufficiently as to constitute a new and stable mode of development. An advantage of the regulationist approach lies in its contention that the current historical period constitutes a determinate shift within capitalism whose full development nevertheless awaits certain forms of economic, social, and political regulation. Within this basic approach, of course, there have been a number of different interpretative schemata.61 For instance, the work of Robert Boyer, which argues for the continuing relevance of national organization to capitalism, highlights the instability and social costs resulting from insufficient nation-state-based regulatory institutions.62 This position carries with it, however, a restricted conception of state intervention—if and when it does emerge—as being essentially constructive (i.e., regulative or coordinative) and a reluctance to address localization or state decentralization not simply as an enfeeblement of national-state regulatory powers but as complex developments in their own right with theoretically multiple potentials. Bob Jessop, on the other hand, presents a regulationist analysis that is both more elaborately conceptualized and somewhat more open-ended. In developing a systematic theorization of the neoliberal economy as part of a restructuring Atlantic Fordism, Jessop proposes an emerging and complementary state form—a successor to the Keynesian welfare state called the Schumpeterian workfare state—which, when coupled with an observed "denationalization" of this state, theorizes greater prominence for the local state and a shift from tasks of government to those of governance.63 Although Jessop's attention to the decentralization of state functions is a relative strength of his regulationist model, theorization of all these properties
28 • Primitive Globalization?
as emerging structural developments of a successor regime may still be premature. For example, one analytical risk posed by the theory of the Schumpeterian state, with its emphasis on strategic-rational and innovative actions by the state in pursuit of "creative destruction," is that it weakens the conceptual basis for recognizing those activities that are merely (uncreatively) destructive. A related concern pertains to the critical distinction between the discourses of state restructuring—with their catchwords "entrepreneurial," "workforce development," "reinventing government," and the like—and the messy, often quite different material realities of institutional politics and policy implementation.64 Whereas in certain contexts Jessop does make this distinction, it is not always visible in broader generalizations about capitalist transformation, post-Fordism, and the state. Part of the problem is that the terminology of state and governance "projects" imputes a coherent intention to address structural problems where none may be present. A more general concern is that the key concepts of regulation theory, because they are intended to explain established regulatory processes and their breakdown at the broader system level, simply may not be particularly well suited to understanding the potential for contingent conditions and shortsighted actions that my approach to the state wishes to highlight.65 This chapter has sought to draw attention to important and often neglected elements of contemporary change, and to provide a new conception of the relationship between certain states and neoliberal globalization. In criticizing a number of globalist positions, I have suggested, in effect, that the term globalization becomes an example of what Andrew Sayer, following Marx, has called a "chaotic conception"—an abstraction covering an enormous variety of activities that do not necessarily form structures or interact causally.66 My theory attempted to establish limits on the effective claims currently made on behalf of globalism. I do not wish, in turn, to make excessive claims on behalf of primitive globalization as a positive socialscientific concept. This term is useful in part because it has a disruptive effect on the reifying tendencies in discourses of globalization, discourses that themselves have helped to construct and rationalize the very phenomena they purport to describe. Yet, beyond this, my intention here has been not simply to dismiss globalization as a myth, but rather to find ways to theorize the transitive and differentiating (and not just the integrative) elements within processes of inter-national and interlocal connection. This kind of theoretical strategy is important for the investigation of social changes in open systems, in which agency, contingency, and complexity continue to set limits both on the ability of structures (emergent or inherit-
Primitive Globalization? • 29
ed) to impose a logic on social relations and on the capacity of social science to anticipate system-level outcomes based on presumptions of (internal and external) closure.67 More provisionally, such a strategy may be especially appropriate for the analysis of moments of historic transition that, by definition, are relatively fluid and open-ended. It is true that the context of transition narrows the grounds for making positive or universalizing theoretical propositions. The advantage nevertheless is that this approach may better position the social scientist to investigate the relevant linkages, differentiate the relative constraints, and construct meaningful explanations (if not general causalities) with respect to social and political projects in multiple environments. In subsequent sections of this volume, such an approach is used to analyze, with greater substance, the politics of neoliberal globalization by examining several cases of urban change. If theories of globalization tend to conflate specific social processes (such as the economic activities of a particular class or the transformation of a given community) with a universalizing concept, then primitive globalization permits the reexamination of these processes as distinctive cases in which various political and state capacities may become visible.68 This approach is employed, over the next three chapters, to investigate several key relationships: state and urban redevelopment; city policy and neighborhood gentrification; urban movements and local control. Although level of analysis and object of study may shift from chapter to chapter, the central empirical questions remain the same: What has been the scope for political actors to influence processes of urban change? How have actors used the opportunities available to them? What have been the effects of their actions? By investigating these questions in related settings, a series of analyses will attempt to reconstruct the transformation of New York.
This page intentionally left blank
2
Building an Urban Neoliberalism The Long Rebirth of New York
During the year preceding September 11,2001, New York's status as premier American city seemed firmly set in place. Everyone loved New York. Tourists, immigrants, investors—from all over the world, people and money appeared to be migrating to a city once seen as declining, dangerous, and ungovernable. Even Americans, who long had shunned the place as dirty and deviant, were flocking there: for the year 2000, the city claimed a ranking behind only Orlando, Florida, the home of Disney World, as the nation's most visited destination.1 Of course, the tragedy of the following year elicited extraordinary sympathies from observers everywhere, regardless of their connection to New York. Yet even before this widespread empathy, a quartercentury-long process of urban revival—part economic, part symbolic—had already produced a city with which so many Americans, remarkably, now identified. It is important to recall how profoundly conditions had changed since the dark days of the mid-1970s. At that time, confronted by the threat of municipal default, New York was hemorrhaging jobs, investment, tax revenues, residents, and large amounts of civic pride. By the end of the 1990s, the city was enjoying a booming local economy, near-record annual employment gains, a thriving real-estate market, a growing population, falling crime rates, and a budget surplus of nearly $3 billion. It was hardly surprising that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani chose to give his State of the City Address for the year 2000 in front of an enormous photograph of Times Square in full millennial celebration.2 More than a success story, New York's famous crossroads of the world had become a model of the new city: safe, clean, and prosperous, a place of opportunity where middle-class visitors could feel at home. 31
32 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
Even at this moment of triumph, a number of facts belied these rosy images. The 1.4 million New York City residents living in poverty in 1979 had grown to nearly 2 million by 1995. Income earnings had become significantly more unequal. The local economy was now more dependent than ever on Wall Street, and spending by the financial sector's high earners was fueling record-high housing prices.3 At the other end of the labor market, workers in fast-growing occupations—from personal and home-care aides, medical assistants, human service workers, and physical therapy assistants to paralegals, data equipment repairers, and teachers—were being paid belowmedian wages that failed to keep pace with housing costs. By the end of the 1990s, as moderate- and middle-income earners priced out of Manhattan were leaving the city or pushing up housing costs in the city's outer-borough neighborhoods, public officials were forced to respond to fears that the city would be facing a permanent disappearance of affordable housing for all but the affluent.4 Scholars have given considerable attention to this growing economic bifurcation of the city. Saskia Sassen's pioneering study, along with theoretical work advanced by John Friedmann and others, first set out the argument that new structures of global capitalism were behind the late-twentiethcentury transformation of New York.5 Contending that major shifts in the world economy have endowed certain cities with international functions of coordination and control, such writers also proposed that these translocal responsibilities tended to detach this kind of "global city" from its national and local economy. New York, then, along with a number of other urban nodes in the new international system, was seen as a "command point" for cross-border corporate networks as well as a major production site for the business and financial services needed to support this role. These functions, in turn, shaped processes of urban redevelopment within the city itself, as intensive gentrification of core areas to accommodate managerial elites was complemented by a clustering of large numbers of low-wage supporting industries, often staffed by immigrants, along the margins of the global metropolis. In this perspective, if globalization was the driving force in New York's fln-de-millenaire revival, then the city's economic and social characteristics, such as strong but uneven growth coupled with disturbing levels of inequality, may be viewed as the consequences—perhaps regrettable but more or less inevitable—of enhanced international integration. Other analysts of New York contend, however, that local politics has played an important role in the city's rebirth. John Mollenkopf, for instance, sought to explain the revival of New York in terms of the rise of a newly dominant political coalition led by Mayor Edward Koch.6 While recognizing
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 33
that postindustrial economic imperatives may shape the terrain for cities, Mollenkopf proposed that a certain level of "autonomy" enables local political forces, especially in New York where governmental capacities and public-sector leadership historically have been strong, to influence the kinds of policies that a city actually pursues. Public-sector interests, political coalitions, and electoral constituencies, then, account for governmental initiatives and spending patterns that often are assumed to result simply from economic forces. Koch, in particular, is seen not only as a shrewd and successful coalition leader but also as a persuasive example of how, quite frequently, "politics counted more than economics." More recent commentators attribute a similar impact to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.7 In this kind of analysis, then, local actors and political forces bear a significant responsibility for the kinds of socioeconomic changes experienced by the city, including its polarizing tendencies. Although globalist and localist analyses both have led to perceptive observations, each approach is limited in what it is able to explain about New York's revival. It is indisputable that recent economic changes in New York are linked to key components of a restructuring international economy. Furthermore, at certain historical moments (as we will see later in this chapter) broader economic stagnation contributed to severe local pressures on city finances. Yet a number of global-city contentions have not been well supported, and it is not always clear that New York's international linkages per se have made its current social and spatial conditions different in kind from those of most major U.S. cities. Even setting these criticisms aside, it is important to recognize that New York has been a global city ever since its earliest days as a New World seaport vital to the Dutch and British empires. The long-standing importance of the city's translocal connections has not prevented government and political actors from having a heavy hand in shaping its development.8 It would not be surprising if politics has also influenced more recent bouts of change. Localist approaches, for their part, correctly apprehend that public-sector actors, even in an age of enhanced capital mobility, can and do exert influence on developers and other nongovernmental actors who rebuild the urban landscape. These kinds of explanations, however, do not effectively explain the relative continuity of policies across different New York City administrations since the 1970s. Nor do they fully account for why New York has tended to produce elite-dominated and exclusionary coalitions. These recurring political patterns suggest that the concept of autonomy may be an inherently limited approach to understanding the basis and direction of local action. What is needed is a repositioning of urban redevelopment in relation
34 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
to national responses to economic globalization. Several recent analyses of New York have broken new ground in this direction, situating the city's development within an international context while also focusing on U.S. politics and policies. Janet Abu-Lughod's work on global cities, for example, pays heed to local as well as national political factors, although the macrohistorical scale of her analysis does not permit a detailed look at New York's recent evolution.9 Susan Fainstein, in a comparative study of London and New York, takes an approach to urban politics that is more closely scaled to contemporary concerns. Fainstein's analysis shows perceptively how the politics of real-estate "deal-making" in these cities has often followed similar paths, while also being mediated by contrasting governmental structures. Yet the nature of her two cases—both embedded in privatizing national systems—sometimes makes it unclear whether their striking commonalities result from globalization or neoliberal politics.10 This question continues to be important, with implications for how even deal-making development may constitute a broader public strategy. This chapter takes a somewhat different approach to investigating the politics of redevelopment in New York during the final three decades of the twentieth century. Seeking in its own fashion to move beyond globalist and localist approaches to urban change, my historical account attempts, within the scope of a single narrative, to comprehend decisive moments in the evolution of the city by examining their emergence within the national economic and political environment of the United States. By tracking changes in New York's development strategy in tandem with shifting governmental initiatives at the national and local levels, it becomes possible to understand the structuring impacts of new national policies on the city while also identifying moments when local forces emerge to exert significant influence over urban redevelopment. My analysis, building on the conception of primitive globalization elaborated in the preceding chapter, focuses on the often destructive use of public policies to establish the institutional foundations for neoliberal development. In doing so, this approach locates a recurring political logic—a reliance on state power to stimulate "market" development and displace the poor—that becomes central, as well, to the emergence of a national urban regime.11 By tracing over the course of a quarter century the considerable impacts of such a regime even on a "global city," the following account draws attention to the ways in which political and governmental action, beyond the effects of economic forces themselves, has tended to exacerbate long-term problems of urban inequality, fiscal instability, and political fragmentation. The emergence of this neoliberal approach, and its role in New York's
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 35
late-twentieth-century revival, is examined by focusing on three key historical moments. First, in response to the city's mid-1970s fiscal troubles, crisis-resolution measures established a new relationship between government and economic development based on market stimulus and popular austerity. As this New York solution "went national," it became a constitutive feature of an emerging U.S. neoliberalism that established a more shortterm-oriented environment for American cities. Second, local instabilities threatened this narrow approach during the second half of the 1980s, when a host of new challenges spurred New York policies that went beyond earlier neoliberal nostrums. By the early 1990s, however, economic pressures and political failures reined in this halting movement toward more balanced forms of development, and in its place local leaders began to call for new strategies. Third, the politics of the mid-1990s set in motion a major retooling of American neoliberalism, with important consequences for New York and its lower-income residents. From free trade and financial-sector stimulus to new efforts to reform welfare and public housing, national policies encouraged a pioneering local agenda to displace populations and to impose a new spatial environment on the city. By decade's end, growth and prosperity had climbed skyward—atop a shrinking economic base and an increasingly polarized income structure. Even before the attacks of September 11, then, the debilitating consequences of these kinds of strategies were becoming strikingly apparent. The following account locates New York's uneven renaissance within an evolving U.S. political response to economic challenges. By tracing the fluid interplay between national and local development, this analysis attempts to illuminate the emergence of public strategies to remake a city and a shaky urban order. In the process, the New York story clarifies key political steps in the rise of neoliberal globalization.
Rebirthing New York The late twentieth century produced a surprising resurrection of the city. During the post-World War II era, urban America had become the dark underbelly of national economic prosperity. A series of measures devised to engineer its recovery, from urban renewal to the War on Poverty, were gradually jettisoned one by one. By the 1970s, New York was the crucible that turned the nation's economic problems into crisis, resulting in a desperate fiscal emergency that took the city to the brink of bankruptcy. Yet this debacle also led, more quickly than one might have expected, to a new kind of growth and economic development. Within the span of a handful of years, in fact, New York was being hailed as the pioneer of a dramatic urban renaissance.
36 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
Unraveling the tangled roots—global? local?—of this sudden revival is not an easy task. Certainly, a globalist interpretation can be made credible: New York experienced crisis and transformation amid a profound restructuring of the world's economies. The city's importance as a global center of finance and business services was also enlarged by how its crisis was resolved. On the other hand, plenty of local culprits lurked behind this budgetary collapse, one in a long series of financial breakdowns peculiar to New York.12 What seems increasingly important, however, as the episodic details recede into history, are the national/local political dynamics of the construction of crisis and recovery. The seriousness of New York's financial condition, along with the economic importance of the city itself, meant that the shock waves of this "local" crisis soon reverberated beyond the Hudson River and upward through the U.S. federal system. In response, an ad hoc coalition of leaders developed a new approach for New York City government—and shortly thereafter for national government—to rejuvenate and transform the metropolis, the first steps in what would eventually become a new U.S. urbanism for the global era. At the core of this approach would be new kinds of public-sector action in the service of downtown-centered revival. Localizing the Crisis For New York, the 1970s were a decade of profound economic change. More than simply a gradual process of structural transition, however, the city's evolution was also shaped by a traumatic political event. Neoliberal New York was birthed by fiscal crisis. The roots of such a generative event lay in broader patterns of national economic development that emerged during the several decades after World War II. This "golden age" of capitalism was marked by strong growth rates and parallel rises in incomes, leading to a period of sustained prosperity and expansion in the United States as well as in most other developed capitalist countries.13 Even during these halcyon days, however, the U.S. model tended to concentrate growing numbers of social problems— poverty, joblessness, a decayed and shrinking housing stock—in the nation's cities. Disinvestment or "blight," as it was quaintly called, plagued the inner areas of older cities throughout the 1950s, and already by early in the following decade New York City was experiencing housing losses owing to owner abandonment on the order of fifteen thousand units per year.14 Throughout the period, public priorities tended to favor suburban over urban expansion, but government did launch a series of important initiatives to rebuild downtown areas. Beginning with Title I of the 1949 Housing
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 37
Act, urban renewal, sometimes portrayed as the "federal bulldozer," was actually a set of national/local partnerships facilitated by a key congressional provision (the federal write-down) that subsidized the costs of acquiring and clearing central-city land. This intergovernmental cooperative arrangement did not make these programs any less destructive. In New York and in other cities, inner-city rebuilding displaced large numbers of lower-income residents, thereby earning urban renewal the more pointed name of "Negro removal."15 Prodded into a more inclusive mode by the political mobilizations of the 1960s, officials in liberal New York combined market-stimulus policies, such as downtown zoning incentives, with the community-oriented programs supported by new federal antipoverty agencies. Urban crisis, understood as physical and economic decay, was briefly defined in ways that also focused on racial exclusion, social inequality, and community disintegration. This liberal understanding soon changed. The national economies of all the major developed countries began to contract sharply in the 1970s, but in the United States it was cities that bore the brunt of economic decline.16 Growing numbers of employers, owners, and middle-class residents fled from central-city areas, and new waves of economic disinvestment left inner-city land markets, and often municipal tax coffers, in difficult straits. In the face of these extreme economic pressures, low federal subsidies to cities (relative to most European countries) coupled with a highly decentralized system of service provision became a ready recipe for local fiscal strain.17 As municipal tax revenues diminished, a number of cities were forced to rely on borrowing to fund their basic services. New York's government leaders, in particular, became extraordinarily inventive in the use of questionable accounting practices to hide the full extent of municipal indebtedness.18 By 1975, when the financial pressures on local government had become serious enough in New York to raise the specter of municipal default, the definition of urban crisis throughout the country had come to mean urban fiscal crisis. The immediate circumstances leading to New York's moment of acute crisis were complicated and, like subsequent events, remain open to a number of interpretations.19 Beyond dispute is that in April 1975 the city of New York was unable to sell its short-term securities in the bond market, and soon found itself dependent on New York State to provide funds to pay its outstanding obligations to investors and to stave off municipal default. It was not only the public sector that was in trouble; at one point the "big eleven" clearinghouse banks (including Bankers Trust, Chase, and Citibank) apparently stood to lose upwards of $35 billion if the city of New York
38 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
had defaulted on its obligations.20 In the ensuing scramble, a series of improvisatory "rescue plans" were devised, as the apparent seriousness of the financial crisis deepened and as the effort to address it moved up the U.S. federal system. First, a group of banking executives and New York State elected officials created the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), a state agency that guaranteed repayment to investors with secured tax revenues earmarked for bonds issued by MAC. When this agency was unable to sell sufficient bonds and enforce painful spending cuts, the New York State legislature created an Emergency Financial Control Board—composed of the governor, mayor, state and city comptrollers, and three corporate officials—to control disbursement of city funds and to enforce austerity budgets. After the efforts of MAC and the control board failed to restore investor confidence, city and state sought national help. The spirit of President Ford's initial reaction to these appeals was captured in the nowfamous New York Daily News headline, FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.21 Yet the Ford administration and the U.S. Congress did eventually approve a threeyear package of loan guarantees. The financial terms of this assistance were intended, as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury William Simon had urged, to be "so punitive" and "so painful" that "no city, no political subdivision would ever be tempted to go down the same road."22 Despite these measures, further rounds of negotiations in New York City, Albany, and Washington would prove necessary—each episode involving a large cast of governmental, corporate, and emergency-agency leaders—to patch together the combination of wage and employment cuts, service deferments, accounting practices, and repayment guarantees to carry New York's finances through the end of the decade. More than a turning point in local history, the New York fiscal crisis became an early, pivotal proving ground in which the United States responded politically to the new economic challenges of the period. This could be seen in the remarkable series of emergency coalitions—spanning public and private sectors as well as national, state, and local levels—that were pieced together to rescue the city. The broader political significance of the crisis also became visible in the public debates surrounding it; from issues of welfare spending and pension funds to banking practices and the behavior of government officials, the major components of the U.S. social contract were subject to searching (and often scathing) national review within the unfolding theater of the New York crisis. Inevitably, a shifting collection of points of view emerged at different moments in the drama, yet over time a dominant perspective took center stage to guide the political and policy solutions.
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 39
The strategy to resolve the New York fiscal crisis came to be undergirded by the thesis that the city's budgetary burdens were driven by the excessive demands of poor people, municipal workers, racial minorities, and community groups—and by the liberal politicians who supported them. New York's public officials encountered fierce criticism, most of it richly deserved, for their repeated attempts to soft-pedal the severity of fiscal shortfalls. Much less blame accrued to developers who had overbuilt, financial institutions that encouraged and profited from irresponsible municipal borrowing, or planners who disregarded secular industrial decline, let alone the corporate decisions and federal policies that long favored suburbanization at the expense of older urban centers. And in the decades following the crisis, extensive analyses have questioned whether New York was indeed much more generous than other cities.23 Regardless of the merits of that case, however, what is notable in the present context is that this apportionment of blame tended to resurrect time-honored themes in U.S. politics—the unworthy and dependent poor, the misguided generosity of social reformers, the unreasonable demands of racial minorities, the irresponsibility of free-spending politicians—a number of years before Ronald Reagan rode these themes to a presidential election victory. In fact, it was this kind of political accountancy that proved so important in New York. Along with the very real fiscal reckoning confronting the city, the public consensus on blame helped justify retrenchment of municipal services (transportation, housing, hospitals, community colleges) most relied upon by working people and the poor. The necessity of triage was given an invidious twist by New York City housing commissioner Roger Starr's advocacy of "planned shrinkage." Blaming housing abandonment on poor residents themselves, Starr argued that "destructive elements" within the lower-income population were making many such neighborhoods unsalvageable. Rather than concentrating significant local resources on the worst areas of the city, as had been advocated in the 1960s, New York City government should therefore recognize that every city has had a permanent slum, and we... [can] simply withdraw all housing construction effort from certain sections where the disorderly and disorganized families concentrate, where there is a critical mass of very, very difficult people.24 By targeting resources to more salvageable areas, Starr claimed, government could facilitate the creation of a smaller, wealthier city more conducive to market standards of economic viability. "Better a thriving city of five million," he concluded, "than a Calcutta of seven."25 Starr's penchant for
40 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
openly championing this urban vision soon made him a political liability for the administration of Mayor Abraham Beame, and the commissioner was asked to resign. Yet the logic of triage retained its appeal, as longtime civic leaders such as financier Felix Rohatyn—whose role as head of the fiscal-emergency agencies would eventually gain him the tide of the "man who saved New York"—were wont to invoke this perspective when it was convenient to do so.26 In view of this definition of the crisis, the measures to address it sought to do more than simply reestablish fiscal solvency. Crisis-resolution efforts worked to reorient local policy around a flexible, ad hoc transformation of the city to promote and sustain corporate expansion.27 As a philosophy of public action, this neoliberal approach hinged on the argument that market-stimulus policies to help core business areas would lead eventually to the city's revival and distribute its long-term benefits broadly. This trickle-down (or trickle-out) approach, pioneered in New York, would henceforth guide government efforts to favor market actors: mobile, financial and service-sector corporations, real-estate developers, and professional/ managerial workers in the central business districts as well as property owners, developers, and gentrifiers in accessible residential areas. It was a strategy that relied heavily on tax subsidies, incentive zoning, and deregulation, rather than on reinvestment in public services, human capital, and neighborhood stabilization. These policy parameters were enforced by the newly created, elite-dominated monitoring agencies. MAC, as well as the (no longer Emergency) Financial Control Board, would eventually withdraw from active roles in policy formation, but not before institutional mechanisms were in place that would automatically trigger fiscal-agency intervention in the event of future budget imbalances. Guided by principles of triage and planned shrinkage, New York City government in the mid-1970s reduced expenditures on public services, closing down firehouses and shedding much of its earlier commitment to community development.28 Spending on "noncommon" (such as libraries, utilities, and education) and "public-welfare" functions (welfare, health, and hospitals) was especially hard hit, as the politically weakest groups suffered the greatest losses. This period also saw a flurry of new ortexpanded taxincentive programs oriented toward central-city businesses and the core land market. The Industrial and Commercial Incentives Board, created in 1976 (and later renamed the Industrial and Commercial Incentives Program, or ICIP), began offering tax abatements to major corporations and builders for development projects primarily in the Manhattan business districts. Amendments to a tax-subsidy program called 421a, which had been designed originally to offer tax breaks to increase the stock of middle-
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 41
income housing, instead stimulated luxury residential construction. State regulations governing cooperative conversion were loosened. Tax abatements for residential rehabilitation—especially the J-51 program, which had been enacted in the 1950s to upgrade cold-water flats—were retailored to stimulate privately financed condominiums, cooperatives, and residential conversions. In addition, a series of major Manhattan redevelopment projects (a South Street Seaport tourist zone, the Battery Park City financialsector residential project, and the Javits Convention Center) was launched or sustained by a combination of public (federal, state, and local) and private developers, despite free-market rhetoric and apparent fiscal constraints.29 None of these initiatives wrenched New York out of its economic doldrums. Over time, however, they would help give shape to the city's future expansion. The fiscal-crisis period set in place new urban norms. Enacted in ad hoc fashion amid an often chaotic political climate, the combination of triage, incentives, and elite intervention firmly oriented public-sector activity around short-term market stimulus. It would be difficult to interpret these changes simply as government-led policy innovations to induce economic activity from otherwise passive or disorganized market actors; the prominent role of corporate leaders in guiding the recovery plan clearly suggests a different story. On the other hand, the new policy measures represented more than simply the heavy hand of globalization, a kind of bankers' "coup" in which international financial elites simply imposed their will on an ailing U.S. city.30 From the vantage point of today, when the New York solution has become the accepted wisdom of city governance, what is most striking about the new measures is not whether they were imposed or induced but that they constituted an early national response to broader economic and political crisis in the localized form in which it appeared. From this perspective, as important as the measures themselves was the political process through which the crisis was constructed and resolved. In this sense, the New York City fiscal crisis of the 1970s not only became a watershed in the redirection of local policy and urban growth, but would contribute to reshaping the nation's understanding of the appropriate relationship between government and economic development in the new global environment. Nationalizing the Solution New York's crisis fused two perceived problems with the American city: it was not attentive to business, and its poor people were obstacles to economic development. By generating the need for a dramatic national rescue, the fiscal emergency also made these deficiencies emblematic of a larger
42 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
malaise. And in fact, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, the "local" solution to crisis had become a national one. After the late Carter administration began to cut direct assistance to cities and to refocus federal urban policy on stimulating private investment, Reagan policies went considerably further. Enacting sweeping tax cuts, deregulation measures, and decreases in federal aid to cities, national policy makers helped create an economic environment that reinforced the need for cities to cater to investors, developers, and mobile corporations. In terms of federal retrenchment toward cities, Reaganism began before Reagan.31 Early in the term of President Jimmy Carter (1976-80), this Democratic administration rewarded urban voters with more generous federal aid—such as revenue-sharing and employment-training monies for distressed cities—as well as Urban Development Action Grants that helped pay for a first generation of festival malls. Following a visit to New York's devastated South Bronx in 1977, the president also seemed to embrace community-development initiatives as an antidote to urban decline.32 But during his final two years in office, Carter's urban policies brought about sharp reductions in spending to help the inner-city poor. Along with the real pressures of prolonged economic stagnation, the growing influence and political success of "fiscal conservatism" in key areas of the country— not just New York but California, which launched a tax revolt with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978—now raised the profile of fiscal retrenchment at the national level. Business also mobilized politically, as new interest alliances, lobbying groups, and pressure tactics emerged from the U.S. corporate community to register new levels of influence over national economic policies.33 Federal aid, as a percentage of New York City's revenues, began to decline during the final years of the decade. By 1980, the Presidential Commission on the National Agenda for the Eighties, appointed by Carter, was urging that the national government stop helping cities. For U.S. national policy this perspective marked, as Dennis Judd and Todd Swanstrom have noted, the first time since the advent of the New Deal that cities were not judged to be valuable cultural, social, or economic entities except to the degree to which they contributed to a healthy national economy.34 Otherwise, presumably, they should be allowed simply to wither away. Under President Reagan, antiurbanism took the form of a more ambitious agenda. Echoing Nixon's call for a "new federalism," the administration sought to withdraw the federal government from education, health, and social-service spending, and, in an early version of urban enterprise zones, pressed for a tax-incentive approach to reviving cities. Although much of Reagan's first-term restructuring program was rejected by Con-
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 43
gress, sharp reductions in eligibility shrank the rolls of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and Medicaid, food stamps, and unemployment programs. The administration slashed appropriations for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, ending the Section 8 New Construction program and initiating a voucher system of rental subsidies. New priorities also reduced public housing starts, terminated self-help housing development grants, cut mass-transit funds, and trimmed Community Development Block Grants for low- and moderate-income households.35 Not surprisingly, federal aid as a percentage of municipalities' total revenues decreased sharply, in New York falling to 15 percent by 1984. Even certain federal programs oriented directly toward business, such as small-business assistance and regional development initiatives, were scaled back.36 By the same token, central-city-oriented tax initiatives enjoyed strong support. In addition to the federal exemptions on industrial revenue bonds that helped finance special city projects like convention centers and sports arenas, the Tax Act of 1981 provided generous benefits for real-estate investment in core central-city land markets.37 These federal policies provided a new set of carrots and sticks for cities seeking to right themselves. Reinforcing vulnerability to market forces, such measures reduced most national urban commitments and actively spurred the mobility of footloose corporations. Such measures encouraged U.S. cities to pursue growth through business subsidy and popular austerity, even if they were not already forced to do so by a fiscal-stabilization program. Not that the immediate political impacts of federal policies were uniform; and over time, certain cities strove to formulate alternative local-policy responses to the emerging order. Chicago, for example, in a historic contest in 1983, elected Harold Washington to be its first African-American mayor on a platform of neighborhood-based economic development. In Boston, Mayor Raymond Flynn, a supporter of tenant rights and neighborhood housing, pushed an unusually progressive development program during much of his tenure in office.38 Yet in cities otherwise as different as Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Dallas—not to mention New York—policy in the 1980s would come to center on the flexible use of public incentives and subsidies to encourage downtown business-district expansion. Neither these growth strategies, nor the kinds of urban partnerships that emerged to pursue them, were entirely new to U.S. cities. As we saw earlier, the postwar history of urban renewal had been replete with publicprivate alliances to redevelop central-city land. In 1950s New York, public agencies led by administrator Robert Moses played a central role in a broader
44 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
coalition—from private developers and banks to labor unions and community organizations—that built bridges, highways, and housing developments for the poor and the middle class.39 Yet the 1980s versions of these alliances were novel in crucial respects, not only because of the direct effects of federal retrenchment but because of a newly sharpened reliance on interlocal competition. Charged with pursuing urban expansion while also forced to manage its politics, city leaders were expected to accomplish both feats without exerting direct control over development or incurring undue publicsector costs. Not surprisingly, these pressures pitted localities against one another, as the new public entrepreneurs sought to lure mobile businesses with ad hoc inducements. Offering competing arrays of tax benefits and offbudget subsidies, cities engaged in development competitions that (from the vantage point of national economic growth) would often turn out to be zero-sum bidding wars, if their true costs and benefits even could be calculated at all.40 In such competitions, state governments also repositioned themselves as sponsors of economic development, setting up new public authorities to float bonds for specific projects. Like local programs, these initiatives permitted businesses to draw on public revenues without providing much accountability in decision making or outcome. As use of these development tools became routine, and as federal priorities appeared unlikely to face a quick reversal, the new short-term competitiveness itself took on the appearance of an emerging economic structure. Embracing this approach promised certain local leaders political rewards as well. Bringing the Solution Back Home Operating on such a terrain, New York's growth coalition came to be headed, first rather tentatively and then more forcefully, by Mayor Ed Koch (1977-89). In most respects, this ruling coalition exemplified the kind of growth alliance typical of early 1980s U.S. cities. It united the economic interests of business and its prominent organizations—the downtown corporations, large developers and their supporters, and, in a key subsidiary role, municipal labor leaders—in a general program of fiscal parsimony and central-business-district growth.41 The mayor's primary importance consisted in his ability to fashion a stable electoral base to support and carry out the development strategies. His ability to "sell" austerity and business subsidy also proved to be an important political asset. Certain kinds of community resistance emerged in response to the narrow policy focus on the core Manhattan business precincts, yet in the immediate aftermath of the fiscal crisis New York's neighborhood-based groups would struggle to exert much influence.
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 45
Given the full weight of national political restructuring, first embodied in the fiscal-stabilization program and then in the policy shifts of the early Reagan years, the emergence of a business-dominated coalition in early 1980s New York was hardly surprising. But neither was its political success guaranteed in advance. For one reason, the imposition of austerity during the fiscal crisis had served to exacerbate the city's housing crisis. Retrenchment of services, from housing-code enforcement to basic services such as fire and sanitation, only hastened the disinvestment and abandonment of declining neighborhoods. Although the initial impacts of fiscalemergency policies were to relegate the urban crisis to lower-income areas of the city, public officials would not be able to insulate themselves entirely from the political repercussions of neighborhood collapse. Already by 1978, New York City government, which was obligated by law to take title to properties that had been abandoned by their owners, was confronted by the need to provide management and services for an estimated three thousand occupied buildings (containing more than thirty thousand apartments) that it could no longer sell at auction. Many communities reacted angrily to the growing crisis, and the Koch administration, making use of block-grant funding from Washington, soon launched an ambitious array of communitybased housing rehabilitation programs.42 Organized under the aegis of a newly created Division of Alternative Management Programs (DAMP), these programs would become a community-oriented backup policy to the administration's market solutions for New York's housing problems. Yet the scale and funding levels of these community-development programs were slow to expand. Fiscal constraints and limited community capacities were part of the reason, but it was also because the city administration preferred to sell off properties when market and political conditions permitted. Activists who had hoped that DAMP might become a beachhead from which to expand community influence over development and housing policy were soon disappointed.43 Instead, city-planning mechanisms were retooled by the administration to facilitate a Manhattan-centered approach to business development. The newly streamlined planning process involved privatizing the initiation of development projects and coordinating planning directly through the mayor's office. Traditional city planning agencies such as the Department of City Planning and the City Planning Commission (CPC), rather than being concerned with overall land-use planning, began to confine themselves to studies of specific zoning changes and project impacts.44 The commission, which had been stripped of its control over New York's capital budget (and of much of its influence) during the fiscal crisis, now voted simply to approve or disapprove projects assembled
46 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
elsewhere. Critics accused the commission of being a rubber stamp for the mayor's office; the planning department was assailed for its coziness with developers. As one former CPC planner wrote: The fiscal crisis bred a management crisis inside the city planning department. For years directors rose and fell like tenpins.... Too many chiefs turning over meant it was harder to mind the store. [As a result] some city planners feel closer to some of the biggest real estate lawyers in town than to their own bosses.45 For planners and political officials alike, the major challenge was to shepherd developer-initiated projects through New York's complicated land-use disposition process. Meanwhile, the broader social purposes of policy and development, or the sorts of trade-offs that the city might be confronted with, were rarely articulated or debated. Mayor Koch himself emerged as the prototype of a new kind of bigcity leader. Shortly after taking office in 1977, Koch had endeared himself to New York's fiscal monitors by a willingness to embrace fiscal austerity. His ability to distance himself politically from the consequent decline in public services was first put to the test in the mayoral election of 1981. Koch's economic development approach gained him substantial financial rewards in the form of campaign contributions from real-estate developers, as well as ringing endorsements from other business leaders.46 Buoyed by a Manhattan-led economic recovery, and by his effectiveness in selling the inevitability of business subsidy and service retrenchment, Koch won reelection by an overwhelming margin against a weak opponent. This victory seemed to clearly demonstrate that the emerging vision of the economic city could survive electoral review. Political dominance by the mayor also enabled potentially divisive growth issues to be negotiated and settled outside the political arena. In their place, the Koch administration presented its development strategy as one in which the "natural forces" of the market were allowed to do what they did best, with the principal role of government being "to get out of the way." In practice, fostering natural forces involved quite a lot of government activity, selectively applied—from tax incentives and capital-funding subsidies to development planning and the political management of community opposition. This kind of alliance between government and business flourished not by subordinating politics to a new economic reality but, rather, by shaping that reality in ways that also furthered the administration's own political agenda. To business, the city was presented as a place where growth was assured, without the burden of rising demands from the populace that
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 47
often accompanied growth.47 To the broader public, on the other hand, the administration tended to paint a future that could be thrown into jeopardy by the least sign of corporate relocation plans or by any more than minimal benefits or funding restorations for severely deteriorated lower-income neighborhoods and public services. Efforts by community advocates to bring the two worlds together—as in a policy proposing "linkage" between development projects and community benefits—failed to make political headway.48 Koch won a third term as mayor in 1985. New York, its Manhattancentered economy booming, seemed to have become a model of the reviving U.S. city. In fact, many areas failed to experience much reinvestment, and in the poorest districts rates of joblessness, infant mortality, and drugrelated violence grew more pronounced. In this sense, much of the city's revival did not so much relieve economic stagnation as push it away from the center.49 Yet, in political terms, the success of the New York renaissance appeared well-nigh incontrovertible. The mid-1970s fiscal crisis had set in motion a new relationship between government and economic development guided by policies of market stimulus and popular austerity. As this New York solution was replayed in a national arena, its key themes became core components of an emerging American neoliberalism. By withdrawing urban assistance and intensifying intercity competition, national policy helped construct a new playing field for U.S. cities, one that strongly favored growth coalitions tilted toward big business and higher-income groups. In New York, ten years after near bankruptcy, the political dominance of such an alliance—and Koch's leadership over it—seemed assured for many years to come.
Challenging Urban Neoliberalism Without explicit design, then, the American response to the crisis of the 1970s put in place the rudiments of a new national/local order. Its early ingredients were fairly simple: Washington retrenched on urban assistance while stimulating the movement of mobile capital; local governing coalitions created new tools to compete with one another and to fuel the nascent booms in downtown land. New York's economic success, in turn, appeared to validate this kind of regime.50 Yet serious threats to the municipal growth strategy, and potentially to the broader regime, emerged during the second half of the 1980s. First housing problems, then the severe impacts of a stock-market crash on real-estate values, revealed the narrow economic base on which the city's recovery was perched. These weaknesses, along with the social and racial conflicts that roiled up in many of the city's
48 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
neighborhoods, set in motion political challenges to the postcrisis developmental order. Shifting Foundations? Over the course of his first two terms in office, Mayor Koch had built for himself a reputation as the nation's preeminent market-oriented mayor. Yet he began his third term in 1986 by unveiling a housing plan that promised $4 billion to $5 billion in spending from the city's capital budget. The proposal envisioned building or rehabilitating 250,000 apartments over ten years. An audacious endeavor, the plan was labeled by observers the most ambitious housing initiative ever undertaken by any municipality in the country. What prompted this sudden departure from the neoliberal norm? The city's economic recovery had seemed to vindicate the post-fiscal-crisis strategy, but by the mid-1980s revival itself was shifting the public agenda onto new ground. One reason was that austerity became an increasingly hard sell in an era of budget surpluses. Apparently this point was emphasized to the mayor by his advisers in the wake of his 1985 reelection victory.51 Another reason was that the uneven pattern of the recovery—sociospatially but also sectorally—became a political issue in its own right. Despite all the commercial development changing the Manhattan skyline, there was a growing consensus that, in the words of one economic observer, "the strongest real-estate market maybe in the world can't deliver more than a handful of housing units."52 This housing crisis meant different things to different groups. Community advocates focused criticism on growing homelessness and the shrinking supply of lower-income housing. Business analysts, on the other hand, feared that inflated land values and housing shortages among the upper-middle class might short-circuit the city's economic machine.53 After a coalition of community-based nonprofit groups unveiled its own housing proposal for the city in early 1986, the Koch administration countered with a press conference announcing the first sketchy version of a Ten-Year Housing Plan.54 As the plan took shape over the course of Koch's third term, corporate calls for additional housing for higher-level professional workers, as well as the administration's own political priorities, kept pressure on the plan to target upper-income beneficiaries. One study by a community advocate concluded that, by 1989, Koch's last year in office, roughly two-thirds of the housing slated for production under the plan was targeted toward marketrate and upper-middle-income housing consumers, with the remainder earmarked for the poor.55 There were also questions, which resurfaced through the initiative's implementation, as to whether the administration's
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 49
numbers on housing units created tended to overstate the reality on the ground. Nevertheless, in its efforts to address the housing problem, the Koch administration made new overtures to the city's neighborhood-based housing groups. The housing department's community- and residentoriented DAMP initiatives saw new growth over the remainder of the decade, though much more of that expansion involved a new private-ownership and management program than partnerships with longtime not-for-profit community-based providers.56 Ushering in a significantly expanded public role in the production of housing, then, the initiatives of the third Koch term marked a major departure from the rigidly neoliberal orientation of the city's development approach during the decade after the fiscal crisis. The Ten-Year Plan's use of capital-budget spending, in particular, to develop subsidized housing for the poor represented a genuine advance beyond the prior decade's combination of neglect and outright displacement. Although this plan was configured in such a way as to direct substantial benefits to upper-income groups, there is little evidence that the business community, in spite of its concern for the housing needs of professionals, actively pressured public officials to create a housing program of the magnitude of the Ten-Year Plan. Obviously, economic conditions played a role in the new approach as well as its limits: On the one hand, strong local growth opened new space for policy innovation; on the other hand, policy reform driven by a disparate set of demands by growth leaders and community activists did not depart decisively from preexisting growth priorities or beneficiaries. Yet the development of this initiative clearly represented a moment in which public officials and their strategic political designs (the kinds of factors traditionally accentuated by localist analyses) reemerged as a significant force in policy change. Harking back to earlier periods of New York history—such as when, under the leadership of Robert Moses, the city had placed ambitious housing initiatives at the heart of central-city renewal—the Ten-Year Plan even raised the question as to whether it might become a harbinger of a more corporatist-like local state, one that would more actively guide urban redevelopment and seek to manage its economic and social costs. A more pressing challenge, however, soon overtook the new focus on housing. The Wall Street "meltdown" of October 1987 sent immediate shock waves throughout the city's real-estate economy. By early the following year, corporate retrenchment in the financial sector led to weakening office demand in Manhattan. Office-building construction fell off sharply, co-op sales plummeted, and residential markets in "transitional areas" showed signs of serious weakness.57 The Koch administration responded
50 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
by redoubling efforts to spur its "big-ticket" development projects, such as Worldwide Plaza, a new office complex west of Midtown, and Riverwalk, a Manhattan residential complex that was supposed to be constructed on a platform floating atop the East River. The city's tax-incentive programs, such as ICIP and J-51, expanded disbursements dramatically, and frantic deal making between the administration and developers ensued to push long-simmering projects into action.58 No longer was urban crisis so easily compartmentalized. By the final two years (1988-89) of Koch's third term in office, concerns about forgotten neighborhoods yielded to the more threatening image of a city divided. New economic uncertainties heightened a recognition that the city's decadelong economic recovery, and its spatial patterns of development, had produced increases in poverty, inequality, and racial segregation as well as a persistent decline in city services. A series of brutal, racially motivated attacks in outer-borough areas such as Brooklyn and Queens now drew sustained public outcry. In black and Latino neighborhoods, conflicts between police and residents, exacerbated by the mayor's many insensitive remarks on race issues, seemed to crystallize minority-group political opposition. Resentments by working-class whites in Brooklyn and Queens, many of whom also felt left behind by the Manhattan-centered revival, posed a further challenge to the mayor. The administration's Ten-Year Housing Plan seemed too little too late, as a citywide march in December 1988 drew tens of thousands of demonstrators demanding further public action against homelessness.59 The following year, David Dinkins was elected New York's first African-American mayor. Bringing together a voting bloc consisting of blacks, Hispanics, and liberal whites, the Dinkins victory was attributable in no small measure to strong support from community groups and the city's more progressive municipal employees' unions. Dinkins was not an insurgent figure in the mold of Chicago's Mayor Washington, who had brought to power a group of development planners strongly committed to an equity-centered and neighborhood-oriented agenda. As city clerk and Manhattan borough president, Dinkins had built a reputation as a moderately liberal establishment politician, sympathetic to lower-income and minority concerns but with a cautious personal style. Dinkins's campaign chest had been well stocked by many of the developer contributions long associated with Koch, and among the new mayor's advisers were many policy moderates and former Koch aides.60 Yet, as a candidate, Dinkins had promised to end the racial and political divisiveness of the Koch years, and in the beginning months of the new administration policy makers
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 51
sought to strike a greater balance between market development and community needs. Expectations ran high for a new relationship between city hall and the neighborhoods. The new mayor's first moves appeared to bear out these hopes. Early in his term, Dinkins modified New York's Ten-Year Housing Plan in ways that promised to increase affordabiliry and economic integration, to benefit more homeless individuals, and to rely more on community-based nonprofit housing providers. The mayor's housing commissioner, Felice Michetti, envisioned "a tremendous and growing commitment" to communitybased housing, noting that "y°u can't expect the not-for-profits to assume the burden without also understanding that you have to create a financial foundation for them."61 Many community activists responded with enthusiasm, as slow-moving plans to produce lower-income housing from abandoned properties began to quicken. Despite its caution, the Dinkins administration offered promise of the emergence of local "progressivism." Beginning with the Koch-initiated housing plan, in fact, New York appeared to be moving gradually away from early 1980s-style neoliberalism, which now was clearly overmatched by the problems of the city. Even in Washington, where Republican Party dominance continued, the aggressive confidence of Reaganite antiurbanism seemed to ebb. As early as 1988, The President's National Urban Policy Report had conceded that U.S. economic recovery and reduced federal urban spending would not necessarily help cities with mounting problems. Federal grants-in-aid to state and local governments began to rise after 1990, and, although the major urban emphasis of President George H. Bush and housing secretary Jack Kemp was to revive the Reagan-era idea of enterprise zones, gradual increases in housingagency spending signaled a partial reversal of retrenchment.62 Nationally, as well as locally, the political tide looked to be moving in a new direction. Searching for a Fix Instead, the early 1990s ushered in a period of uncertainty and crisis. The urban regime that had emerged out of fiscal crisis, like the Reagan "revolution," foundered against the limits of its narrow economic and political base. Elites soon responded with new doses of old medicine—harsh fiscal austerity and expanded developmental incentives—that did little to address New York's underlying problems or to develop a broader vision of the road to long-term stability. Out of the city's debilitating neighborhood conflicts, meanwhile, emerged a growing Nimby (not in my backyard) sentiment, one that provided a certain popular base for a reconstructed neoliberal politics. First under Dinkins, then under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani,
52 • Building an Urban Neolibemlism
local leaders relaunched neoliberal growth mechanisms along with an increasingly aggressive set of measures to regulate social behavior and movement in the city. Although these measures did little to lift the city out of market stagnation, they would help prepare the ground for New York's economic boom during the second half of the 1990s. This path to "Giulianism" first began under Giuliani's predecessor. Mayor Dinkins, who had taken office in 1990, inherited a declining local economy that would only worsen as the country slid into recession. If Dinkins's first year began with expanded support for housing and neighborhood-based providers, the following year's severe budgetary pressures reactivated fiscal monitoring agencies as direct arbiters of local spending and policy. After squabbling with Felix Rohatyn, who remained head of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, and with the leaders of the bond-rating agencies, Dinkins submitted to the Financial Control Board's dictates on large-scale spending reductions in exchange for emergency financial assistance.63 During this time, the mayor also began to waver on his campaign promise to reform or eliminate the ICIP tax-incentive program.64 Mounting evidence suggested that these subsidies for development—in the form of property-tax exemptions and abatements that were mostiy for Manhattan office buildings—did not serve as useful inducements, either because they were targeted in areas of strong growth or because the firms that took advantage of the incentives had good reasons to locate there anyway. Yet the city's developers, led by the Real Estate Board of New York, announced that the Dinkins administration's position on ICIPs would be viewed as a litmus test of the mayor's attitudes toward the market and, correspondingly, his future relationship with business. In response, the ICIP program was renewed in early 1992, with the number of projects granted benefits climbing yet again. A freeze on corporate taxes was also declared.65 Meanwhile, severe funding cuts stalled community-based projects and estranged the mayor from crucial sectors of his electoral base. Housing and communitydevelopment spending was reduced, and publicly sponsored housing starts in 1993 fell to almost half their number in 1989, Koch's final year in office.66 Under such conditions, a determinedly progressive administration would have faced an uphill task in retaining its ambitions. From its inception, however, the Dinkins coalition had mobilized a community base behind a leadership core that was heavy with former Koch aides, advised by policy centrists, and funded by a campaign chest well stocked by developer contributions. The candidate's campaign message of "racial healing" was short-term relief to a divided city, but the coalition had not articulated an
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 53
alternative vision of development and community renewal. Early on, the mayor's political response to deteriorating economic conditions and to the accompanying interest-group pressures from the financial and development sectors was, therefore, in the words of one ambivalent supporter, to "demobiliz[e] the coalition that elected him."67 Standing for reelection in 1993, Dinkins was unable to generate the grassroots enthusiasm that had carried him to victory four years earlier, and he was defeated. By that time, the community-oriented elements of New York's development strategy had already been curtailed. Political alternatives had been turned aside, but the city's economic problems were not so easily handled. New York's recession of the early 1990s (the longest and deepest since World War II) provided ample time to ponder the shortcomings of the 1980s recovery. Most glaring was the city's dependence on a real-estate economy linked directly to the financial markets. Vacancy rates in Manhattan office space jumped from roughly 12 percent in 1987 to well over 20 percent in 1992; at the other end of the city's spatial economy, communities such as Central Harlem and East Brooklyn, which had been bypassed by the boom, now experienced new surges in housing abandonment.68 Beyond New York's dependence on a finance and real-estate roller coaster, the city's broader service economy also made it susceptible to underlying, long-term weakness. Aggregate growth in the city's economy, for example, had been smaller than in the United States as a whole (3.8 percent versus 4.1 percent), even during the local boom years (1983-88). New York's unemployment rate, reaching 11 percent by 1992, now also diverged significantly from the national level (8 percent). Perhaps most disturbing, shares of income gains among local residents were becoming markedly skewed, even in relation to U.S. trends that were moving in similar directions.69 This trajectory was shaped, in certain respects, by the needs of the new international economy, which now reinforced the value of New York's historic business functions. As Sassen and others have shown, the growing importance of financial institutions and "advanced producer services" after the 1970s tended to enable traditional centers of banking, securities, and corporate headquarters to become coordinating nodes in the international economy. The most visible manifestation of these functions in New York was the new army of higher-level white-collar employees, working in the city's business districts in securities, banking, law, and advertising.70 Yet there were also economic shifts that did not fit with New York's enhanced image as global city. New York's share of corporate headquarters, for example, which had long seemed to be a primary measure of globalization,
54 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
was in decline.71 Furthermore, although the absolute numbers of the city's managers and professionals did grow, its share of the nation's advanced services employment actually declined between 1978 and 1993—in financial services (from 10.3 to 9.1 percent), in legal services (from 9.5 to 7.6 percent), and in accounting (from 8.5 to 5.0 percent).72 Evidence indicated, then, that a relative decentralization of headquarters and business-services activities to other areas of the United States may have been eroding New York's dominance within the very sector that theorists saw as key to global-city status. A number of major U.S. cities, in fact, now exhibited international linkages, though these were often highly specialized. This tendency suggested that globalization was having effects on local economies in many places, but this dispersal of functions also raised questions as to whether its impact in any one location—even in a world city like New York—might be too easily overstated.73 In the face of New York's daunting economic challenges, the city's corporate leaders struggled unsuccessfully to articulate a vision for the early 1990s that went beyond the austerity and tax-incentive prescriptions of prior decades. The New York City Partnership, a business group founded by David Rockefeller during the earlier fiscal-crisis period (and whose members included the top executives of 150 of the city's largest companies), stepped up to issue a number of policy proposals to move the city forward again. Most prominent was a report that criticized the local planning process, which, as noted earlier, had been devised to facilitate deal making between the mayor's office and developers. Yet projects increasingly experienced lengthy delays because of poor planning (or because of shrewdly targeted resistance from excluded community groups), and the Partnership report suggested scuttling the city's land-use review process entirely.74 Another proposal issued by the Partnership, this time jointly with the New York Chamber of Commerce and Industry, expressed the hope that the city's fiscal problems "may be creating a more receptive climate for privatization"; the report recommended a number of steps to hasten this process along.75 The Partnership also set up a $100 million private investment fund, to be used for "predevelopment costs," such as promoting the pet projects of top business leaders, including a proposed new Central Park restaurant.76 The common thread in these recommendations was enhanced privatesector control over development. Yet it was difficult to see how further movement in this direction would correct the short-term-oriented nexus between government and land developers, which had already oversaturated the Manhattan office district and deepened the city's economic stagnation. In fact, even when viewed from a sympathetic perspective, these pro-
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 55
posals were discouragingly stale. They failed to address any of the city's central long-term problems: the chronic underfunding of basic city services; the inadequacies of tax-incentive programs and other policies to guide a balanced process of urban or regional redevelopment; and the tendency of growing economic inequality and instability to exacerbate the city's social conflicts. Meanwhile, even as New York disbursed hundreds of millions of dollars per year in tax breaks to companies, this global city continued to lose employers to neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut. And, as one urban planner noted at the time, "when firms ultimately do leave, their parting words are that the streets are filthy and the schools are bad."77 If the corporate community responded with tired solutions to the city's economic problems, there was confusion about what, in political terms, might energize a new electoral agenda for the 1990s. To a surprising extent, the answer came out of New York's neighborhoods. The same developmental order that had served to "localize" the city's economic problems also shifted conflicts over land use to the neighborhood level. Community fragmentation, in turn, now propelled an increasingly desperate search for the recipe to "neighborhood stability."78 By the early 1990s, major attention was directed toward the siting of facilities that were unwanted or challenged by segments of the local community. These so-called Nimby conflicts ranged from residential facilities such as jails, shelters, and group homes to sites for waste management, transportation, and equipment. In response to neighborhood resistance, New York in 1991 adopted so-called Fair Share Criteria requiring city agencies to balance service-delivery goals with a more equitable spatial distribution of facilities. In the ensuing implementation, a key provision intended to initiate and support consensus on particularly controversial sitings was rarely invoked, and subsequent assessments questioned whether the measure much altered the locational patterns of undesirable sites.79 Consequently, the perceived failure of Fair Share tended to heighten the defensiveness of neighborhoods. These fears found a voice in the mayoral campaign of Rudolph Giuliani. The Republican standard-bearer, a former federal prosecutor, had first run for mayor in 1989, when intemperate language got him labeled too strident for cosmopolitan New York. Four years later, he competed against Dinkins with a refurbished law-and-order platform that also emphasized middle-class "quality-of-life" issues. Yet his rhetoric remained pungent. During this 1993 campaign, Giuliani depicted a city where children and police officers were being "slaughtered," the streets were "overwhelmed by drug dealers," and criminals "roam unhindered by arrest." Linking together street crime, panhandling, welfare dependence, and poorly run homeless
56 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
shelters, Giuliani contended that the presence of aggressive homeless people on the streets epitomized a loss of "control" over the city. New Yorkers, he contended, should not be "required to be assaulted by menacing individuals." Giuliani promised to put more police on the streets and boost arrests, build more prisons, restrict access to homeless shelters, and require more welfare recipients to work. As Dinkins struggled to energize his own electoral base, Giuliani's message seemed to resonate with swing voters.80 There was little campaign discussion of the city's economic problems. In a bitter contest, in which racially tinged rhetoric played an increasing role in the final weeks, Giuliani defeated Dinkins by a slim margin (about fifty thousand votes) to become New York's first Republican mayor in two decades.81 It soon became clear that the city's economic-development policies, as well as its political rhetoric, would become more aggressive. The Giuliani campaign had not highlighted a broader vision of development, and in addition to public safety the new mayor promised to focus on budget issues and improving city services. Local government under Giuliani nonetheless was marked, from its inception, by efforts to subsidize redevelopment in the Manhattan business districts. This pursuit of land-value escalation in the city core was shorn of some of the secondary concessions to community interests that had been doled out during the late Koch and early Dinkins years (roughly between 1987 and 1991). From the beginning, in fact, the new mayor's planning director went out of his way to signal a clear development agenda: "No one is looking to unravel necessary and appropriate community protections, but there is no question that this is an administration that is sympathetic to the role of development in the economy."82 The administration moved quickly to expand the city's tax-subsidy development programs, giving out a record $348 million in property-tax breaks alone over Giuliani's first eighteen months in office. To assist developers who had overbuilt in the Lower Manhattan financial district, the mayor also proposed an estimated $230 million in exemptions from property and commercial rent taxes in 1994.83 Other development projects began to move forward with significant public subsidies, including a revival of the Times Square area that would eventually make the old red-light district the new center of an expanded Midtown Manhattan business district. The ad hoc subsidy approach, then, was back in full force. Economic recovery and political opportunity had once served to couple this incentivecentered strategy with an ambitious decade-long housing plan, not to mention the tentative expansion of city-community partnerships to further enhance the production of lower-income housing. Now, even by the end of Giuliani's first year in office (1994), New York policies reverted more single-
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 57
mindedly to incentives that furnished public benefits to central-city businesses and upper-income groups, even as the Ten-Year Plan was winding down. Whether this narrowed approach would drive a sustained economic revival was still uncertain. But a new local administration willing to pursue it was firmly in place.
Reinventing Urban Neoliberalism The remaining years of the decade would see a major reformulation of U.S. neoliberalism. National response to economic crisis reestablished, as it had during late 1970s and early 1980s, the conditions for an urban regime centered on corporate-led revival of central-city areas. Yet as national policies in the 1990s spurred capital mobility, and with it another round of interlocal competition for development, the focus this time was on entertainment, tourism, and retail consumption. Federal urban and social policies also played an important role, providing big-city officials with new incentives and tools with which to manage local obstacles to central-city transformation (such as poor people) and granting greater flexibility over how these mechanisms might be used. In this context, New York reemerged as a model city, its local government moving aggressively to meld 1980s-style corporate subsidies and 1990s-style social regulation into a formidable redevelopment machine. Underscoring again the crucial role of government in urban transformation, this most recent phase in New York's renaissance— its extraordinary economic success as well as its failure to address the deepening housing crisis—would highlight in vivid terms the national/local political forces intensifying the polarization of U.S. cities. Public Initiative and the American City National policies set many of the terms for end-of-century urban revival. With Bill Clinton's victory in 1992, economic expansion based on deficit reduction came to be the nation's guiding macroeconomic principle. This strategy soon shaped an array of U.S. policy approaches, from budget, trade, and finance to unemployment, wages, labor markets, and cities.84 Premised on the leading role of Wall Street, the antideficit strategy was coupled with a strong push for free trade that resulted in NAFTA, Clinton's major first-term legislative victory. Slowly, as the stock market lifted and the economy pulled out of recession, growth returned to many parts of the country, and, over time, a more robust expansion would even begin to improve the welfare of many lower-income workers and the poor.85 In the meantime, however, urban spending remained anemic. Budget authority for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) saw only a modest increase during Clinton's first two years in office.86 Yet urban areas that already enjoyed
58 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
economic advantages—in the form of dense concentrations of producer services (New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco), high-technology functions (San Jose, Boston), or export-oriented manufacturing activities (Los Angeles)—did gain early local benefits from the administration's economic agenda to promote finance, trade, and flexible labor markets. Over the course of Clinton's first term, the direct impacts of national policy priorities on cities grew more pronounced. Even before the onset of a new Republican "revolution," Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which provided $39.3 billion to state and local governments over six years, primarily to support prison building and policing. At the end of that year, following the congressional midterm elections, the Republicans' Contract with America, introduced by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, set up a flag of "devolution" under which a dramatic round of federal retrenchment was enacted.87 Although not always urban policy changes per se, a number of further initiatives targeted primarily at the poor furnished city governments with flexible new powers with which to manage their lower-income populations and deteriorated public spaces. The shift from Aid to Families with Dependent Children to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant in 1996, ending the entitlement status of poor relief, mandated work requirements while giving states and localities broad discretion over eligibility, assistance methods, and benefit levels.88 In terms of housing, the survival of a number of federal programs, and even of the federal housing department itself, was soon put on the block. Faced with these threats, the Clinton administration sought to "reinvent" the agency, developing national/local blueprints to transform public housing through the demolition of low-income projects and the conversion of federal assistance into rental and homeowner subsidies for market housing.89 Although this reinvention saved HUD, it did not protect the agency from severe budget cuts; authorizations decreased from $26.3 billion in 1994 to $16.1 billion by 1997.90 When Congress also froze the issuing of new Section 8 vouchers, a key rental subsidy, federal housing policy set the stage for a ragged displacement of inner-city residents under the antiseptic banner of "deconcentrating the poor." Cities entered the mid-1990s competitions for mobile actors and assets saddled with expensive social problems and local tax bases still depleted by recession. While increased competition seemed to become a watchword of entrepreneurial localities in many parts of the world, the distinctively American character of interlocal rivalries was especially vivid in the race to cultivate or attract entertainment-related developments, such as casinos, tourist attractions, and sports franchises. Teams and stadiums, now at the center of most local growth strategies, were fed sizable state and local sub.
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 59
sidies despite their minuscule economic contributions to employment growth or public revenues.91 Unquestioned pursuit of these downtown "anchors" tended, in turn, to crowd out other development options, as cities found themselves head-to-head in a rivalry to become increasingly generic tourist, convention, and entertainment destinations. To compete for visitors, each U.S. city seemed compelled to offer a similar package of amenities that became, over time, the city itself. New York's ability to thrive in this economic environment was predestined in part by simple good fortune. The growing centrality of financial markets, enhanced by Clintonomics, would make Wall Street a spectacular engine of late-1990s growth. But New York also competed effectively in the race to become, as political scientist Larry Bennett has put it, the "ascendant city of leisure."92 Enlisting entertainment companies such as Disney to remake the central city as a site of middle-class consumption, local officials learned to cultivate as a development tool their new government capacities to regulate public life. Turning away from ambitious housing efforts, and building on the key Clinton/Gingrich initiatives, the Giuliani administration's innovation would be to funnel its authority through a handful of policy areas—crime, welfare, homelessness—in which the imposition of social control would itself help fuel the development of an economically and racially divided city. Generous tax subsidies for the Manhattan business districts were the main thrust of Giuliani's first development moves. Beyond the Wall Street area, a prime new territory for business growth surrounded Times Square on Manhattan's West Side. Unfulfilled plans from the 1980s had envisioned replacing the decaying entertainment district with office towers, but redevelopment efforts in the fallow economy of the early 1990s became more modest. Local officials, led by public-sector entities such as the FortySecond Street Redevelopment Project (a subsidiary of the state of New York's Empire State Development Corporation), proceeded with an "interim plan." Seeking to piece together a retail redevelopment strategy, this project moved incrementally to renovate theaters and storefront commercial spaces for music stores and clothing outlets. Major corporations began to show interest in the area as economic growth resumed. Spurred by a series of "partnerships" between public subsidies and entertainment outlets owned by corporate giants—the Disney Corporation alone received $26 million in low-interest loan subsidies simply to redevelop a single theater— the Times Square/Forty-Second Street district soon turned into the fastestgrowing and most visited area of the city. By the late 1990s, in fact, area land became so valuable that it permitted only office-tower projects after all.93 Among these structures were flagship buildings for some of the era's
60 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
largest media and entertainment empires. The West Side also became the focus of New York's unusual sports-franchise competitions with itself, culminating in an unsuccessful effort to lure the Yankees from the Bronx.94 The economic success of projects like Times Square did not rest only on tax incentives, subsidies, and ad hoc partnerships. Over time, new forms of social regulation became key components of the city's growth strategy. At the center of this approach was the administration's aggressive effort to combat crime. Between 1993 and 1997, New York reported a 60 percent drop in murder and nonnegligent homicide, as well as dramatic declines in robbery, burglary, and overall felony complaints. There was considerable debate over which elements (if any) of New York's policing approach were actually responsible for the decreases, particularly as these rates began to fall in other cities.95 Whether high numbers of civil-rights violations were an acceptable price for aggressive crime busting was also an ongoing concern, fueled by the mayor's penchant for ridiculing even mild criticisms of police performance. Less often recognized was the extent to which policing and public safety in New York had become an integral component of the city's economic development strategy. "Reclaiming the open spaces of New York" was the centerpiece of the administration's "zero-tolerance" policing campaign, one that relied on new information technologies (the so-called CompStat system), as well as highly aggressive street-level policing, especially mass arrests for minor legal infractions.96 Through a prohibition of panhandling and certain kinds of idling in parks, subways, and streets, city authorities (as well as the private security forces operated by businessfinanced "partnership" organizations) made retailers feel more secure, reduced the social inconveniences of daily life for many residents and shoppers, and helped cultivate the reassuring image of a city under control. These actions also tended to push the poor and the homeless (as well as the unlicensed and the merely unconventional) out of the urban places and corridors occupied by wealthy and middle-class groups. Other measures, such as the prohibition of political rallies and "unauthorized" press conferences near City Hall, made public protest more difficult. The city's welfare program became another useful tool in this broader pursuit of development, though it did not start out that way. Beginning as a triage-like effort to purge the welfare rolls, the city's workfare initiative, called the Work Experience Program (WEP), evolved into a government program for the provision and regulation of low-wage, flexible laborers. Given new fuel by federal welfare reform, New York trimmed its caseload nearly in half, from 1.16 million in 1995 to six hundred thousand in the year 2000.97 Evidence suggested that workfare for most clients was not leading to full-
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 61
time jobs in the private sector, but the welfare department's Business Link program did provide significant short-term benefits to businesses: those that hired a welfare recipient for at least three months qualified for thousands of dollars in wage subsidies and tax credits. A number of New York's largest firms took advantage of the program.98 Because of TANF's flexibility, New York was able to rely on punitive sanctions to shrink its publicassistance pool; neither college enrollment nor a lack of child care freed recipients from the work requirement. Over time, the city built a veritable army of minimum- and subminimum-wage WEP workers to clean up the city's reclaimed streets and parks. Community nonprofit organizations with city government contracts protested the low wages of WEP workers, but when the mayor's office threatened to cut off their funding, the protest fizzled." Only unfavorable rulings by the courts restrained the city of New York from mandating near-universal workfare participation for welfare recipients (well in excess of the numbers required by federal law), including homeless-shelter residents as well as the physically and mentally disabled. As development successes mounted, many of New York's challenges began to take on a different shape. This was particularly so in the area of housing, where the problems were daunting and the local strategy of response more complicated. The strong revival of New York's real-estate market eased the city's recurrent plagues of housing abandonment, yet intensified in the process its long-standing problems with affordability. Despite the fears of neighborhood advocates, the arrival of the Giuliani administration had brought no immediate dismantling of the city's community-based housing programs.100 Yet capital spending on housing fell during each year of Giuliani's first term in office, and the end of the city's ten-year program in 1996 left behind a major gap.101 As land values climbed, and as a series of actions by state and city government weakened New York's rent regulations, growing numbers of neighborhoods were upscaled and longtime residents found themselves priced out. New York's substantial nonmarket housing system also experienced strain. For public housing as well as the city's own extensive stock of owner-abandoned housing, federal reductions in subsidies greatly increased operating expenses and, consequently, the need for self-financing. Now that upscale development was butting up against deteriorated slum areas containing high concentrations of public housing, these federal measures provided local authorities with incentives for privatization and demolition. Yet the relatively decent quality of much of New York's public housing stock, as well as the strength of tenant pressure, put the brakes on such efforts.102 Tenant pressure also fought off efforts to repeal the city's
62 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
system of rent regulation. But in the face of powerful economic and policy pressures, housing costs in much of the city escalated at a rapid pace. Revival of the city in the 1990s, therefore, rested on an expanded role for public authorities. Partnerships with market investors were not only to build projects but to reconstruct the city itself—its reputation and reality— as a safe, profitable, and heavily patrolled space for redevelopment. Central to this endeavor were coercive and displacing actions by governmental agencies toward urban residents, particularly those who were poor. Through policy initiatives in policing, welfare, and housing, New York subordinated entire areas of government activity to the task of clearing away the social obstacles to the most immediately profitable forms of economic growth. Mayor Giuliani earned much of the credit for these innovations, not merely because of local economic prosperity but because politics and government, indeed, had played an important role in so thoroughly transforming the city's public image. Republican Senator John McCain paid political tribute to the mayor during a 1998 visit: I think that there's tens of millions of Americans who visit New York every year, and the overwhelming majority of them are impressed at the dramatic changes that have taken place under his stewardship. It's hard for them to believe they can walk through Central Park, that there's no squeegee people and that practically everywhere you look, there's the presence of law enforcement.103
Of course, this symbolic rehabilitation of mayor and metropolis alike would reach epic proportions following the terror attacks of 2001. Yet its basic contours were firmly established well before that moment of crisis. By reputation unruly and cosmopolitan to a fault, New York—perhaps the least American of U.S. cities—already had become in image a model American city. Surveying Prosperity, Watching the Numbers A final look at New York's socioeconomic profile may help characterize the city's broader balance sheet. It may also clarify, after a volatile quarter century of gains and reversals, the role of a neoliberal urban regime in reshaping the "state of the city." As record numbers of people ushered in the year 2000 in Times Square (and many millions more watched the scene on TV), New York seemed to bask in the warm glow of its booming economy, white-hot realestate market, and record local-government surpluses. In many respects, conditions in the city could not have been more different now from the dif-
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 63
ficult days of the mid-1970s. Growth rates in the city's economy were projected to climb as high as 6 percent, the largest in decades.104 Soaring employment growth in the service sector, fueled by job increases in business services, was finally helping to diminish the city's high unemployment rate to its lowest level since the 1980s. Wall Street enjoyed profits of $16.3 billion in 1999, up more than one third from the record of $12.2 billion registered two years earlier.105 The commercial real-estate market was also operating at record levels, driven in part by leasing activity from the high-flying Internet, new-media, and high-technology firms in the business-service sector. All this market activity, meanwhile, pointed to a city of New York budget surplus that was projected to be almost $3 billion for fiscal year 2000.106 In terms of population growth, New York also looked much healthier than during the decade of 1970s, when the city had lost more than 10 percent of its residents. After a 3.5 percent increase during the 1980s, census data showed a much larger gain of 9.4 percent over the course of the 1990s (though a portion of this increase seems to have been the result of a more thorough count).107 Most of the population influx was composed of immigrants. Yet New York's moment of economic success also masked a host of problems. Certain prospects for cities, including global cities, had not changed over the course of the quarter century or, indeed, had grown more troubling. In important ways, these prospects were related not to international tendencies per se but to governmental and political responses to broader economic challenges. The debilitating conditions faced by U.S. cities—high vulnerability to the exit of mobile actors, low levels of federal assistance, heavy dependence on revenues generated by the land economy— continued to encourage short-term-oriented growth strategies that narrowed the economic base of cities. New York reached the end of the 1990s, in fact, much more dependent on Wall Street than it had been even ten years earlier. Representing only 5 percent of city employment, the securities industry accounted remarkably for more than half (56 percent) of the increase in aggregate real earnings between 1992 and 1997.108 After 1997, business services also posted significant wage gains, though subsequent downturns in computer-related industries were likely to make those gains short-lived.109 As Wall Street entered a bear market at the end of the decade, economic signs for the city began to grow much more ominous. Overall, the New York economy of the 1990s became less diversified than its 1980s version, itself hardly a model of balanced growth. Globally oriented analyses tended to focus, with considerable justification, on the alarming divergence between New York's "export" sector—which generated
64 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
a disproportionate share of aggregate earnings (but relatively few jobs)— and its "local" sector full of lower-paying jobs.110 It was also apparent, however, that the job and earnings base of the economy was narrowing within both of these sectors. The city was losing positions in higher-wage and lower-wage categories, as well as in employment categories in between, suggesting a local economic strategy that was not only favoring alreadyadvantaged groups but that was also generally ineffective over the long term. Given these trends in employment and income, it was hardly surprising that economic inequality in New York City grew dramatically during the 1990s.111 What may be more disturbing is that the reinforcing impacts of national and local government policies were partly to blame. Clinton-era federal policies, as we saw earlier, spurred the financial economy and intercity rivalries while bringing federal expenditures down in most areas, including education, income security, and housing. New York initiatives intensified many of the impacts of those federal measures. Implementation of "work first" welfare policies actively discouraged employment strategies oriented around education and training. Failure to bring stability or significant reinvestment to the city's neglected public schools also made it difficult to raise the skill levels of younger New Yorkers at the bottom of the widening income gap. Municipal budget surpluses were diverted into tax cuts rather than into badly needed infrastructure projects that might have generated useful employment and workforce development. And local tax policies also made their mark more directly. After 1994, the local tax burden of the working poor actually increased, even as low-income taxpayers saw their income shares decline. In fact, because of the city's tax code, nearly a hundred thousand households who were poor enough to have had no state or federal income-tax liability at all nevertheless were forced to pay income taxes to the city of New York.112 Housing, more than ever, was New York's biggest Achilles' heel. Shifts in the city's income structure, coupled with the booming land economy, created growing affordability problems for New York's lower-income residents. Based on the Census Bureau's Housing and Vacancy Surveys, more than five hundred thousand households (nearly one-fifth of all city households) were now paying more than half of their incomes for housing; another four hundred thousand households paid rents in excess of 30 percent of their incomes.113 The vast majority of households experiencing cost pressures lived in rent-regulated housing in the market sector. Many of the city's poorest households, who lived in nonmarket structures (public housing, in rem housing, or community-based housing), generally experienced lower housing costs. Yet the threats to this sector also made the circumstances for
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 65
residents increasingly insecure. In fact, housing affordability was not simply a problem for the poor but, increasingly, for working-class and moderateincome families as well. Even for two-earner households, the wages of the fastest-growing occupations now were too low (under $40,000) to be able to provide for housing access to the New York City region.114 Meanwhile, New York was losing "middle-class" households (those earning between 85 and 200 percent of size-adjusted area median income, that is, between $42,000 and $100,000 per year), who were attracted by more affordable housing in the metropolitan suburbs. Would the suburbanizing middle class soon be taking their jobs with them?115 And as the city's housing prices continued to climb and immigrant enclaves expanded in other U.S. metropolitan areas, would New York also lose its immigrants, the recent engine of its population growth? By the end of the year 2000, then, unprecedented growth and prosperity coexisted uneasily with economic fragility and housing crisis. Even barring the unexpected, long-term challenges loomed on the horizon. Perhaps more disturbing than the housing crisis faced by New York was the slowness of governmental authorities to address it. Researchers and community organizations continued to call for a new capital-budget housingproduction plan; one broadly supported proposal called for $10 billion in capital spending over ten years, and specified potential sources of funding.116 In response, Mayor Giuliani finally announced, in early 2001, a proposal to spend $600 million over four years to produce low- and moderateincome housing, a much smaller commitment and a fraction of the amount that had been devoted to Koch's Ten-Year Plan.117 Even at the time, it was unclear whether this proposal would get off the ground as New York's economy, and tax revenues, began to falter. But the more fundamental obstacles were not simply fiscal but political. Despite a combination of federal and municipal budget surpluses that presented a multiyear window of opportunity for significantly expanded government support, priorities in late-1990s Washington and New York were directed elsewhere. Taken as a whole, then, the various elements of New York's second rebirth in as many decades reflected the ebb and flow of larger economic forces as well as patterns of action by national and local government. International economic integration over the final quarter of the twentieth century created a new economic centrality for financial markets, for information technologies, and for the networks of trade and capital flows that crossed traditional borders. The broad outlines of a new economic order with certain common trends (corporate concentration, decentralized production, flexible labor markets) became clearly visible, and their impacts on a city
66 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
economy with strong international linkages—from Wall Street to new immigrants—were considerable. Yet government power continued to mediate those forces in important respects, and we have seen this to be the case even in a global city like New York. Initiated in response to a stagnating national economy, Clinton-era economic and social policies played a key role in establishing new conditions for urban redevelopment. A Wall Streetoriented economic strategy spurred a financialized central-city revival. New domestic initiatives encouraged punitive strategies of social regulation. Both national and local strategies tended to accentuate remarkable economic gains: core areas revived, businesses thrived, and urban populations grew. These strategies also displaced older, poorer communities that lay in the paths of redevelopment, often marginalizing the populations that were so successfully dispersed. If economic circumstances often set the conditions for development, government itself weakened public capacities to manage change in constructive ways.
National/Local New York New York, like many U.S. cities today, is more prosperous than it was twentyfive years ago. It is also more unequal. These patterns remain true even in the wake of the attacks of September 11. Probably more directly than in most American cities, longer-term changes in New York reflect the impacts of an international economy that prizes the city's financial and businessservices sector, along with a host of flexible low-wage supporting functions. It is increasingly clear, however, that New York's global role does not fully account for recent city trends. Key indicators of inequality and poverty, as well as the ways in which forms of disadvantage are spatialized within the metropolis, resemble patterns in other major U.S. cities more than those in Paris, Amsterdam, or Tokyo.118 Beyond the evidence based on economic and spatial outcomes, processes of urban redevelopment in U.S. cities have often differed from those in Continental Europe and Japan, where state agencies do not disregard social welfare or stable development in pursuit of short-term economic stimulus.119 How cities pursue economic and social well-being, in other words, is related to historic paths of development, as well as to the different responses that countries fashioned to post-1960s shifts in the international economy. This range of response suggests that the notion of a neoliberal national environment—one that is constructed by policies that promote zero-sum interlocal competition, ad hoc public subsidy for upper-income development projects, and highly constricted economic opportunity for the poor—remains central to understanding the problems of cities in the United States. These cities, even global cities such
Building an Urban Neoliberalism • 67
as New York, reflect the singular tendencies of American politics and the economic impacts of international integration. This account has pitched itself against a strict globalist interpretation of the late-twentieth-century revival of New York by emphasizing the role of public policy at both national and local levels. Without dismissing the significance of New York's international linkages, I have argued that, at key moments in time, governmental response to crisis and opportunity exerted important influence over how the city changed. As part of this response, the relationship between national and local policies established certain institutional foundations for the development of neoliberal globalization; in the process, this relationship also accentuated inequality and economic hardship for many New York City residents. Urban neoliberalism first emerged out of the New York fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, a pivotal moment that helped to shape a national response to the deepening economic problems of the city. Reaganism, in turn, reinforced a narrow New York growth strategy, often pitting local government against the city's lower-income residents. Despite the widespread dominance of this regime in 1980s urban America, its inability to generate broadly shared economic benefits prodded New York (and a number of cities) to press beyond trickle-down, trickle-out prescriptions. This departure proved to be short-lived, however, no match for a corporate-dominated politics unable to move beyond deregulation and short-term stimulus. It was also no match for a Nimby upsurge whose political themes (such as the need for coercive social control) would become central to a reconstructed neoliberalism. Following the advent of Clintonomics and Republican-inspired domestic policy measures, the national elements of a refurbished regime were resolutely in place. Such a regime, developed in heightened form in Giuliani's New York, fused economic deregulation and social control to guide a partial remaking of the city for the affluent. In this way, a sequence of national and local developments over the course of a quarter century suggests how policies and political processes come to shape a global city. If globalist approaches can overemphasize the unmediated impacts of the international economy on cities, localist frameworks often fail to address the dynamic interplay between national and local politics. Focusing directly on this fluid relationship clarifies how, at certain moments, national and local actors may become (for better or for worse) agents of urban innovation. By the same token, an examination of this interplay over the span of several decades makes visible a certain reinforcing continuity—a debilitating logic—to the way that U.S. governmental policies relate to the city. In this sense, studies that imply distinct local and national policy spheres
68 • Building an Urban Neoliberalism
(such as Paul Peterson's City Limits) are also somewhat misguided.120 Overemphasis on local policies and coalitions, or on separate local and national arenas, elides a fundamental political reality: urban regimes—the durable patterns of interaction between government and economic actors that shape urban development—are not local but national/local in nature. This point begins to suggest the scope of change that might be needed to reclaim the city. Discussion of constructive national/local strategies is deferred to chapter 5. In the meantime, the next two chapters investigate political response to economic change at quite different urban scales, shifting the focus of this study to often hidden public and community actors.
3
Public Action Gentrification and the Lower East Side
In the course of New York's late-twentieth-century economic ascent, nothing was more dramatic than the changes experienced by so many of its neighborhoods. From the 1970s revival of Manhattan's faded middle-class areas to the more recent upscaling of working-class districts in Brooklyn and Queens, neighborhood gentrification was no longer seen as anomalous or uncertain but as a core dynamic of urban life, practically inevitable. Manhattan's Lower East Side stands as an especially striking example of gentrification, both in the startling character of its onset and in the dramatic transformation that ensued. For most of the century, this once storied immigrant ghetto had been an area in decline. In 1973, urban planners Harry Schwartz and Peter Abeles proclaimed (in their generally insightful community study Planning for the Lower East Side) that the "Lower East Side is the only Manhattan neighborhood below East Harlem that is committed to housing the poor. It has played this role for the last century, and strong trends indicate that it will continue to do so."1 Within a decade of the study's publication, the sales prices of many crumbling Lower East Side tenement buildings had jumped from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and by the end of the 1990s transactions in the millions were becoming commonplace. As land values and rents climbed upward, the area's working-class and lower-income residents—Puerto Ricans, Chinese-Americans, aging European immigrants, and African-Americans— seemed to be increasingly replaced by young singles and professionals. Neighborhood ways of life based on immigrant social ties gave way, first, to an edgy alternative-community scene and then, increasingly, to a trendy extension of the Manhattan entertainment economy geared toward consumption activities for the young and affluent. By the year 2000, much of 69
70 • Public Action
the Lower East Side was clearly no longer the same community as that of a generation earlier, even though surprising numbers of lower-income people continued to live there.2 Indeed, with rental apartments priced at two to three thousand dollars per month and condominiums in old Orchard Street tenements selling for well over half a million dollars, available housing was no longer affordable to the middle class. Perhaps because this kind of neighborhood transformation ceases to amaze, public discussion over whether gentrification is good or bad has progressed little over the years.3 Supporters continue to point out, with considerable justification, that declining areas need reinvestment and new residents. Drawing on the insights of urban-ecology perspectives in sociology, these supporters also observe that consumer housing choices and urban land markets influence how neighborhoods change.4 Gentrification, in this view, is caused primarily by the recent preferences of middle-class people to live in cities, and this "reurbanization," in turn, has benefited cities in many ways, from strengthened tax bases to enhanced amenities. Yet supporters also tend to invoke a renewal stereotype—one in which the arrival of new residents is expected to "lift up" the area, including its longtime lower-income residents. This optimistic scenario, even when it is not condescending to the poor, fails to confront the realities of neighborhood change in a rapidly escalating urban real-estate market. Such a stereotype ignores, as well, the fact that gentrification is not so much breaking down the economic and racial segregation of the U.S. metropolis as remapping it.5 By contrast, critics of gentrification assert that the economic pressures accompanying neighborhood reinvestment and in-migration inevitably drive out, or price out, current occupants. Often relying on critical politicaleconomy approaches to urban change, this perspective tends to see the case of the Lower East Side as an especially striking example: even here, where community groups mobilized to resist residential displacement, the economic forces at work proved to be too strong.6 In this way, gentrification in the Lower East Side, as elsewhere, can be seen to enact a spatial restructuring of urban land linked to changes in the global capitalist economy.7 As corporate downtowns continue to expand, the displaced populations of the old inner city are therefore inevitably pushed farther and farther to the margins of the city. Political-economy approaches, more convincingly than urban ecology, situate neighborhood revitalization within structural economic changes that have far-reaching implications for the spatial dynamics of the city. In the process, these critical perspectives become significantly more attentive to the social costs incurred by market-oriented urban revival. Despite these
Public Action • 71
different positions, however, in one respect observers often seem to agree: gentrification is an economic process, and the "nature" of gentrification— benign or malign—is largely inherent in its economic logic. This is not to conflate the two traditions, or to suggest that researchers using either approach simply disregard noneconomic characteristics.8 Urban ecology, for example, has long seen patterns of settlement and land-use change as resulting from complex combinations of demographic, market, and spatial factors. Several important studies in this tradition emphasize the potential capacities of a range of social groups, from corporate institutions to residents' associations, to influence specific instances of neighborhood transition.9 Research in this tradition does not ignore public-sector actors either, but it does view them as secondary or largely neutral brokers of neighborhood change. Public officials themselves also tend to echo this view of their own role, at least when there is blame at stake. In the midst of conflicts over the Lower East Side, for instance, one city planning official contended: "What I hear being implied is that public action is pushing people out. Public action is not—the city has no control over the private market."10 Yet "public action," even when construed in the narrowest sense as local government activity, does have considerable influence over the market. Public policy can strengthen or weaken economic forces. It can seek to distribute the benefits of market growth broadly or narrowly. It can use the tools and resources of government—from tax incentives, zoning regulations, landuse controls, and spending priorities to the ownership of land and housing stock—to encourage investment in certain districts and discourage activity in others. It can support the efforts of residents to stabilize their neighborhoods, or it can accelerate destructive changes already in motion. Thus, though there is no question that economic forces are often powerful, observers and participants alike often underappreciate the role of government and public policies in shaping the ecology of neighborhood change. Failure to recognize this public role, moreover, can obscure the ways in which quite narrow conceptions of revitalization and community may influence official courses of action. Certain ideological premises—for instance, that corporate developers and wealthy gentrifiers constitute the sources of all meaningful investment opportunities in reviving neighborhoods—tend to set the stage for a governmental approach that sees longtime residents and community groups as obstacles to be pushed out of the way. Studies from a political-economy perspective, for their part, do tend to recognize the importance of the state. In this tradition, government agencies are frequently theorized as significant supporters or facilitators of a class-based restructuring of urban space.11 To the extent that state interest
72 • Public Action
are seen as objectively linked to dominant economic agendas, however, such studies discourage empirical attentiveness to how governmental capacities and policies at the neighborhood level may vary over time and place. This elastic scope for public action is not always highly visible. In fact, local governments in the United States frequently encourage gentrification to proceed—all things being equal—as fast and as far as it can, a tendency that gives rise to the perception that the local state is structurally predisposed to maximizing land values and displacing the poor. But all things are not always equal. Depending on the circumstances, local-government efforts to encourage gentrification may be complicated by other concerns, such as the rising costs of local housing, the political ramifications of increased homelessness, the strength of neighborhood-based resistance, or the emergence of opportunities for community partnership. It is also possible, as ecological approaches have suggested, for different resettlement currents or transitions to collide in a neighborhood area; in these instances, the inherent potential for multiple futures may further enhance the leverage of public actors. Of course, structural constraints do shape the landuse strategies of public officials, and there are strong incentives to favor more powerful economic actors. But by making policy choices within a shifting scope for meaningful action, government officials can and do influence, for better and for worse, how gentrification evolves and the kinds of impacts it has. This chapter examines neighborhood change in the globalizing city. Drawing from political-economy approaches as well as urban ecology, it analyzes particular strategies of public action that have often undergirded, and sometimes complicated, processes of neighborhood gentrification. Earlier sections of this study elaborated the concept of primitive globalization—a process whereby state policies spur short-term-oriented and destructive forms of economic development—in order to understand the importance of a national/local policy regime in shaping the transformation of New York. Here the focus narrows to the relationship between city and neighborhood. By examining the evolution of local policy priorities in terms of their impacts on New York's Lower East Side during the final decades of the twentieth century, this section of the study attempts to comprehend the conditions for public action to stabilize neighborhood transition as well as how local authorities may take advantage of those opportunities. This investigation draws upon a range of sources (including census data, community-board archives, interviews, and program analyses) to track policies and neighborhood change over the course of two and a half decades. During the 1970s, New York's policies were guided by a simplistic dualcity vision that tended, by emphasizing strategies such as planned shrink-
Public Action • 73
age and triage, to exacerbate economic polarization among local residents. Yet the neighborhood impacts of those policies were more spatially differentiated than is often recognized. In the Lower East Side, these measures served to strengthen three different ecological processes (gentrification in a young white bohemia, abandonment in a Puerto Rican barrio, and residential succession in a Chinese immigrant enclave) located in three distinct neighborhood areas. Along with complicating the spatial terrain of the community, this kind of public action served to reposition city government itself—as property owner, planner, and development partner—at the center of subsequent processes of neighborhood change. Public-sector initiatives tried, for much of the 1980s, to deploy this leverage to promote a highly destabilizing kind of gentrification. Yet a combination of opportunity and pressure led local officials eventually to begin to pursue a more balanced approach, one that offered greater promise of preserving the rich ecology of the Lower East Side community. By tracing the emergence of such a strategy as well as the reasons for its subsequent abandonment, this account investigates gentrification not as a structural logic but as a complex, potentially malleable set of neighborhood transitions in which local policies do influence economic change. Yet public priorities also ensured that, in the case of the Lower East Side, fewer opportunities were seized than were squandered. Planned shrinkage and triage, ad hoc slum clearance, privatization of public housing resources—these recurring approaches to neighborhood renewal centered on dislodging traditional residents and preparing the ground for an upscale future, making this Lower East Side story something of a cautionary tale.12 By focusing on the power of government actions to exacerbate destructive economic changes, the following account investigates how gentrification may come to operate as an instance of primitive globalization at the neighborhood level.
Untangling the Roots of Gentrification Case studies of neighborhood revitalization traditionally begin by locating the moment of "onset," a point in time when decline first gives way to signs of revival. This analytical operation tends to involve a kind of search for immediate origins—either the first arrival of in-movers or the beginnings of reinvestment—followed by the tracking of a fairly standard sequence of economic stages as neighborhood conditions evolve. Although most researchers recognize that larger urban processes play an important role in neighborhood evolution, this neighborhood-level approach is used to identify local agents and mechanisms of change as well as to pinpoint early moments in which policy intervention might be effective. This search for
74 • Public Action
origins seems to be justified by the fact that, after onset, the general progression of renewal in a given neighborhood often is, indeed, somewhat predictable and apparently self-reinforcing. It is easy to extrapolate from this kind of analysis, however, the implication that economic globalization or "the market" governs the sequential unfolding of a revitalization or gentrification process, relegating politics or government action to the minor role of subsequent or exogenous intervention. Yet neighborhood change takes place within contexts of urban restructuring in which economic and political processes are deeply and variously entwined. Many of the different ways these processes have been interwoven are visible, in fact, over the long history of the Lower East Side, where they led to quite disparate episodes of neighborhood revival. Nineteenth-century slum initiatives, for example, responding to public fears of contagion and disorder, tended to pursue tenement reform as the means for community renewal within the European-immigrant Lower East Side. As city-building visions and governmental capacities expanded during the Progressive Era, more sweeping "slum clearance" conceptions came to guide the destruction of thousands of area tenements—and thus the displacement of thousands of Jewish and Italian immigrant families— to make way for new bridges linking Manhattan to the rest of the city.13 Elite developers and social reformers took slum clearance in a new direction in the 1920s. Their loftier revival schemes for the Lower East Side, represented by alluring sketches of Bauhaus-style residential complexes and yacht basins along the East River, nevertheless came to naught in the face of government incapacity and then the onset of Depression.14 New Deal programs of the 1930s then jump-started slum-clearance projects of a quite different nature. Governmental agencies sponsored the construction of large-scale public-housing projects to replace vast tracts of Lower East Side tenements near the waterfront.15 After World War II, city and state administrators launched a new kind of public-private initiative to bring more upscale development to the area. These urban-renewal projects, underwritten by the federal Title I program or by limited-dividend corporations sponsored by local unions, cleared and redeveloped the Lower East Side's Grand Street area for middle-income residents.16 These projects, in turn, ground to a halt at the end of the 1950s, defeated by community organizations opposed to displacement. Meanwhile, new communities of Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Ukrainians, and young whites—the result of unplanned population movements—also arrived.17 These groups, joining (and slowly replacing) the area's aging Jewish and Italian residents, readapted the tenement district to suit their needs and pressed forward their own claims for expanded housing.
Public Action • 75
Even this thumbnail historical sketch is enough to suggest the insufficiency of market-centered explanations of earlier revivals in the Lower East Side. Public visions of renewal have strongly shaped the history of the community, even as the particular roles taken by government and other actors have varied significantly within each episode. Changing urban conditions, government capacities, and political pressures have also influenced the ability of various development actors to realize their ambitions. This is not to ignore the economic forces that often establish the primary directions of neighborhood change, nor to underestimate the tendency of governmental action to operate in favor of local elites. Yet this schematic chronology of renewal does suggest that more recent episodes of neighborhood transition in the Lower East Side might also be reexamined as processes of revival in which public action has occupied a central but shifting role. Beginning in the 1970s, New York developed (as observed in the preceding chapter) new conceptions of "planned shrinkage" and "triage" that served to reconfigure the relationship of local government to the city. These new public priorities shaped, much as notions of slum clearance did in earlier eras, the kinds of neighborhood changes that were set in motion by the restructuring of the city. By examining these neighborhood impacts more closely, in fact, it will be possible to see how the policy measures of the fiscal-crisis period served to intensify three distinct ecological processes in the Lower East Side area: gentrification, neighborhood abandonment, and immigrant-enclave expansion. Far from being the straightforward expression of an economic logic, then, early neighborhood-level conditions in the area suggest a variegated picture in which the redirection of public priorities exacerbated spatial divisions within the city while also propelling more complicated ecological currents than might be expected from notions of revival and decline. The decade of the 1970s beset the Lower East Side with confusing whirlwinds of change. Large numbers of residents moved out while new groups arrived; many property owners seemed to bail out and then bid back in again; certain blocks were renovated even as others were being burned down. To unravel this complex web of neighborhood changes, it is useful to begin by focusing on how the larger crisis in New York City ushered in a transformation in local government's relationship to economic development. As the preceding chapter explored in detail, a national/local alliance assembled to rescue the city not only sought to restore fiscal solvency but to do so in a fashion that would promote and sustain revival of the corporate center. In the process, urban leaders invoked conceptions such as planned shrinkage in order to rationalize the withdrawal of public services from certain declining areas as somehow vital to the economic rebirth of the city. This dual-city approach to policy—one that used a narrow calculus to
76 • Public Action
determine which areas of the city remained of economic value—was reflected in a redirection of public-sector development initiatives. Thus, an array of new tax incentives sought to stimulate land values and rebuilding in central business districts and adjacent residential areas. At the same time, crisis-period austerity budgets brought about significant cutbacks in the kinds of social-welfare expenditures, as well as in "safety services" such as fire and police, that remained critical to poor neighborhoods already teetering on the verge of collapse.18 Although these public measures were taken partly in response to economic trends that significantly predated the emergence of fiscal crisis, the policy initiatives and budgetary priorities of the mid-1970s served to accelerate the destructive impacts of changes at the neighborhood level. These priorities also intensified the unevenness of the city's economic and spatial transformation, fueling gentrification in the valued areas near the corporate business centers while exacerbating decline and collapse in lower-income, minority neighborhoods. This approach helps untangle what otherwise appears to be a chaotic set of neighborhood changes in the Lower East Side during the 1970s. First, a revival in core precincts of the Manhattan real-estate market, spurred by tax-incentive programs, stimulated land values in surrounding residential and commercial areas (such as Greenwich Village, SoHo, and Murray Hill) and encouraged an accelerated in-migration of young, white gentrifiers into the northern tracts of the Lower East Side (see map, p. 78). In this East Village area, the counterculture boulevard of St. Mark's Place became the corridor for the spread of young residents into this neighborhood of aging Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and Italians. In retrospect, it is clear that what researchers see as early-stage signs of gentrification already had been visible in the East Village long before; nonconformists and artists began to settle there, in fact, early in the post-World War II era. Real-estate observers reported short-lived market surges by the beginning of the 1960s, well before the area became a hippie destination later in the decade.19 Yet it was the economic and political reinvestment in New York's core business district during the second half of the 1970s that put real muscle behind renewal in the East Village. Spatial analysis of the city's new tax-incentive programs, such as the 42la and J-51 initiatives, shows that their use was first concentrated near the Midtown area, then spread outward to nearby neighborhoods. By 1980 developers were converting or upgrading more than 3,700 East Village housing units to higher-income use with the help of J-51 subsidies.20 Renewed interest in the area's property market was also reflected in the significant incidence of "redemption," a process whereby owners whose properties had been seized by the city of New York for tax delinquency
Public Action • 77
could easily reacquire them, often merely by promising to pay up back taxes at a later date. By examining the spatial distribution of redemptions in the Lower East Side, we can see how city authorities' willingness to forgive tax arrears helped stimulate renewed market interest in the northwestern areas of the community (the East Village area) through the late 1970s.21 Residents and observers at the time needed no such data to perceive that the neighborhood was experiencing dramatic change. Real-estate speculators were on the prowl throughout the district. Businessmen from outside the area would "walk into the bar," noted a bartender working at a Ukrainian tavern on Second Avenue in 1978, "asking if I know of any available real estate."22 Fertile terrain for early gentrification, the East Village bohemia was being incorporated into the valued and newly reviving parts of the city. The redirection of local development patterns and priorities had very different impacts in the most deteriorated areas of the Lower East Side. This differentiation becomes especially visible by examining the northeasterly Puerto Rican district, called Loisaida, within the context of the city's transformation of the 1970s.23 In broad terms, the decade's job losses, concentrated in New York's eroding industrial base, hit local minority workers especially hard. At the same time, lower-income housing markets began to unravel, as a combination of redlining and low tenant incomes led to growing waves of abandonment in many of the city's black and Latino communities.24 In Loisaida, housing deterioration already had made neighborhood life difficult for residents. Property owners (in a now well-understood process) "milked" their properties of rents while forgoing routine maintenance. In spite of economic decline, the area became a thriving political and cultural center for the city's Puerto Rican community, with links to the East Village bohemia. Neighborhood-based organizations, such as the Real Great Society/Charas, the Young Lords, Pueblo Nuevo, and the early Nuyorican Poets Cafe, helped establish a newly assertive Latino community identity anchored in the blocks east of Avenue B.25 The decade of the 1970s, however, with its public policies of triage, sorted the city into valued versus unvalued districts. Driving a wedge between the reviving East Village and declining Loisaida, these policies also unraveled the public-sector infrastructure undergirding the fragile ecology of the barrio. This flurry of blows simply devastated Loisaida. Loss of housing and of residents in the Puerto Rican Lower East Side reached astonishing levels. Hundreds of buildings were abandoned by their owners; residents fled, some of them literally "torched" out by fires set by landlords or their employees in order to collect insurance money. In the two most devastated census tracts in Loisaida, the nearly fifteen thousand residents who lived there in 1970 dwindled to fewer
78 • Public Action
Population by race or Hispanic origin in New York's Lower East Side, from U.S. Census data, by tract, in 1980, 1990, and 2000. Because of changes in census definitions, data for all tracts may not be precisely comparable over time.
than five thousand people ten years later.26 Not all of the housing abandonment in the Lower East Side was in the areas occupied by Puerto Rican residents, to be sure, but most of it was concentrated there. Between 1976 and 1979, for example, the vast majority of the area's 454 abandoned properties
Public Action • 79
taken by city government were located in tracts with significant Latino settlement, many of them only a few blocks away from the new pockets of East Village revitalization.27 For community activists of the time, the contrast between the two neighborhoods was striking, even after the fires had died down. "Some things are happening over around First, Second Avenues," said one activist in 1978, "but east of First, nobody thinks about it. It's still a 'dumping ground.' "28 The local political economy of the fiscal-crisis period, then, tended to cleave the East Village and Loisaida into two different halves of the restructuring city. Yet this tale of two cities was not the entire story. A third Lower East Side district, now also in transition, failed to even register on the dualcity visions of the period. This particular neighborhood area, located in the southwestern part of the community adjacent to Chinatown, was often referred to by observers as the "old" or "lower" Lower East Side. Once the center of the Jewish garment industry, the district remained home to dwindling numbers of descendants of European immigrants as well as, following World War II, to a growing population of new residents from Puerto Rico. In this sense, the area evolved into a southern extension of Loisaida. Beginning in the 1960s, however, when the Hart-Celler Act ended U.S. immigration quotas that had long favored European resettlers, nearby Chinatown experienced a surge of rapid growth. From fewer than twenty-five thousand residents in 1960, the Chinese population of lower Manhattan tripled over the following two decades, fed by the arrival of tens of thousands of rural and working-class immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China. These new immigrants soon spilled over the ethnic turf boundaries that for decades had restricted Chinatown. Now, pushing eastward, the resettlers adapted the old Lower East Side lofts and tenements to serve a growing immigrant economy centered on wholesale and retail trade as well as the sweatshop production needs of a resurgent garment-manufacturing center.29 Transforming the lower half of the Lower East Side, this expanding periphery of "Greater Chinatown" generally housed poor immigrant households, sometimes in extremely crowded conditions, though the investments of local Chinese property owners were also crucial to the expansion. It is clear today, of course, that this process of resettlement represented a distinct instance of neighborhood transition, or "invasion and succession" as the Chicago School sociologists once termed it. But the singularity of this ecological change tended to be ignored at the time, or it was conflated (because aggregate income levels of the in-migrating households were often higher than those of incumbent occupants) with the onset of gentrification of the East Village. In retrospect, it is plain that these two groups of in-movers—young
80 • Public Action
whites in the East Village and immigrant Chinese in the old Lower East Side—represented quite different cohorts. Their "invasions" also were being propelled by two distinct growth engines within the restructuring city. East Village gentrification was driven by a wave of land-use redevelopment radiating from New York's corporate centers and supported by city development policies. Transforming the no-longer-bohemian precincts that lay between the Midtown and Downtown business districts, this wave swept young artists, students, and working-class residents into surrounding lower-income and industrial areas. Chinese in-migration into the Lower East Side, while also linked to a larger restructuring process, was nevertheless stimulated by quite different elements. Fueled by Pacific Rim investors as well as changes in immigration policy, the expansion of Chinatown signaled not merely spatial growth in the "enclave economy" but its dynamic reconstruction. Now offering an extensive array of goods and services for tourists as well as for New York residents, this community area was becoming in its own right a distinct and powerful node of economic development within the city.30 Despite the area's economic value, though, this kind of immigrant district did not attract strong notice from planners and city leaders at the time. The dominant vision of the era, shaped by dual-city notions, tended to cast affluent white professionals as "growth providers" and lower-income minorities as "service demanders"—either taxpayer burdens enmeshed in dependency or low-wage workers wedded to manufacturing economies in perpetual decline. Communities of immigrants, even when their economic assets were growing, remained largely invisible to the public eye. What may first appear, then, as a confusing set of market and demographic changes in the Lower East Side can be seen more clearly when these changes are differentiated and linked to broader economic and policy shifts in New York City during the 1970s. In effect, three different processes of neighborhood transition were taking place in the Lower East Side: gentrification, abandonment, and immigrant succession. These processes were occurring in three more or less distinct subareas—bohemia, barrio, and enclave—of the Lower East Side community. Each of these processes also connected quite differently to the shifting fault lines of the city, as new economic and governmental priorities inscribed sharply defined terrains of revival versus devastation, along with more fluid immigrant spaces between the two. Beyond this remapping of neighborhood space, moreover, the new priorities also ended up reworking—in ways that were not always intended—the parameters of public responsibility for the neighborhood crisis to which public action itself had contributed. Thus, while urban lead-
Public Action • 81
ers successfully refocused New York's development vision on central business districts and adjacent areas, local government was forced, belatedly and reluctantly, to assume ownership of the growing numbers of abandoned properties in slum neighborhoods. By 1981, the property holdings of the city of New York included eight thousand abandoned buildings, many of them still occupied by tenants; more than five hundred of these buildings were located in the Lower East Side.31 In the past, city-owned properties had been offered up for sale at public auctions, but this was no longer immediately viable. As a result, the fate of these buildings would pose a series of complicated political questions with important implications for the future of many neighborhoods. The city's enormous inventory of properties, then, would serve to further position public-policy decisions at the center of neighborhood transition. In this sense, an investigation that began with the question of "onset" has led to a more wide-ranging historical reconstruction of the complex roots of gentrification. Rather than a search for market or demographic origins, the preliminary approach here has been to examine the ways in which early-stage revival was intertwined with a host of economic and political forces involved in restructuring New York during the 1970s. Responding to changes in the political economy of the city, newly aggressive public priorities toward redevelopment served to accentuate destabilization and spatial fragmentation in the Lower East Side. In doing so, these priorities helped construct multiple processes of ecological change, as well as enhanced governmental responsibilities for slum housing; taken together, these developments comprised important elements of the spatial and political terrain from which future policy opportunities would also emerge. How city policy makers approached these opportunities, in turn, would influence the subsequent evolution of gentrification itself.
Gentrification and Opportunity Once neighborhood gentrification begins, it is often seen as ecologically self-reproducing, each stage leading to the next. Thus, when urban "pioneers" improve an area, they bring it to the attention of more middle-class households, whose arrival in turn paves the way for the truly affluent. Or, in another scenario, aggressive real-estate entrepreneurs operating at the "urban frontier" clear the ground for speculators and more reputable investors; these middle-level operators then draw the interest of large-scale institutional investors and developers. There are convincing elements within these economic-sequence scenarios, the best of which are also attentive to cyclical factors (such as boom-and-bust real-estate markets) that might
82 • Public Action
accelerate stages of revival, slow them down, or even bring them to a halt.32 Revitalization in the Lower East Side appeared to present this kind of escalating process for much of the 1980s, followed by a deceleration that corresponded with a sharp cyclical downturn in the New York economy, thereby lending support to market-sequence models of neighborhood change. Ye these dynamics represented only part of the story. In fact, the "publicness" of gentrification in the Lower East Side intensified during this decade as government took on a range of tasks. City agencies promoted and subsidized reinvestment. They performed slumclearance-style demolitions to assemble development sites. They attempted to privatize ownership of city-held properties and, when faced with community opposition, sought to devise innovative plans to work around these political obstacles. City officials became, in effect, the multipurpose facilitators and guarantors of revitalization, and by decade's end they even found themselves (to the surprise of many observers) embarked upon a community partnership with local groups to balance market-rate development with subsidized housing. By tracing how city government came to pursue this double role—in which, with one hand, it sought to spur intensive gentrification through a range of schemes and, with the other, began to support elements of a community-based revitalization process—it is possible to illuminate many of the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which public action may influence, in combination with economic dynamics, the substance and pace of neighborhood change. For New York's leaders, the emergence of gentrification in many neighborhoods adjacent to the Manhattan core was more than good news. It was vindication of the crisis-period growth strategy, which focused singlemindedly on the central-business-district land market and on affluent residents as the engine of city growth. Already by 1980, new office construction was beginning to rival the fevered pace of precrisis levels, and residential rehabilitation and conversion, spurred by the J-51 tax incentives, led to dramatic rises in property values in neighborhoods near the Midtown Manhattan business core. Neighborhood gentrification was now proceeding rapidly, not only in traditionally middle-class districts with quality housing stock but in areas of lower-income settlement as well. In the Lower East Side, a process that might be called "hypergentrification"—high levels of speculative investment relative to the condition of the housing stock and the incomes of existing residents—developed with remarkable speed. Median sales prices in the area, for instance, nearly tripled (from $3,389 to $10,158 per unit) between 1979 and 1982 alone.33 Economic revival radiated through the East Village and eastward toward Avenues A and B, where new investors
Public Action • 83
tended to be young speculators or "flippers."34 After a brief market slowdown in 1983, a boom in Manhattan's central business districts began to propel value escalation and widespread rehabilitation in East Village housing as major developers and institutional lenders became active in the area. Lower-income tenants complained of being priced out by rapid increases in rents, while others reported physical harassment and declines in building services, particularly in the "frontier" properties, where empty buildings were often more valuable than occupied ones.35 By 1985, Citibank, in a step that many investors seemed to regard as a harbinger of the area's future, provided financing for the conversion of the sixteen-story Christadora, an abandoned settlement house on Avenue B, into a high-priced housing co-op.36 Beyond the tax incentives and property redemptions mentioned earlier, public measures stoked this burst of reinvestment in other ways. Although official city-planning studies tended to portray gentrification as a "private-market" affair, repeated promises by local officials to sell off or give away hundreds of city-owned properties to market-rate developers stimulated a certain gold-rush mentality among investors.37 Major developers and lenders, entering the Lower East Side market in force, anticipated the coming privatization of in rem properties as a definitive tipping point for the area. As one Citibank officer declared, "This can't be a slum forever. I'm a Manhattanite and I know what young professionals are thinking. This could be another SoHo."38 As community residents pressed the local housing department to hold off selling the properties, officials promised that privatization was only a question of time. "The owners aren't happy action wasn't taken earlier, but everybody knows something must be done soon," reassured a housing department commissioner.39 Housing officials tended to offer a number of plausible rationales for making publicly held properties available to private developers: that it was important to take advantage of the strong market; that areas of the Lower East Side continued to suffer from decline; that the city could not afford to rehabilitate the properties itself. From this vantage point, then, privatization would simply represent intelligent "leveraging"—deploying limited public resources in such a way as to maximize market-led growth in the areas where it was taking place. Community groups, and neighborhood residents located in heavily gentrifying areas, often saw the issue differently. In the face of rapid upscaling, the kind of leveraging talked about by city officials seemed to be unnecessary. Particularly when residents themselves had already worked hard to keep buildings afloat during the lean times, privatization in a strong market appeared to rationalize the dislodging of long-term residents who
84 • Public Action
happened to be poor. Sometimes even lower-level housing administrators expressed strong concern over the city's approach. As one complained anonymously to a local publication, The problem is "gentrification," and we're being asked to go along with it....This is a hot area, and I can understand that, but I do have problems understanding it when people's lives and investments are at stake. It's wrong to allow people to spend money fixing up their buildings only to tell them later they have to get out to make way for progress.40
Beyond raising questions about the need for leveraging, then, the prospect of massive privatization also seemed grossly unfair, particularly when top officials failed to acknowledge the reality of residential displacement and community destabilization. The propensity of city officials to articulate the wishes of corporate developers as public goals tended to undermine the credibility of official plans for the Lower East Side. Even interim measures raised suspicion about official intentions. Early in the 1980s, for instance, local government began to demolish large numbers of vacant buildings, and over the remainder of the decade city-hired crews would raze well over 250 buildings in the Lower East Side. Community advocates, though in general agreement with efforts to prevent empty shells from being used for illegal activities, nevertheless complained that demolition (as opposed to sealing up the buildings) was a shortsighted measure that eliminated structures suitable for future renovation. By continuing with demolitions, local officials instead appeared to be embracing a slum-clearance-style approach, one that promised to make the area more attractive to corporate developers looking for vacant sites.41 In this respect, government actions preparing the ground for gentrification resembled quite strikingly the "bulldozer" techniques used in earlier episodes of urban renewal. City proposals to sell off publicly owned properties provoked a strong response in the Lower East Side. During the late 1970s, community organizations had mobilized the support of residents, using protest and political pressure, to stop the "private disposition" of city holdings until an acceptable redevelopment plan was devised.42 This moratorium on property sales created a major challenge for the city administration, as well as, over time, a series of opportunities to reevaluate its approach. The administration's initial response, and one that persisted for a number of years, was to attempt to push ahead with market-rate privatization efforts by other means. Consequently, Lower East Side community groups and city officials fought a
Public Action •
85
long-running series of political battles through much of the 1980s in which proposals for disposing of the properties—as well as other measures that would further stimulate hypergentrification—were advanced, disputed, and sometimes withdrawn. Bitter clashes over an early proposal by city administrators to develop "artists' housing" set the stage, and the tone, for many of the engagements to come. First presented in 1981, the Artists Home Ownership Proposal was developed by the city's housing department in direct response to criticisms of neighborhood gentrification. Mayor Ed Koch, who was said to have personally suggested the program, explained its rationale at a news conference: Artists are always displaced. They go in before anyone else, they do all the work, and then the people behind them get the benefits, as in SoHo. They rent lofts, fix them up, and then avaricious landlords sell them for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm not against SoHo, but we should try to create neighborhoods where artists won't be displaced. By building in their ownership, they can stay permanently, and keep the benefits for themselves.43 With the artist housing program, local officials solicited proposals to rehabilitate an initial round of sixteen vacant city-owned tenements, on two different Lower East Side sites, into artist cooperatives. The sites (one on East 8th Street in Loisaida, the other on Forsyth Street) lay just beyond the eastern and southern borders of the gentrified East Village. Financing was to be subsidized through a city loan program that would provide $1.7 million in federal community-development funds. The units were intended to be sold to "moderate-income artists" (although a number of proposals were accepted from nonartists) for between forty and fifty thousand dollars per unit.44 The city's housing commissioner insisted that the plan was designed to "economically integrate" the area. Yet the plan encountered fierce opposition. Responding to the economic-integration argument, the city councilmember from the area, Miriam Friedlander, countered, "That's no longer needed here. It's taken place, we need to anchor low-income residents." Community activists were blunter: "To build artists co-ops at $50,000 a throw is not meeting the needs of the neighborhood, which is for low-cost family housing. This is making gentrification public policy, and it will inevitably displace people who live here."45 Public hearings held in the Lower East Side were raucous. Community residents denounced artists as frivolous elitists and wealthy "parasites"; artists speaking in favor of the plan called opponents demagogues and "fascists." After the local community board gave its endorsement to the plan, community opponents, led by the
86 • Public Action
Lower East Side Joint Planning Council (JPC), mounted a vigorous political campaign to defeat the proposal. It was finally voted down by the Board of Estimate, at that time New York's executive body, in 1983.46 Subsequent city proposals also envisioned privatization of housing resources for higher-income development. Announcing what it called a CrossSubsidy Funds Program, the city administration in 1984 proposed to sell vacant, city-owned properties in the Lower East Side to market-rate developers, who would be encouraged (but not required) to set aside 20 percent of the units for low-income families. An unspecified portion of the sales proceeds would be used, said city officials, to rehabilitate roughly 1,200 city-owned apartments in the area, to be sold at low cost. "The program," said the mayor, "will assure that the Lower East Side remains an area of great ethnic and cultural diversity and will revitalize one of our historically most important neighborhoods."47 Yet the city plan was not well thought out. The cross-subsidy proposal cited no market or housing-need studies to buttress its recommendations, made no mention of how many properties would be sold, offered no dollar estimates of sales proceeds—it included, in fact, little documentation of any kind. When pressed to support the claims of the city's plan, a housing official conceded, "I don't have a ream of policy decisions to back this up. Our intent was to make an announcement."48 It soon became clear, in fact, that even the new low-income units mentioned by the plan were already allocated in existing city programs. The cross-subsidy proposal failed to generate grassroots support. Meanwhile, community groups began to agitate for city support of their own plans for the Lower East Side, but officials showed no interest in working with them. It was not until 1986 that top local administrators finally took steps to break the stalemate. Following an invitation by New York's new housing commissioner, a Lower East Side team of community leaders agreed to take part in a series of negotiating sessions. Part of the impetus for this conciliatory approach was that the administration's general interest in housing issues had expanded. Having recently announced a citywide housing plan that pledged $4.2 billion (later increased to $5.1 billion) in capital funds to build and rehabilitate housing, the Koch administration now recognized openly that the city's strong economic revival was failing to solve its housing problems—indeed, that in key respects the boom was making those problems worse. The larger capital-budget plan not only committed government to new responsibilities for responding to this crisis but also addressed nonprofit housing groups as partners. (For more extensive discussion of this plan, see chapter 2.) Beyond this broader shift in city policy, there was also significant pressure from Lower East Side developers for the adminis-
Public Action •
87
tration to make meaningful concessions to community groups so that gentrification in the Loisaida area could move forward. Claimed one developer: The greatest crime is the one being perpetrated by the city. They are allowing vacant buildings to sit barren and abandoned. We have all this housing stock with many developers ready to put in private money, to work out some kind of accommodation to satisfy the low-income needs.49 In addition to these pressures, the move to negotiations was facilitated by the personal involvement of the city housing commissioner, Paul Grotty. Tenant and community leaders had long been at odds with his predecessor, Anthony Gliedman, and proclaimed it fitting when Gliedman resigned his post in 1986 to take a position in luxury developer Donald Trump's organization.50 Lower East Side advocates were unanimous in crediting Crotty with introducing a new tone of respect into the agency's relationship with neighborhood groups. "Crotty was the first one who took it seriously," noted one community board member. Even a JPC leader, normally quite critical of Koch officials, conceded: "Crotty started the ball rolling. . . . I think he met with us in good faith, and I could work with him."51 After six months of negotiations, the two sides finally reached agreement on a goal of producing one thousand market-rate and one thousand low- and moderateincome units from city-owned properties in the Lower East Side. Shortly thereafter, Lower East Side community leaders and city officials signed a Memorandum of Understanding, which set out the production goals of the plan and outlined a five-stage process of implementation, in which subsidized and nonsubsidized housing would be developed simultaneously.52 This compromise cross-subsidy plan, with its willingness to acknowledge and take up a governmental responsibility for neighborhood housing, seemed to promise a new chapter in neighborhood transition. The plan's major provisions obligated city officials to work with community groups to create low- and moderate-income housing. The plan also committed the administration to furnish sufficient public subsidies, beyond those generated by market sales, to create the one thousand affordable housing units. At the same time, the document did not follow through on a JPC demand for mandated inclusionary zoning in the private sector.53 Even in terms of public subsidies for affordable housing, the document did not specify funding sources beyond the first phase of the plan. The negotiated settlement, then, may have been a significant step toward a more constructive governmental approach to neighborhood gentrification in the Lower East Side but it was also a limited and uncertain promissory note. Uncertainty was
88 • Public Action
compounded by a sudden economic downturn following the Wall Street declension of October 1987, less than one month after the Lower East Side agreement was signed. Puncturing the local land boom, the new economic climate unraveled the basis for the settlement's cross-subsidization scheme, premised as it had been on revenues from the sale of properties in order to float the lower-income-housing component of the plan.54 Community groups, in turn, pressed the city's housing department to fund affordable housing directly, but, given the new economic climate, Koch administration priorities now reverted entirely to high-profile development projects. More than two years passed, in fact, before a new administration headed by Mayor David Dinkins began to work with Lower East Side groups to implement a revised plan for lower-income housing. Dinkins's campaign had pledged to repair relations between City Hall and community organizations, and the new mayor, along with his housing commissioner, Felice Michetti, now promised financial and political support for nonprofit ownership and management of city-owned housing.55 Board of Estimate approval and bid closings on the first phase (two hundred units) of the plan's lower-income housing component were completed, and sites and community developers were chosen for a second phase (another two hundred units) before Dinkins's first year in office was over. JPC leader Frances Goldin gave substantial credit to the new administration: "Because of Dinkins and Michetti, the housing for low-income people is moving on the Lower East Side. It never would have otherwise."56 By the end of the 1980s, then, it was clear that local government's relationship to gentrification had grown more complicated, with important implications for ecological change in the different neighborhood areas of the Lower East Side. Certainly, many city initiatives continued to support neighborhood upscaling, sometimes at the expense of lower-income residents. Tax incentives remained geared toward upper-income housing, and city officials still pursued market-oriented development projects outside the framework of the negotiated settlement. At one point, for example, the mayor's office tried to craft a separate plan with a private builder to develop a large urban-renewal site near the Grand Street area. Community opponents, criticizing this violation of the spirit of the negotiated framework, fought the project to a standstill.57 On the other hand, administrators had come to recognize lower-income community residents and their housing organizations as legitimate interests in the Lower East Side. Leaders of those organizations now bargained directly with housing officials, and, although the Memorandum of Understanding itself did not waste much rhetoric on the virtues of community partnership, the agreement did commit the administration to working with community leaders and with the area's orga-
Public Action • 89
nizations to ensure that publicly owned housing resources were developed in a more balanced fashion. New economic uncertainties seemed to undermine this commitment, but by the end of 1990 city officials nevertheless had moved beyond the initial agreement to subsidize directly the first rounds of the affordable housing plan in the Lower East Side. The spatial impacts of this more diversified policy approach were also mixed. Public policies of the 1980s accelerated gentrification in certain Lower East Side areas while slowing it down in others. In this sense, government actions tended to complicate, but did not entirely erase, the tripartite spatial processes—gentrification in the East Village, abandonment in the Loisaida barrio, and immigrant succession in Greater Chinatown—that still composed the area's multiecological pattern. The East Village, becoming significantly more expensive, now pushed the borders of bohemia southward across Houston Street and eastward into Loisaida. Gentrification in Loisaida, however, remained highly uneven, its impacts more apparent in the area's escalating land values than in its slow population growth, as other researchers have pointed out.58 This kind of pattern sometimes is seen as evidence of an economic logic whereby reinvestment tends to precede resettlement. Yet it is worth emphasizing that the emergence of such a sequence in Loisaida during the 1980s was strongly influenced by government actions past and present. Put in basic terms, there was simply too little housing in the area to support full-scale gentrification; triage strategies, including a public penchant for demolishing empty buildings, had helped turn vast tracts of Loisaida into vacant lots. Therefore, new construction—and not simply turnover in the existing housing stock (as had happened in the East Village area)—would be necessary to undergird later-stage resettlement and gentrification. In such a context, future public approaches toward Loisaida were also likely to prove fateful.59 Although the administration's ultimate course of action still remained unclear, local officials had already begun to exert a different kind of influence in the area just by pulling back from mass privatization of city-owned properties.60 The administration's "nondecision" on property sales was already spurring neighborhood actors to prepare for a different scenario: community housing groups now were enhancing their own capacities to sponsor new projects; homesteaders and squatters were fixing up the abandoned properties they occupied; even certain private investors were becoming reconciled to the prospects for mixed-income development of the area. In this kind of neighborhood context, then—one in which strong gentrification pressures were colliding with a deteriorated and heavily "cleared" neighborhood area—the role of government as dominant property owner, coordinator, and partner of development would remain pivotal.
90 • Public Action
Government's emerging role as facilitator and manager of gentrification had a number of less immediate, but also quite important, consequences for the ecology of Greater Chinatown. One of these impacts was to further spur the Chinese community's dramatic expansion. For all the attention focused on gentrification by young whites, in fact, the most powerful demographic surge of the 1980s was the continued influx of Chinese residents into the old Lower East Side (see map, p. 78). Gradual in-migration, pushing north and east, enlarged the spatial terrain of this immigrant community to the extent that researcher Min Zhou, in a study of Chinatown conducted during the period, mapped the new boundaries of Greater Chinatown all the way up to Houston Street.61 A striking symbol of this change was the transformation of the Jewish Daily Forward building: for many decades the home of the Lower East Side's Yiddish-language newspaper, this tenstory structure was converted into a church and community center for the area's Chinese residents. Government action had supported expansion of this immigrant enclave in indirect ways. Changes in city zoning policies helped stimulate higher-income residential development in a traditional Chinatown/Lower East Side border area near the Manhattan Bridge, pushing the lower-end immigrant economy further into the old Lower East Side. Then, in a budding recognition of the economic importance of the apparel industry to the city's economy, officials began to protect the Greater Chinatown garment shops and their low-wage workers from displacement.62 But probably just as important was the administration's failure to massively privatize the city-owned properties in Loisaida. Beyond its ramifications for Loisaida, this nondecision slowed the migration of young white gentrifiers into what was now the expanding Chinese district of the old Lower East Side. In fact, by 1990, an ecological collision between Chinese succession and white-led gentrification was taking place near the center of the larger community area. There, on the blocks immediately south of Houston Street (for example, the area bounded by census tract 30.01), a remarkable mix of community populations were now residing side by side: Asian and white inmovers as well as longtime Hispanic residents. In effect, bohemia, barrio, and enclave had all collided.63 Of course, city policies by themselves did not engineer this collision of communities; larger forces of urban restructuring described earlier were central to such a collision taking place at all. And it remained to be seen whether local officials would come to recognize this ecological confluence as an opportunity for crafting a creative neighborhood-revitalization strategy. Nevertheless, it was clear that the Lower East Side continued to be the site of multiple neighborhood transi-
Public Action • 91
tions even as the negotiated framework now in place seemed to enhance the potential for preserving elements of this rich neighborhood ecology. The Lower East Side experience of the 1980s suggests, then, that neighborhood gentrification was not proceeding in an inexorable sequence of economic stages. Government's double role, as well as the sheer complexity of ecological conditions, continued to complicate the evolution of the process. By focusing on the multiple neighborhood impacts of these forces, I am not suggesting that the future remained entirely open, much less that the capacity to determine this future lay simply within the power of city officials or community-level actors. It was clear, moreover, to many observers at the time that Anglo gentrification—linked as it was to corporate and upper-income revival in the expanding core districts of the city—was positioned to become the Lower East Side's strongest ecological force in the long run. It was also apparent that the area's Hispanic community, already thinned by two decades of displacement, risked being pushed out or priced out by many of these pressures. Yet although these structural tendencies represented daunting challenges, settlement patterns on the ground were still surprisingly multiform, fluid, and unevenly paced. Such flux suggested that much remained to be decided, especially with the onset of economic stagnation during the late 1980s and with increasing amounts of the city-owned housing stock in the Lower East Side now slated for subsidized redevelopment. To the extent that expanding initiatives might be used to anchor traditional residents who were most vulnerable to displacement, the emerging city and community initiatives promised to exert additional influence over the shape of things to come. Even several decades after the onset of renewal, the process of neighborhood transition in the Lower East Side remained a far cry from the unfolding of a simple, unalterable logic of gentrification.
Policing and Privatizing: New Public Action New York reshuffled its priorities over the first half of the 1990s. Shifts in governmental approaches to public spaces and neighborhoods would influence, in turn, the character of a new wave of gentrification when it emerged later on in the decade. Whereas neoliberal policies of the 1980s had become complemented, as we have seen, by subsequent initiatives to provide affordable housing and manage neighborhood transition, a new economic and political climate soon unhinged this double-sided public role. First, the return of fiscal retrenchment in the early 1990s squeezed subsidies for neighborhoods. Then increases in housing abandonment, along with a fear of crime, fanned a growing perception of urban disorder. Beginning with short-term responses that emphasized regulating the poor, New York's
92 • Public Action
leaders soon came to embrace a more ambitious notion of remaking the city for middle-class visitors as well as for the affluent. This redefinition of the city centered on "cleaning up" public spaces and neighborhoods in order to facilitate development based on tourism, entertainment, and retail-chain commerce. Although welcomed early on by many New Yorkers, this public vision tended to rule out legitimate places for lower-income residents and the homeless. It also altered local government's relationship to neighborhood change. No longer seen as a balancing act, appropriate public action now concentrated on deploying governmental resources to stimulate higher-income development and to police the poor. Community advocates who defended vulnerable groups were labeled obstructionists; subsidized housing programs were accused of providing unworthy people with a free ride. In the end, a reconstructed neoliberalism would reshape the agenda of possibility for public action in the Lower East Side. Entering the 1990s, the challenge presented by gentrification in the Lower East Side had seemed daunting but still open to a number of responses. One of these was posed directly by the negotiated framework signed by officials and community leaders: Could government and community actors, working together, sustain a mix of residential groups and preserve distinctive neighborhood identities in the face of what was likely to prove a significant market-driven upscaling for the middle class? To meet this challenge, many Lower East Side groups sought to expand their capacity as neighborhood housing providers in order to implement, and perhaps enlarge, the lower-income component of the negotiated plan. But the onset of a municipal budget crisis struck the first blow against these larger ambitions. Cuts in city subsidies, as well as organizational problems on the part of neighborhood providers themselves, soon slowed down housing production in the Lower East Side. It was more than fiscal stress, however, that disrupted the process. Local political leaders began to single out a motley assortment of culprits, from criminals to "squeegee men," who were seen as responsible for disturbing declines in public welfare and neighborhood stability. Governmental priorities shifted correspondingly, beginning with an effort to use city agencies to clear the streets and parks of a range of social groups. Drug dealers, panhandlers, and gang members were arrested or driven away; so were many other public-space users, including minority youth, political protesters, counterculture members, street vendors, and housing squatters. Police crackdowns and street confrontations along the gentrifying border areas of the Lower East Side became commonplace.64 Other city agencies with a strong neighborhood-level presence—from housing inspectors and park managers to streets-and-sanitation crews—also reorganized
Public Action • 93
their activities to complement this social cleanup campaign. By shifting political attention and city resources to these new "clearance" efforts, public action began to pave the way for upper-income gentrification. This governmental turn threw lower-income neighborhood advocates into disarray. When certain groups in the Lower East Side tried to reenergize neighborhood activism through the use of more militant tactics, new community leaders emerged to support the policing and upscaling agenda. (This process is addressed more fully in chapter 4.) The local city council seat was won by a former housing leader who now articulated a progentrification platform devoted to sweeping homeless people and socialservice agencies from the area. "Our problem," he announced, "is tolerance."65 Officials in the city's housing agency did not formally repudiate the negotiated framework for responding to neighborhood change. Yet, clearly, the political climate no longer supported community-based partnerships, and subsidized housing projects slowed to a trickle. Even before a 1990s economic revival shimmered on the horizon, then, a political redefinition of neighborhood renewal had pushed aside hard-won notions that public action might appropriately counterbalance the excesses of hypergentrification. New York finally saw the beginnings of a Wall Street-led economic expansion by the mid-1990s. Real-estate revival in the Manhattan business districts sparked the resumption of powerful gentrification pressures in the Lower East Side, where housing prices shot up rapidly. Upscaling the area entered a dramatic new stage, as the spread of residential properties for professionals, white-tablecloth restaurants, and fashionable shops signaled the definitive absorption of the East Village into a Manhattan-centered, highspending entertainment economy. Residential and commercial rents in the trendiest blocks even began to outstrip those in traditionally wealthy districts like the Upper East Side.66 One developer, a gentrification "pioneer" whom tenant groups had denounced a decade earlier for his ham-fisted efforts to empty his buildings of lower-income residents, now was erecting prime-market residences with duplexes renting for $4,000 to $5,500 per month.67 This newest stage in the embourgeoisement of the East Village was also marked by the theme-marketing of the neighborhood itself for cultural export. A spate of entertainment productions emerged with Lower East Side settings, from the musical Rent and a television comedy series called Tompkins Square to a short-lived Web-based soap opera titled The East Village. Celebrating the community's reputation as an unruly space of artistic creativity and romantic danger, these cultural products offered bohemia mythologized and packaged. In doing so, they also hastened the gentrification process itself, of course, as a neighborhood made safe for urban tourism
94 • Public Action
now became flooded with upper-income visitors searching for retail bargains and countercultural cachet.68 The swelling East Village scene spurred changes in other areas of the community. A moneyed influx of young white residents and real-estate investors moved eastward into Loisaida and then southward into what had become, only several years before, a mixed-ethnic district (Chinese, Anglo, and Latino) below Houston Street. This latest gentrification wave, in turn, priced out increasing numbers of Puerto Rican and Dominican residents living near the new nightlife districts along Ludlow and Orchard Streets. The rush of affluent newcomers also halted the expanding periphery of Chinatown (see map, p. 78). In this way, the multiform ecological collision observed earlier—in which bohemia, barrio, and enclave all contended for space—began to "shake out" by the end of the 1990s. White residents, for example, composed for the first time the largest population group in the especially contested district (census tract 30.01) south of Houston Street.69 Of course, significant numbers of Hispanic residents remained in the area, particularly along many of the blocks dominated by subsidized housing. Furthermore, the Lower East Side's Chinese community, still posting population gains in many tracts, would undoubtedly constitute a major residential group for many years to come. But in the absence of changes in public policy, the likely face of the future was now becoming clearer, perhaps symbolized once again by the Jewish Daily Forward building. Converted fifteen years earlier into a Chinese church and community center, the structure was purchased in the late 1990s by a major developer interested in converting the building to provide luxury residential accommodations for the urban professional market.70 In this sense, the Lower East Side was becoming fully integrated, residentially and commercially, into the Manhattan cultural economy. Characterized less and less by distinct neighborhoods of settlement, the area still presented what might be viewed (in light of this apparent endgame of gentrification) as surprising evidence of economic and social heterogeneity. Pockets of poverty endured, for example: more than half of the area's census tracts (fifteen out of twenty-nine) contained between 10 percent and 25 percent of residents who relied on public assistance, in spite of strenuous efforts by the city administration to clear the welfare rolls.71 In fact, the continued presence of large numbers of Lower East Siders of Asian and Hispanic descent still made the community very heterogeneous by the standards of most U.S. localities.72 Latino renters who occupied privately owned housing benefited somewhat from New York's rent-stabilization system, which, though weakened, still slowed down the impact of land-value changes on tenants' housing costs. For Chinese residents, higher levels of property own-
Public Action • 95
ership (as well as higher household incomes) helped contribute to the enclave's staying power. Nevertheless, the Lower East Side's potential for remaining an area of significant lower-income and minority settlement now rested mostly on the still considerable islands of affordability represented by the area's nonmarket housing stock. Unfortunately, governmental retrenchment and privatization tended to erode these islands. Between 1990 and 1998, the stock of city-owned properties in the Lower East Side, still the major source of newly created housing, shrank from 175 to 54 parcels.73 Although a handful of these properties continued to be made available to neighborhood-based nonprofit developers, the struggle for subsidies forced this "community sector" to trim its earlier ambitions. Pinched financing also steered initiatives away from supplying low-income units to furnishing developments for middle-income projects that were more easily subsidized.74 Late in the decade, as realestate values climbed, the city administration launched an expanded wave of privatization. Culminating in the sale of nine city-owned properties in Loisaida for a total of $2.27 million in 1998-99, these sites were used mostly for new market-rate development projects.75 It was clear that more privatization was to come when local officials issued requests-for-proposals for large-scale development of the long-vacant urban-renewal site near the Grand Street area. Located several blocks from new "loft-style condominiums" selling for more than $1 million each, these land parcels, which government and community organizations had wrestled over for decades, were now positioned to become one of gentrification's grand prizes among the Lower East Side's publicly owned tracts.76 Subsidized housing projects also began to succumb to upscaling. Thousands of middle-income cooperative apartments along Grand Street, for instance, were now confronted with the prospect of deregulation. Ironically, these co-ops, once viewed by militant activists as bastions of privilege in a poor Lower East Side, had become bulwarks of affordable housing by the 1990s: apartment prices, held in check by tight resale restrictions, often remained well below a hundred thousand dollars per unit even while housing values in the surrounding area climbed to much higher levels. Yet as public-sector support for housing flagged, growing numbers of residents also fought to remove the restrictions; old solidarities and old bylaws were eventually pushed aside to permit open-market sales.77 The Grand Street co-ops thus began to "open up," with apartment prices quickly jumping to a quarter of a million dollars and more. In the process, another low-cost housing resource dwindled, and with it the possibility that the Lower East Side might remain affordable to the middle class. Other neighborhood housing also fell under attack. Gentrification soon threatened, for example, the
96 • Public Action
area's federal Section-8 stock of privately owned apartments. Long affordable to lower-income tenants, these housing units had benefited from rental subsidies administered through the local public-housing authority. As subsidy contracts expired, though, building owners balked at renewal; weak public subsidies now failed to compete with the greater opportunities of an escalating real-estate market. With large numbers of Lower East Side renters at risk of displacement, community organizers and federal housing officials, with little help from the local administration, scrambled to piece together a rescue plan.78 Meanwhile, a far larger stock of low-cost housing units—the enormous swath of public housing towers stretching along the East River— now appeared to rest on shaky ground. For decades, these properties had seemed to guarantee, if nothing else did, that the Lower East Side would always remain home to lower-income, minority residents. These towers, federal public-housing projects managed by the local authority, provided residents with relatively stable homes during the dark days of the 1970s, when Loisaida's privately owned buildings were being abandoned by the hundreds. More than thirteen thousand such apartments continued to house some of the city's poorest residents. By the late 1990s, the aging publichousing structures were in need of significant reinvestment to reverse physical deterioration. Yet in the wake of major shifts in federal housing policy, a new political environment confronted public housing instead with the uncertain prospects of "transformation."79 What transformation might mean for the Lower East Side projects was unclear. Residents fought off several early rounds of proposals to shore up the authority's fiscal base; activists contended that the plans threatened access to housing by the very poor and weakened security-of-tenure for existing residents. But federal and local policy changes, combined with the physical needs of the structures themselves, made the long-term future of this housing safety net very unsettled. In the meantime, the land parcels beneath them—many of them waterfront properties surrounded by areas escalating in value—were certain to attract growing pressures to demolish the structures or to modify them for "higher and better" uses. Would public housing itself become gentrified? Like so many other issues, this question, too, would be shaped by public action. Whatever the future might hold, it is evident, looking back over the final decades of the twentieth century, that the Lower East Side experienced a remarkable set of social and physical transformations. The dominant thrust of this period of neighborhood change can be understood, of course, as a story of gentrification—even of hypergentrification—in which a largely working-class and lower-income minority community was increasingly
Public Action • 97
being remade into an urban playground for the young, white, and affluent. Yet this characterization leaves out much of the substance of the process, which in turn obscures issues of political opportunity, agency, and contingency. The kind of gentrification experienced by the Lower East Side was not simply prefigured by larger forces of urban restructuring, nor by the onset or sequential unfolding of an economic logic of neighborhood transition. Different strategies of public action—slum clearance, community partnership, privatization—influenced processes of neighborhood change in important and often unanticipated ways. In this respect, late-twentiethcentury gentrification exhibited surprising continuities with earlier episodes of neighborhood revival in the Lower East Side: public visions of the desirable community established the contours for successful renewal; government officials found themselves repeatedly at the center of spatial redevelopment; local policies influenced neighborhood change on the ground. By observing this process over the course of three decades, it has become clear that the Lower East Side's most recent history presented myriad opportunities for the pursuit of constructive strategies to preserve neighborhood-level heterogeneity and affordable housing. At certain moments, these openings were pursued. Much more often, public actors responded with efforts to spur destabilization and dislodge the poor. It is this pattern of action that reveals the political roots of a gentrification process, providing crucial elements of the story of neighborhood transformation in the Lower East Side.
Gentrification and Globalisation Is gentrification good or bad? This elementary question was the subject of contentious debate when it was posed several decades ago. Recent years have seen little animated discussion of the issue, perhaps because of a settled consensus that—good or bad, supply-driven or demand-driven— gentrification is largely the consequence of economic forces. Critical approaches to globalization may have reinforced this state of affairs, if only because they tend to subsume neighborhood change within a structural transformation that is seen as inherently benefiting cosmopolitan elites while marginalizing urban immigrants and the poor.80 The central problem with these approaches to globalization and gentrification is not that observable neighborhood-level outcomes cannot somehow be made to "fit" the theories. Rather, it is that the theories fail to explain the political processes that also influence neighborhood change. Earlier sections of this book proposed a theory of how politics and the state contribute to the often destabilizing impacts of international integration on cities. Developing the concept of primitive globalization, these
98 • Public Action
chapters identified a pattern of reactive policies—ad hoc measures to spur short-term-oriented economic activities and uproot communities—that, especially in the United States, have tended to remake the city for business elites, visitors, and affluent residents. Such a conceptual approach helps to reframe an understanding of the relationship between city and neighborhood in processes of gentrification. In this chapter, I have attempted to push beyond economic approaches, and beyond my earlier focus on national/ local politics, in order to highlight the responses of local government to urban change at the neighborhood level. Focusing in detail on the evolution of New York's Lower East Side over three decades, this chapter has traced a shifting set of local initiatives with often considerable impacts on neighborhood spatial change. In the process, gentrification, more than simply a structural effect or a neighborhood-level sequence, emerges as a politically constructed form of public action. Local policies deployed measures of withdrawal, coercion, and exclusion to dislodge resident populations and to undermine the civic protections that stabilize communities of place. Through examining the "separating" or displacing roles taken by government, it is possible to see how these actions also established key local foundations for a certain kind of globalization, one that fractures and then homogenizes neighborhoods while exacerbating instability in the city. I am not suggesting that economic approaches to gentrification are fundamentally misguided. Obviously, there are very real economic tendencies at work in contemporary forms of neighborhood renewal. These tendencies—from corporate reinvestment in central-city land to the strong preference for urban life by certain wealthy and upper-middle-class groups—are central causes of economic revival as well as its destabilizing impacts in lower-income (and even middle-income) communities. Yet these approaches often lead to studies of gentrification that trace an unfolding logic of transition. Government and community actors, when visible at all, are seen as secondary agents. Instead, a careful examination of the Lower East Side suggests, echoing several perceptive studies of other communities, that economic and political processes are deeply intertwined in neighborhood gentrification, a species of public-private redevelopment in which the state establishes much of the groundwork and subsequent evolution.81 The position of the state is not uncomplicated, however. Government policies may spur multiple ecological currents or lead to contradictory pressures on local officials, who then are forced to respond to problems of neighborhood instability. In this sense, the spatial "embeddedness" of public action may also create, as it did in the Lower East Side, especially strong conditions of opportunity: community mobilization provides a po-
Public Action • 99
tential basis for sustained city-neighborhood partnership; ecological complexity may furnish propitious circumstances for enhancing neighborhood heterogeneity; constructive government involvement can lead to more accountable community stewardship. When neighborhood change is seen, in other words, as more than a symptom of structural economic transformation or a function of local real-estate markets, there is a greater chance to recognize—and seize advantage from—its political and contingent elements. For strategic as well as analytical reasons, then, gentrification needs to be approached as a potentially complicated and contested set of neighborhood transitions in which economic change is influenced by government response. By the same token, this response itself is shaped by political or ideological articulations of neighborhood revival: What is the desirable community? Who are its members? Which actors represent potential agents or partners in renewal? When local government itself defines longtime residents and community groups as obstacles to be pushed out of the way, policy measures that foreclose opportunities should be labeled what they are: not blind market mechanisms but irresponsible public actions. To point to neighborhood-level possibilities, and to criticize local failure, is not to disregard the need for broader changes in the economic and political environment confronting cities. Earlier discussions of primitive globalization have already drawn attention to the ways in which recent changes in the U.S. urban system discourage cities from pursuing balanced strategies of development. Certain European cities, moreover, continue to take a different approach; the implications of these approaches for managing neighborhood change are addressed in a later chapter. But the important point here is that gentrification, while possessing an inherent class dynamic, is also an elastic process and generates varying social impacts depending on political context and response. Even within the constricted politics of U.S. cities, in other words, meaningful neighborhoodlevel choices remain. Local officials possess a range of policy tools—from housing and building codes, zoning laws, and property ownership to political leadership and institutional capacities for partnership—to shape neighborhood change, even in a "global" age. Failure to use those tools constructively has important consequences, as we have seen, for the social and spatial conditions of the city. This kind of failure also has ramifications for other urban actors. One key question raised by primitive globalization, and heretofore deferred, is: How have community actors responded to destructive actions by the state? In the Lower East Side, residents mobilized politically in response to gentrification and local policies; for a number of years, the community even
100 • Public Action
became visible as the center of a neighborhood-based movement that challenged the restructuring of the city. To understand more fully the politics of public action, it is important to focus directly on the ways in which community mobilization has emerged and evolved under conditions of primitive globalization. This issue is taken up in detail in the following chapter.
4
Urban Movements, Local Control Fighting over the Neighborhood
New York's Lower East Side emerged for a time as a crucible of resistance to the global city. Beginning in the early 1980s, community groups organized large numbers of residents, led angry street marches, and generated considerable pressure on developers and city officials to address issues of displacement and homelessness. Several of these community organizations soon turned themselves into housing developers, launching a number of innovative projects for lower-income residents. Other groups stayed a more confrontational course, culminating in the refusal of squatters and homeless occupants of Tompkins Square Park to make way for "the city and its landlords."1 For more than a decade, in fact, the Lower East Side seemed poised to become the epicenter of a broader urban movement against gentrification. But by the close of the twentieth century the battles, as well as the larger ambitions of activists, had been mostly curtailed: community housing initiatives bogged down; the police moved in, suppressing conflicts at the most contentious sites; and gentrification moved forward, transforming much of the community into an extension of affluent Manhattan. The past several decades have not been an auspicious period for urban movements. Theorist Manuel Castells contends that cities no longer produce successful movements because, in today's globalized "space of flows," places no longer serve as a basis for social power.2 From this structural vantage point, the community mobilization in the Lower East Side represents an unsurprising failure: local movements are inexorably undermined or outmaneuvered, in an age of globalization, by larger and more fluid forces of development. This perspective fails to address, however, a central element of the Lower East Side case: political conflict. As Neil Smith's studies make clear, neighborhood space, and political control over 101
102 • Urban Movements, Local Control
neighborhood space, were important to authorities and insurgents alike.3 Furthermore, the struggle itself indicates that the neighborhood-based movement in the Lower East Side was able to generate considerable power, at least for a time. From mobilizing large numbers of residents against city development policies to taking over and redeveloping abandoned housing, grassroots groups repeatedly beat back publicly sponsored gentrification initiatives while also setting in motion a number of community-oriented alternatives. Ultimately, it is true, these strategies failed to preserve the traditional community of the Lower East Side. Yet although a broader spatial transformation of the city made such an ambitious outcome unlikely—and in this sense theories of globalization do contribute to understanding the scope of urban restructuring—structural forces alone do not explain why such a dynamic movement was unable to accomplish less sweeping but still substantial goals, such as reshaping city policy toward the neighborhood or creating a large-scale community-housing stock. Other theorists, such as Margit Mayer, suggest that factional differences between militant and pragmatic activists may account for significant weaknesses in contemporary urban movements.4 From this perspective, strategic disagreements within the community may help explain the limited accomplishments of the Lower East Side-based mobilization. Christopher Mele, in a perceptive analysis of the battles over Tompkins Square Park, has shown that complex "cleavages in resistance" were in part the inevitable product of such a diverse urban community.5 Even Lower East Side activists themselves acknowledged that the neighborhood's internecine conflicts— in which activists fought one another nearly as often as they did "yuppies," developers, or the police—sometimes lent credence to one city planner's complaint that "it's impossible to get anything done there."6 Did this inability of neighborhood groups to work together serve to squander movement opportunities? Perhaps, though interorganizational and strategic rivalries have been endemic to episodes of collective action. Historians of community organizing suggest that the tension between militant and pragmatic activism—or, as it has been expressed more recently, between community resistance and community development—has been a challenge in many periods, but not always an insurmountable one.7 During earlier eras of Lower East Side activism, in fact, there were key moments when, as we shall see, a political division of labor actually worked to the advantage of movements. Furthermore, preceding chapters of this study have suggested that in recent decades a particular national and local politics tended to rework the conditions within which neighborhood change took place. Might
Urban Movements, Local Control • 103
this politics also have influenced the relationships that emerged between neighborhood-based factions, as well as the broader impacts achieved by this kind of community mobilization? Such a question may be central to understanding the prospects for urban movements. This chapter focuses on the Lower East Side-based mobilization against gentrification, its achievements and limitations, and the relationship between militant and pragmatic factions over the course of nearly two decades. Building on the insights of preceding chapters, as well as on the work of Smith, Mele, and other Lower East Side researchers, my analysis argues that what I have called primitive globalization—the use of state policies to stimulate short-term-oriented, destructive forms of economic development—was a major cause of movement failures in the Lower East Side. During the 1970s and early 1980s, government response to economic challenges furnished new issues of political contestation: neighborhood abandonment, public-sector retrenchment, new subsidies for corporate expansion. Pursuit of these policies by a set of decentralizing governmental institutions also encouraged movement actors to organize resistance at the neighborhood level. This grassroots response met with initial success in the Lower East Side, where a diverse array of housing activists and residents came together to challenge the city's development politics. Over time, however, the weaknesses of a neighborhood base, and the problems of a strategy oriented increasingly toward "defending the neighborhood" instead of transforming the city, tended to hobble the potential growth and vitality of the community response. By focusing on the evolution of such a strategy, and on the ways in which it intensified problems of fragmentation and factional conflict, it becomes possible to see how neoliberal policies and the politics of "neighborhoodism" may have constrained the potential impact of a late-twentieth-century urban movement. The following analysis focuses on how the political terrain of city and neighborhood explains key tendencies within the "movement field" in the Lower East Side during three successive phases of its development: 1980-85,1985-90, and 1990-95.1 draw from a range of primary sources (including the minutes of local community-board meetings, interviews, organizational documents, community newspapers, and personal observation), as well as published accounts by other researchers, in order to trace the different strategies to preserve and expand affordable housing. Beginning in the early 1980s, a number of strategic tendencies emerged—tenant organizing, protest, advocacy and planning, self-help, and service provision— within a complex movement field that was based in the neighborhood but
104 • Urban Movements, Local Control
not bound by it. Community organization reflected this fluidity, as groups not only banded together to form a neighborhood-wide coalition but also engaged in a series of actions that linked the problems of the neighborhood to a larger development politics in New York City. During the second half of the 1980s, however, organizations shifted direction as key actors began, for various reasons, to take the neighborhood as a privileged terrain for strategic action. Bifurcating the movement into pragmatic and militant camps, this new phase found one faction pursuing a neighborhood housing plan and another mobilizing to defend the park, both intent on "saving" the neighborhood. By the early 1990s, as the two movement camps disintegrated, the efforts of multiple factions to save their own neighborhood bases culminated in a kind of movement implosion. Tracking the evolution of the movement in this fashion tells a different Lower East Side story than often emerges. Rather than a tale of local failure in the face of globalization, or one of an exceptional community undone by its own militancy, this Lower East Side story reveals die political conditions and movement responses that tended to weaken community influence within the global city. In such an account, it is a recognition of the early complexity and heterogeneity of neighborhood-based mobilization that makes possible new insight into its subsequent factions, militant and pragmatic alike. Neither the direct consequence of globalization nor of a primordial bent toward factionalism, diese later divisions come to be seen as likely outcomes for any urban movement that does not attempt to grow beyond a neighborhood base. The dramatic confrontations at Tompkins Square Park also reemerge in a new light: no longer the culmination of a movement, they are symptoms of its endgame. In this sense, the following account of the Lower East Side is intended to focus not so much on the neighborhood itself as on the implications of neighborhoodism for community organization and mobilization within the city.8 By approaching the Lower East Side in this way, I do not mean to suggest that this particular case or neighborhood is somehow "typical" in ways that previous analysts have failed to appreciate. As will be clear, the character and intensity of Lower East Side politics—in moments of mobilization as well as those of factionalism and demise—were often uniquely its own. But the effort to organize around a defense of the neighborhood was not at all unique, nor were the kinds of internal conflicts this strategy engendered. It is these elements that may illuminate not only the prospects for urban movements but also important relationships between politics and community in a globalizing era.
Urban Movements, Local Control • 105
Movement and Neighborhood The final quarter of the twentieth century threw into question the potential for urban social movements in the advanced capitalist democracies. Following the 1960s, when mobilizations in cities had dramatic impacts on social perception and public policy, urban-based activism seemed to become more attenuated and diffuse. For Castells, this weakening of urban movements has to do with the ways in which a new global economy is organized around versatile networks of information and capital that are no longer dependent on place. Because this "new spatial process, the space of flows, is becoming the dominant... manifestation of power and function in our societies," and because such a process is also seen to erode the power of the nation-state, social movements that rely on their relationship to local places and to the state are much less likely to emerge or thrive.9 It is not necessary to agree with sweeping notions of globalization to concede that a more fluid and integrated international environment undermines many kinds of social movements. Yet urban places still serve as important sites of power. Certainly in so-called global cities, but also in most U.S. downtown districts, central-city location remains important to a vast array of corporate institutions and other social actors, suggesting that the structural conditions for conflicts over the terrain of the city have hardly disappeared.10 And indeed, studies of urban politics and social movements indicate that such conflicts are frequent if not routine.11 More broadly, there is little sense that social attachments to place have been profoundly weakened by globalization. Quite the contrary: the proliferation of walls, enclaves, cul-de-sac streets, and gated communities suggests, if anything, an intensified bond between social community and particular places, especially in the United States.12 What has changed—beyond an international economy that is now more fluidly linked—is that a restructuring state has reconfigured the fault lines that furnish both opportunities and constraints for a broad range of social movements, including urban ones. Theorists have often noted the intimate and complex relationship between the modern state and social movements. As John Walton has put it, the state provides certain means of collective action, while movements tend to appropriate certain principles of legitimacy (embedded in the state itself) in order to contest key elements of state rule.13 Urban movements represent only one, city-centered form of collective mobilization, and it should not be surprising that urban movements do not, by themselves, tend to transform directly the larger structures of power in our time. Social theorist Craig Calhoun has noted that, as early as the mid-nineteenth
106 • Urban Movements, Local Control
century, the spatial flexibilities of state rule in developed capitalist societies rendered the city an unlikely base for successful revolutionary challenge.14 Nevertheless, instances of local mobilization and protest appeared in U.S. cities throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. During the 1950s and 1960s, significant urban movements targeted local-state agencies in their roles as sponsors of redevelopment and as providers of housing, health, and education. These movements, in combination with national mobilizations for civil rights and welfare rights, contributed to major shifts in governmental response.15 The United States was hardly the only country to experience these dramatic instances of urban collective action; many of the world's cities were convulsed by conflict in this period. Yet just as social movements in the United States played a more important historic role than elsewhere in precipitating expansion of a reluctant welfare state, urban movements have provided an indispensable vehicle for representing the political interests of America's lower-income and minority citizens. In the process, they have bequeathed to subsequent community mobilizations both an ambitious legacy and an ambiguous role: urban movements may not transform the fundamental structures of power, but by seeking to do so they sometimes come to generate significant pressure and influence on national policies and on the city. Beginning in the 1970s, economic challenges and urban fiscal crisis shifted the priorities of the state, reconfiguring, in the process, the possibilities for community mobilization. In a new policy environment, budgetary constraints, buttressed by ideologies calling for reduction and decentralization in governmental social-welfare responsibilities, served to repulse broader community pressures for influence. By the same token, privatization of government services and expanded subsidies for market-oriented redevelopment also created new areas for contestation by urban residents. This double movement, part of a larger state response that I have called primitive globalization, became especially visible (as preceding chapters have shown) in New York City. Restructuring local government, and cutting services in lower-income areas, sparked a new upsurge in community organizing and neighborhood-based mobilization. Yet following the emergence of a neoliberal urban regime both nationally and locally after 1980, this "neighborhood movement" splintered into a semi-isolated array of neighborhood-based organizing efforts. In this context, the immediate opportunities for community influence also became highly decentralized. This trend was particularly pronounced in New York, where municipal authorities put in place a new community-board system designed in part to promote resident participation at the neighborhood level.16 For social-action
Urban Movements, Local Control • 107
groups, response in this new environment meant exerting interest-group type pressures on city agencies or through the new neighborhood-level governance institutions; for self-help-oriented organizers, there emerged a new emphasis on building neighborhood-based service providers. In either case, state restructuring had repositioned the political opportunity structure within the neighborhood. Social-welfare analysts and urban planners would subsequently focus much attention on the implications of this period's bifurcation between community resistance and community development. For some observers, absorption of movement organizations into a service-delivery sector would spell their co-optation. For other analysts, community-development approaches would not prevent groups from continuing to engage in advocacy, mobilization, and confrontation.17 Yet even though many commentators recognize this split as a key cause of movement fragmentation, what has been too often slighted is the neighborhood context in which this strategic tension or dilemma came to be faced.18 In historical terms, this kind of tension—a tension between protest-oriented and service-delivery approaches to the problems of the urban poor—was hardly unprecedented. The earlier history of New York's Lower East Side, for example, suggests instead that such internal divisions represent a recurring feature of urban activism, with somewhat unpredictable consequences. As early as the late nineteenth century, neighborhood-based social-welfare organizations like the Henry Street Settlement and the Educational Alliance saw themselves as providing a "respectable" counterattraction to the more militant social movements of the day. Yet when rent strikes shook the slum during the first decade of the twentieth century, prominent social workers at the Alliance and elsewhere defended the aims and tactics of the strikers. During the 1930s, Lower East Side settlement workers and tenant activists, in spite of mutual suspicions, exerted complementary kinds of political pressures that contributed to the emergence of public housing. In the late 1950s, an innovative community coalition of political activists, social workers, and advocacy planners even worked side by side—and alongside the lower-income residents of the East Side's Cooper Square area—to scuttle a massive urbanrenewal displacement scheme.19 The point of these historical examples is not that past activists avoided factional disputes (they did not), but rather that the combined impacts of pragmatic and militant activists produced not only rancor and rivalry but also, under certain conditions, important gains for movement members and constituents. A key reason may have been that the attachment of both groups to neighborhood was much less intense than that of more recent activists.
108 • Urban Movements, Local Control
Neighborhoods, as Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven have observed, provide uncertain bases of political power for lower-income people.20 History suggests that the neighborhood, a primary unit of solidarity and social cohesion, operated as a significant arena for community organizing throughout much of the twentieth century, and it remains fertile terrain for first-time political engagement. In earlier periods, however, geographic proximity played less of a role in producing group solidarity than did ethnic ties or political loyalties, and progressive neighborhood-based organizing was understood primarily as a transitional mechanism or springboard for larger social changes rather than a defense of neighborhood interests.21 This difference also meant that for militants and pragmatists alike— whose goals were not neighborhood control but, respectively, radical change and social reform—strategic differences and constituency ambiguities might be "sorted out" or mediated in a larger arena in which common enemies remained visible and larger purposes might be pursued. By the early 1980s, however, after the neighborhood again had become a primary arena for community organizing, many activist groups sought to reconstruct urban movements around a "neighborhoods agenda." How these groups attempted to build such initiatives, and how these efforts evolved over time, would prove to be consequential for the larger prospects of community influence. In certain instances, this agenda would propel broader mobilizations to reshape the development politics of the city; neighborhoodbased groups in such an environment might be forced to straddle the deepening "trenches" (to redirect Katznelson's term) between neighborhood and city.22 In other cases, however, "saving the neighborhood"—a potent rallying cry but an ambiguous agenda—became the prelude to a defensive, and often divisive, struggle for territorial control. The following sections investigate the dynamics of this process in the case of New York's Lower East Side-based housing movement. A heterogeneous and complex community, the Lower East Side became a crucible for many of the neighborhood-based community responses to change, as groups sought to negotiate the difficult political terrain between city and neighborhood. By tracking changes in the relationship of various movement actors to their neighborhood base, it becomes possible to follow the evolution of key tendencies within this movement field through three discernible phases centered, respectively, on saving the neighborhood (1980-85), defending the neighborhood (1985-90), and fighting over the neighborhood (1990-95). Although the kinds of broader economic and political forces analyzed in preceding chapters were certainly important in encouraging such an evolution, I will suggest here that the strategic choices
Urban Movements, Local Control • 109
of community organizations themselves also contributed to a movement orientation that initially traversed both city and neighborhood but eventually came to define itself exclusively o/the neighborhood and against the city. The consequences of such a strategy, and its implications for community development and social action, become visible over time in the shifting political fault lines within the movement itself.
Saving the Neighborhood A new environment for community activism emerged out of the U.S. urban crisis of the 1970s. Corporate investment reestablished central-city districts as finance and business-services centers. Government policies emphasized urban retrenchment and the privatization of social-welfare functions, as well as increased subsidy for downtown real-estate projects. In response to central-city redevelopment in a number of cities, community concerns about urban inequities tended to center on the destabilizing consequences for neighborhoods, whether these were residential areas suffering from neighborhood abandonment, or pressures brought by gentrification, or both. Shaped by a political context in which appropriate state tasks had been redefined by a market-oriented neoliberalism, the focus was on the responsibility of neighborhoods (especially what were soon to be called "underclass" neighborhoods) for a broad array of deleterious social consequences, as well as, subsequently, on the potential role of neighborhoodbased actions to solve those problems. There was also, in a number of cities, a genuine resurgence in activism at the neighborhood level. New York's Lower East Side emerged from the 1970s a singular community, one still shaped by its identity as a portal of the immigrant working class. Even as this larger identity persisted, the community had also become an extremely heterogeneous area of settlement. Home to many ethnic and racial groups—aging European immigrants and their descendants (Jews, Italians, Ukrainians, and Poles), Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, ChineseAmericans and African-Americans, as well as more recently arrived cohorts of young whites—the Lower East Side was composed of ecological subareas, such as the East Village, Loisaida, and Greater Chinatown, distinguished by ethnicity as well as by housing market conditions (an issue that was explored in detail in the preceding chapter). Yet the larger Lower East Side area also continued to be seen by many residents as the locus of a strong class-based identity that transcended ecological differences.23 Linked in part to the area's turbulent history as an immigrant gateway and seedbed of radical agitation, this political identity was reanimated by particular institutional reconfigurations that followed the post-World War II urban crisis.
110 • Urban Movements, Local Control
Retrenchment of government services, combined with the new responsibilities given after 1978 to the city's community-board system, made the service boundaries of the Lower East Side (Manhattan Community District 3) a heightened arena of political mobilization and "neighborhood" identity.24 Even then, the enormous variety of community organizations in the area reflected the continuing social heterogeneity of the Lower East Side. In the area of housing alone, dozens of organizations, old and new, would become important actors in the Lower East Side movement over the coming period.25 Nevertheless, these organizations, and the many less-overtly organized elements of community activism that surfaced, tended to group themselves into three broader tendencies: advocacy and planning, tenant organizing, and direct housing provision. This movement itself emerged primarily in response to gentrification and to public policies supportive of neighborhood upscaling. Already in the late 1970s, reinvestment and resettlement in several areas of the Lower East Side had suggested the beginnings of market revival. With new investors, and with growing numbers of young white residents, also came a combination of destabilizing neighborhood changes: rent pressures, new reports of landlord-initiated harassment, and growing demands by property developers for an accelerated reprivatization of city-owned properties recently abandoned by their owners.26 A series of public initiatives, many of them efforts to give away or sell off these properties, others supportive of landlords' efforts to evict low-rent-paying residents, would generate a growing wave of opposition in the Lower East Side. Arrayed against the displacement of long-term residents were many of the area's housing organizations, among them groups that had emerged decades earlier to fight urban renewal, organizations recently opposed to disinvestment in local tenements, associations formed to rehabilitate abandoned properties or organize tenants, and resident committees to defeat efforts to "upzone" certain areas of the community. A large number of social-service providers and churches also were active on behalf of a number of community issues, including housing. By the early 1980s, many of these groups (twenty-five in all) had become members of the Lower East Side Joint Planning Council (JPC), a coalition of housing organizations, churches, social-service agencies, settlement houses, and local merchants' associations concerned about the impacts of gentrification on the lower-income residents of the area.27 A number of other activist groupings that were not formal members of the JPC nevertheless recognized its leadership role in the community. The community groups affiliated with the JPC launched a multistrategy movement against gentrification during the first half of the 1980s.
Urban Movements, Local Control • 111
Although not a centrally coordinated campaign, the movement's immediate efforts were twofold: a mobilization against private developers and property speculators who were seen as causing the displacement of incumbent lower-income and minority residents, and an effort to oppose privatization of the area's approximately five hundred abandoned, city-owned properties until a community plan was agreed upon. This dual-pronged campaign began with pressure to hold in place a 1978 city moratorium on auction sales of these properties in the area pending the creation of a community-based redevelopment plan.28 Subsequent proposals by city officials envisioned developing several clusters of these land parcels with housing for "artists." Denounced by activists as a trojan horse for gentrification, this artists housing plan provided a galvanizing issue for community resistance. Mayor Edward Koch's personal connection to the plan (housing officials claimed that he had first proposed the concept), as well as his attempts to rally support for it among the city's other top politicians, made the artists housing proposal a lightning rod for opposition to the mayor and an ad hoc political referendum on the administration's development policies. Following a well-mobilized campaign, coordinated by JPC member organizations but involving participation from the city's broader arts and activist communities, the plan was voted down by the New York City Board of Estimate in 1983.29 In the process, the campaign drew a number of residents and activists into a broader housing movement that was now based in the Lower East Side. Its identity still uncertain, this movement straddled both city and neighborhood. An examination of three practice approaches within the movement— advocacy/protest, tenant organizing, and self-help homesteading—suggests its multiple tendencies. The Cooper Square Community Development Committee, founded in the late 1950s to oppose an urban renewal plan, was the strongest guiding force within the JPC in the early 1980s and the center of protest activity. Led by Frances Goldin, a veteran of the pioneering campaigns against urban renewal, Cooper Square remained primarily an advocacy organization seeking to protect lower-income residents from displacement.30 The group articulated a strongly focused vision of the Lower East Side as a historically multiethnic, multiracial community of poor immigrants and working people. Yet the organization also counterposed its own conception of community with a broader critique of development for the wealthy symbolized by the close political ties between New York's mayor and the city's largest real-estate developers. Consistent with its roots, Cooper Square sought to fight the destabilizing developments of the early 1980s by organizing a series of multifaceted public campaigns involving coalition
112 • Urban Movements, Local Control
building, protest, and alternative planning. The immediate goal was to keep public officials from selling off city-owned holdings and from overstimulating market-rate redevelopment in the Lower East Side. The group's most pointed rallying cries, reflected in protest slogans such as "Hands Off the Lower East Side" and in the name of the JPC's "This Land Is Ours" Committee, focused on protecting city-owned properties from privatization. Link-
Greed: protest against luxury developers, 1982. Photograph by Marlis Member.
Urban Movements, Local Control • 113113
ing neighborhood and city, Cooper Square often took the lead role in organizing protest campaigns. One energetic protest march in May 1982, for example, wound through the many different areas of the Lower East Side, picking up supporters along the way, before arriving at City Hall Park, where more than two thousand protesters condemned New York's development policies, assailed the artists housing plan, and burned Mayor Koch in effigy.31 Several days later, a group of Lower East Side activists showed up at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in evening gowns and tuxedos to protest a society function honoring Harry Helmsley, an important New York real-estate developer who was accused of having his eye on the Lower East Side. Expanding beyond protest, Cooper Square and the larger JPC coalition also decided to formulate a community-based plan that would set out a controlled framework for redevelopment of the Lower East Side. As one leader explained, "We couldn't be just a fire brigade anymore. We had to have a 'grand plan.' "32 First presented to the Lower East Side community board in 1984, the ensuing JPC Plan (as it was generally labeled) combined a proposal for special displacement protections and mandatory inclusionary zoning in the privately owned housing stock with a call for redeveloping all of the area's five hundred city-owned properties for low- and middle-income housing. The plan, which was not immediately approved by the local board,
Politics: effigy of Mayor Koch presides over an abandoned tenement, 1982. Photograph by Rena Cohen/nyc.
114 • Urban Movements, Local Control
was nevertheless important in part because it was recognized by many of New York's other neighborhoods and community coalitions as an ambitious but exciting model.33 The proposal also rebutted the local administration's claims that its own schemes to privatize city-owned properties held the endorsement of the Lower East Side community. City officials responded by calling the proposal unrealistic, but the JPC Plan's initial impact was political: to demonstrate the potential existence of an alternative to gentrification and displacement. A second important actor in the Lower East Side in the early 1980s was the neighborhood branch of the Metropolitan Council on Housing. With historical roots extending even further back than those of Cooper Square, Met Council had operated for several decades as a citywide "tenant union."34 Supported by annual membership dues paid by individual tenants, Met Council focused primarily on mobilizing members as a lobbying force to protect New York City's rent regulation system.35 The union also attempted to organize tenants into building associations in order to collectively demand better services from their owners. Met Council's small budget permitted only a handful of paid organizers, but the organization sometimes attracted a cadre of volunteer activists to its system of neighborhood branches. Residents attended storefront meetings for legal counseling and organizing assistance, and in certain neighborhoods organizers would visit buildings to help with organizing efforts and rent strikes. Partly the result of long-standing ties to New York's third-party politics, but also because of its financial autonomy, Met Council's political independence enabled the organization to articulate long-term goals that included a vastly expanded, publicly controlled housing sector.36 Despite this ambitious vision, however, and notwithstanding the group's public association with the rent strike, Met Council's day-to-day organizing model followed the cautious dictates of bread-and-butter economic unionism: avoiding programmatic ideological appeals, organizers patiently sought to help residents gain better services, to protect New York renters' rights to lease renewals and annual caps on rent increases, and to build its organizational membership. Met Council's Lower East Side branch attracted growing numbers of residents during the ferment of the early 1980s. Tenants came to complain about building services, rent increases, and displacement pressures, including owner-initiated harassment, and the influx of new organized residents soon translated into a surge in volunteer housing activists. Although initially a beneficiary of neighborhood ferment, the branch nonetheless became a contributor as well during the several years of its strongest growth (1983-84). In addition to individual counseling at the branch office, orga-
Urban Movements, Local Control • 1 1511.
nizers worked with dozens of buildings in this period, helping to set up tenant associations and advising tenants with cases before the city's housing court. Rent strikes in its affiliated buildings rarely averaged more than a half dozen at any give time.37 Although the organization helped address crisis situations (such as broken boilers) in ways that often stabilized the living situations of residents, most tenant associations failed to stay active after immediate grievances were resolved. Nor was Met Council the only group in the area to do this kind of work; a neighborhood-based organization called GOLES (standing for Good Old Lower East Side) also advised tenants and organized rent strikes. Yet Met Council's branch-organizing activities made a distinctive contribution because they drew residents not already affiliated with neighborhood organizations into the city's larger orbit of housing activism.38 More than groups that held a neighborhood-focused strategy, Met Council's Lower East Side membership involved a mix of old residents and new; through organizing residents by building, the organization promoted activism and community engagement that cut across intracommunity barriers between white students and artists, Hispanic women, seniors, and even residents of a housing complex for the deaf. Seeking to exert greater pressure on property owners, and to broaden the base of the movement, Met Council launched an effort in early 1984 to organize tenants in a large group of properties owned by a single developer. This campaign
"We will not be moved": protest against gentrification, 1984. Photograph by Marlis Momber.
116 • Urban Movements, Local Control
Marching for housing, 1985. Photograph by Marlis Member. to disrupt an especially aggressive "speculator" and "gentrifier" was eventually linked to JPC efforts to promote its own plan as a redevelopment alternative, culminating in another large-scale housing march through the community.39 Beyond the strategies pursued by Cooper Square and Met Council, a third tendency within the Lower East Side-based movement of the early 1980s was a group often referred to as "homesteaders." As Malve von Hassell's participant study makes clear, this sector included a loosely affiliated collection of residents and activists, many of them not linked to formal organizations, who were attempting to occupy or rehabilitate neglected buildings in the Lower East Side.40 Comprising occupants of both publicly and privately owned housing, a number of these residents espoused visions of "sweat equity" or "self-help" housing rehabilitation as a cornerstone of an emerging neighborhood movement. Many urban homesteaders viewed housing rehabilitation as a means by which residents could rebuild their own communities without depending on large governmental institutions for construction or management. Some of these activists were primarily devoted to the survival of a traditional, working-class Lower East Side; others were committed to broader ideals of cooperative ownership and work. Still others simply wanted a place to live, or desired home ownership, or saw a good financial opportunity in a rising market. Finding initial support in a variety of the local and federal community-development programs of the
Urban Movements, Local Control • 117
Downtown rally meets uptown rally, 1985. Photograph by Marlis Momber.
1970s, these diverse groups often came together to advocate for the expansion of the New York City housing department's Division of Alternative Management Programs (DAMP), which provided limited city subsidies to fix up or manage deteriorated city-owned buildings. Perhaps the most prominent of these early organizations in the Lower East Side was Adopt-a-Building, which became active in sweat-equity rehabilitation as well as a communitymanagement program within DAMP.41 Other homesteaders attracted early political support and technical assistance from a neighborhood coalition of churches calling itself the Lower East Side Catholic Area Conference (LESAC). Another significant group formed a small network of buildings called Rehabilitation in Action to Improve Neighborhoods (RAIN), though a great many homesteaders still operated more or less independently.42 Over time, several of the better-organized groups also began to affiliate with the Association of Neighborhood Housing Developers, New York's emerging coalition of neighborhood-based and (mostly) nonprofit developers. Many more housing groups were active in the Lower East Side during this period, not to mention a dense network of social-service, business, and cultural organizations. The area's multitude of groups differed, in fact, across a range of characteristics, from social base and source of funding to ideology and primary area of activity. The three groupings I have focused on, however, represented the three major tendencies within the Lower East Side-based antigentrification movement, and it should be clear that their
118 • Urban Movements, Local Control
differences in approach—protest and planning (Cooper Square), tenant organizing (Met Council), and self-help housing rehabilitation (homesteaders)—were substantial. Yet in spite of these differences, each tendency demonstrated a number of crosscutting attachments to both city and neighborhood that helped mediate potential tensions between groups. Met Council, for example, saw the Lower East Side primarily as fertile ground for gaining new members who could help build a larger citywide organization and movement to strengthen tenant rights, even though many of its branch organizers were residents and held strong neighborhood allegiances. Cooper Square, as its name implied, was committed to preserving and enhancing the immediate community of a specific urban renewal site; the group also took on, through the JPC, a leading role in pursuing a community-controlled revitalization in the Lower East Side. But the organization's broader critique of destructive development, and its willingness to lead protest actions against City Hall and New York's developer establishment, gave Cooper Square an important leadership position within the city's larger community and movement field. Even the homesteading groups, perhaps most tied to the Lower East Side because of their members' emerging attachments to specific properties and place-based rehabilitation projects, often saw themselves as part of a larger movement extending beyond the neighborhood. This sense of larger attachment held promise of being reinforced by practical politics: despite a self-help ideology, the actual fate of community housing rehabilitation would depend to a great extent on a more expansive response from government and other potential sources of subsidy. In this way, the general movement field may have been divided in rough terms between advocacy/planning, tenant organizing, and self-help community development, but groups crossed these borders; members of nearly all groups, for example, participated in protest. All committed in some fashion to the Lower East Side, the three tendencies straddled, to a greater or lesser extent, a political community that extended into the larger city. Taken together, then, the Lower East Side-based movement of the early 1980s enjoyed a number of what might be called organizational and social-action bridges between city and neighborhood. In this sense, much of this movement field was anchored in the neighborhood but not restricted to it. Furthermore, the distinct tendencies identified earlier remained in practice overlapping and fluid; many organizers, members, and residents were active in multiple parts of the movement. When the political Lower East Side marched together to "save the neighborhood," this mobilized community carried, collectively, a heterogeneous set of notions about what saving might mean and where it might take place. The result, as of 1985,
Urban Movements, Local Control • 119
was that the movement not only generated a major neighborhood presence but attracted strong support from a broader community of activists and community-development practitioners. In the process, the groups also succeeded in throwing city officials onto the defensive, preventing the sell-off of city-owned properties and raising the visibility of potential redevelopment alternatives.
Defending the Neighborhood The Lower East Side-based housing movement would undergo striking changes in composition and direction during the second half of the 1980s. Local activists had begun the decade restricted to the lowest rung of power: the neighborhood. Grassroots mobilization, combined with New York's recovery from fiscal crisis, seemed to promise emerging opportunities for community influence farther up the ladder. Yet as the city administration opened up new terrain of governmental activism after 1985, the Lower East Side groups turned more insistently toward the neighborhood. Consequently, a movement represented by three broad and rather fluid tendencies (advocacy/planning, tenant organizing, and self-help/service provision) reshaped itself into a neighborhood-based activism characterized by two competing factions. On one side, JPC groups evolved into a pragmatic wing, pursuing endorsement and implementation of their neighborhood plan. On the other, contentious activism shifted to homesteaded or squatted buildings, and to Tompkins Square Park, where activists attempted to defend a homeless encampment from being evicted. By the end of the decade, there would be a clear bifurcation between militant and pragmatic wings of activism, as well as a fully entrenched focus within each camp on defending "its" Lower East Side. For activists, gentrification pressures in the area seemed to reach a new stage when, in 1985, institutional lenders began to provide loans to local real-estate developers. In a move that many investors also regarded as a bellwether, Citibank provided financing for the conversion of the sixteenstory Christadora, an abandoned settlement house, into luxury cooperatives.43 These signs of accelerated transformation suggested to neighborhood activists that a bleak future for the Lower East Side—one that might include few of the area's traditional working-class residents—was emerging even more quickly than they had feared. True, city officials continued to be blocked politically by movement pressures from selling off city-owned properties to market developers. But in light of a fast-changing environment on the ground, this stalemate no longer seemed to work to the community's advantage. In response, the member organizations of the Joint Planning Council
120 • Urban Movements, Local Control
refocused their efforts to gain endorsement and implementation of the coalition's own redevelopment plan. Already by 1985, the council had gained narrow approval by the Lower East Side's community board of an amended plan, one that initially retained JPC calls for inclusionary zoning in market housing but compromised on the question of city-owned vacant properties. Whereas the JPC plan had argued for the redevelopment of all of the roughly five hundred properties for low- and moderate-income housing, the Community Board 3 proposal stipulated a 50-50 split: for each marketrate and middle-income unit of housing developed from public properties to be sold at auction, one subsidized low- and moderate-income unit would be built.44 When the city's housing department failed to respond to the board's proposal, a JPC-initiated petition campaign and protest march brought the administration to the bargaining table, but city officials still balked at working within the framework of the community board's plan.45 Stalemate persisted throughout 1986, and not until late the following year did the community board and a new city housing commissioner reach agreement on a compromise plan that dropped the JPC demand for inclusionary zoning but committed the department to a 50-50 formula on cityowned properties. The stated goal of this plan was to produce one thousand market-rate units from the negotiated sale of a number of those properties; sales proceeds, combined with public funds, were slated to subsidize—or "cross-subsidize"—the more or less simultaneous development of one thousand low- and moderate-income apartments. The crosssubsidy agreement also provided for the board and for "various interested housing organizations in the Lower East Side" to play an active role in determining methods of development and models of ownership and management.46 Yet no sooner was the agreement signed than implementation ground to a halt. When anticipated market sales foundered on a sudden downturn in the city's real-estate economy, city officials ruled out moving forward or providing additional subsidies; community groups quarreled with the city, and among themselves, over a new method of implementation. The groups also haggled over the establishment of a new communitycontrolled management structure for whatever lower-income units might be created, deciding eventually on a mutual housing association (MHA) structure but rejecting proposals to affiliate with an emerging national network. Thus the board began to set up, in turn, its own MHA.47 In 1990, developers broke ground on the first phase (two hundred units) of lowerincome housing slated by the compromise plan. Yet again, political obstacles imperiled forward movement, this time compounded by city financial prob-
Urban Movements, Local Control • 121
lems. A second phase of development, to be supported through a combination of low-income housing tax credits as well as uncertain state and city subsidies, set off a rancorous competition among Lower East Side community organizations for development contracts.48 One major change in the movement field of the late 1980s, then, was a pronounced shift by older housing groups from protest and planning to a focus on community development in the Lower East Side. This evolution reflected, to some extent, broader shifts in federal priorities, funding structures, and the emergence of a new provider "industry." Yet although such a change typically is seen as a general drift from community resistance to pragmatic development, its evolution in the Lower East Side did not represent a straightforward shift in tactics. JPC groups continued to use protest and mobilization, though more often now to shore up government commitment and funding support for the compromise plan. Perhaps more to the point, other activists and organizations took up, as we will see, a more confrontational position in their dealings with city authorities. What is certain, however, is that the relative weight and purpose of JPC-centered activity had shifted. A plan with a primarily political purpose—an additional instrument of pressure on city officials as well as a model setting out the principles and need for community-controlled redevelopment—now became the goal of the Lower East Side-based movement itself, at least as defined by JPC groups. In the process, the JPC-centered wing of the movement became much more exclusively bound to the neighborhood. The coalition no longer sought to have an impact on broader city policies but, instead, to carve out a particular redevelopment arrangement for the Lower East Side. In this vein, the city-owned properties in the Lower East Side were viewed not so much as public resources but as neighborhood assets. (One implication of such a distinction soon became evident when certain neighborhood advocates opposed efforts by city officials to place homeless people from outside the Lower East Side into neighborhood low-income housing developments.)49 Intensive efforts by JPC groups to exert a strong measure of governance over the plan and its implementation were, in one sense, quite understandable. Given the lukewarm commitment of the city administration, the lower-income provisions of the plan were otherwise unlikely to be fulfilled. Yet with each step in its campaign focused on wielding tighter control over a neighborhood plan, JPC groups repositioned themselves from acting as participants in a neighborhood-based movement to being quasi-public stewards of the neighborhood and its resources. Even beyond this self-appointed role, signs of provider-group competition at the end of the decade suggested that a second "slippage"
122 • Urban Movements, Local Control
was beginning to take place: stewards of the neighborhood trust were now competing for what looked like neighborhood spoils. The broader movement in the Lower East Side evolved in other ways during this period. Tenant organizing, which earlier had seen a pronounced upsurge, fell off. As gentrification accelerated, in fact, Met Council's Lower East Side branch encountered a harder time attracting residents to its patient, disciplined strategies to organize building associations and conduct rent strikes. Unable to create enduring neighborhood-based networks on a shifting terrain, the branch increasingly focused on advising individual tenants, and many of its volunteer organizers melted away. Met Council's central office, convinced that neighborhood base-building strategies no longer exerted much leverage for broader changes in policy, launched a brief campaign to use short-term squatting actions in abandoned buildings in different parts of the city as a means of pressuring authorities to halt residential evictions.50 The campaign garnered little support or attention, and henceforth Met Council's major focus would return to protecting the city's housing laws. Its Lower East Side branch stayed open and, like GOLES, continued to advise residents, but tenant organizing did not remain a strong presence in the neighborhood movement. And as Met Council's role in the Lower East Side receded, so did a major organizational bridge between neighborhood and city. In the meantime, the militant wing of neighborhood-based activism reemerged with different leadership. The narrowing focus of JPC-centered activism had left a vacuum for mobilization around broader issues of development. Furthermore, the negotiated housing agreement itself dramatized to many observers the diminishing returns of the JPC strategy in a city where displacement and homelessness continued unabated. Militant homesteaders and squatters, in turn, condemned the compromise as a sellout.51 When Tompkins Square Park, which had attracted a growing homeless encampment, became the object of police efforts to impose a curfew, demonstrators clashed with police. One night in August 1988, police officers brutally attacked a small band of peaceful demonstrators, as well as larger groups of onlookers and casual passersby. This "police riot" attracted intensive media coverage, and threw embarrassed city authorities onto the defensive. The harsh spotlight on government efforts to support gentrification and displacement served to reenergize movement strategies of protest and confrontation. A new militancy centered on "defending the park"—that is, on protecting the right of homeless people to live in the park until the city administration fundamentally altered its policies on homelessness and
Urban Movements, Local Control • 123
public space—seemed to be the key to reviving the housing movement in the Lower East Side.52 The social and organizational complexities of this community-based resistance effort have been examined effectively by a number of analysts.53 During the course of the 1980s, Tompkins Square Park itself had become a gathering place for an enormously heterogeneous array of social groups, both neighborhood residents and nonresident users. The park also became a place of refuge for growing numbers of homeless people, most of them black and Latino men, who gradually established fugitive domiciles in various corners of the park. After the police riot, activists who referred to themselves as squatters or "anarchists" (and whose neighborhood base lay in a number of the area's abandoned buildings) often took the lead in resisting further city efforts to clear out occupants or close down the park. Linking the curfew issue and the cause of the park's several hundred homeless residents to their own advocacy of squatting, these radical activists rearticulated an antigentrification agenda that centered on the right to occupy parks and unused buildings until New York City created permanent housing for the homeless.54 Subsequent police "sweeps" of the park (in which makeshift shelters were knocked down and residents forced to relocate) failed to disperse the homeless and fueled further protests. The park soon contained a number of semipermanent shanty settlements, which coexisted in an unstable ecology with other park users as well as city maintenance and security workers. After a national housing demonstration in Washington, D.C., in October 1989, a number of Tompkins Square Park residents declared their encampment to be a "Tent City." A standing political demand for alternative housing, the encampment also made the park itself the key battlefield in the fight against gentrification. Squatting as a strategic action now took center stage, as New York City activists debated its increasing prominence and uncertain potential for generating political pressure on government housing policies.55 For protagonists in the Lower East Side, the movement to defend the park came to take on, as Neil Smith has observed, the image of a "last stand" against gentrification.56 Yet this stark image, implying a clear conflict between two contending sides, fails to capture the intensifying political confusion within the neighborhood-based movement. After a brief moment of community-wide solidarity that followed the police riot in 1988, Lower East Side residents became, in fact, sharply divided over the park issue, and Mele has pointed out that the emerging cleavages cut across traditional class- and racebased solidarities.57 Key neighborhood groups—park users, liberal housing
124 • Urban Movements, Local Control
activists, churches, residents of nearby blocks—were often deeply split over the defending-the-park strategy. Homeless residents also were divided over the strategy of making the park a battleground against gentrification.58 JPC organizations were mixed in their reactions, and although the coalition's failure to take a solidaristic position was strongly criticized by militants, the JPC's own relationship with city housing officials did not seem to benefit much either. Other activists grew frustrated at the park issue's prominence within the movement, or became turned off by the inflated rhetoric (as in such slogans as "Gentrification Is Genocide") used by certain radicals. Rhetorical charges and countercharges ("JPC mafia sellouts," "middle-class kids playing revolutionaries") flew between groups that once had tolerated, if not embraced, one another. Thus, while protagonists of the defendthe-park movement tended to depict the resistance as a starkly polarizing issue—one that pitted, in a productive way, a principled neighborhood against a treacherous and reactionary city—it was not difficult for journalists and others to find as many opinions on the issue as there were neighborhood residents and stakeholders.59 In this sense, it was not surprising that after a brief "united front" in 1988, radical activists were no longer able to mobilize large numbers of supporters and demonstrators to defend the park. The divisive impacts of the park battles, like those engendered by the JPC pursuit of a neighborhood plan, resulted in part from a bifurcation be-
Tompkins Square Park eviction, 1989. Photograph by Donna Binder.
Urban Movements, Local Control • 125
tween pragmatic and militant activism. In effect, the split of the Lower East Side-based movement ended up weakening both camps. The JPC, as we have seen, struggled to implement a plan it could not control. The squatter militants, for their part, tried to draw a line against gentrification at Tompkins but, without broader support from more mainstream groups, would enjoy little chance of holding it there. To some extent, this split was itself the product of inevitable tensions within a movement, especially one facing powerful forces of urban transformation and a local administration long neglectful of housing issues. Yet even as political conditions in New York were beginning to open up during the second half of the 1980s, the split in the Lower East Side was intensified by the overwhelming focus on the neighborhood taken by both camps. JPC's commitment to implementing its plan set the coalition on a narrowing road of neighborhood control in which its own claims to broader leadership would seem increasingly compromised. The battle over the park, by the same token, tied militants to the defense of neighborhood turf, an agenda that was not even fully supported by its natural constituents. Both approaches to "defending the neighborhood," therefore, tended to narrow the political focus of the movement even as each undermined its own community base. The two strategies would also lead the two sides directly into conflict, battling to control the same Lower East Side.
Fighting over the Neighborhood The first half of the 1990s was a period of disintegration for both movement camps in the Lower East Side. On one side, fragmentation within the pragmatic JPC coalition became manifest in a Darwinian competition for development contracts. This struggle resulted not only in the demise of several venerable organizations but also in repeated episodes of extremely turbulent intracommunity conflict. These multiplying divisions between erstwhile allies soon spread to conflicts inside the surviving organizations, as residents and leaders of each of the emerging community-based development projects clashed over issues of control and accountability. On the other side of the Lower East Side-based movement field, radicals were dealt a major defeat when city police and park authorities moved in to shut down Tompkins Square Park in June 1991. Their base now circumscribed to the embattled "squats," militants faced concentrated campaigns by city authorities to evict them. These evictions were increasingly supported not only by the traditionally progressive JPC organizations but also by a conservative not-in-my-backyard (Nimby) faction that shortly rose to dominance. For several years, in fact, community activism in the Lower East Side
126 • Urban Movements, Local Control
took the form of a community-based war of all against all. By the mid1990s, a series of spectacular, military-style raids by city police, resulting in the eviction of a large concentration of the remaining squatters from their buildings on East 13th Street, would establish a kind of street-theatrical coda to the demise of the Lower East Side-based housing movement. During earlier years of the movement, JPC leaders had tended to see squatters as misguided idealists. But over time, the coalition's own pursuit of redevelopment rights to city-owned properties recast squatters as obstacles to organizational self-interests. For the squatters, branding the JPC-led agreement a sellout was not simply an expression of radical principle. Properties slated for development by the agreement came to include growing numbers of buildings occupied by squatters themselves. In this way, the intensified neighborhood focus of both camps put the narrow self-interests of the two sides on a collision course. Embodied quite concretely in a sharpening struggle to control the future of the land, the neighborhood stakes of both factions ensured that each gain by either side became a zero-sum proposition. It was the abrupt closing of Tompkins Square Park in 1991 that signaled the beginning of the end of the housing movement in the Lower East Side. After a year of relative quiet, during which neighborhood conservatives had agitated for police action and the local community board sought to work out a peaceful resolution, a brief confrontation between squatter activists and police was followed by a retaking of the park by a force of three hundred riot police.60 Authorities ousted homeless residents and all park users, and then closed and fenced off the park. For several months demonstrators protested the closing, but their numbers soon dwindled. The defeat, coupled with the dispersal of the former park residents, threw radical housing activists back on their heels. Although not entirely self-inflicted, their failure was traceable in part to the ways in which the park battles shifted housing-movement claims. Once the movement's immediate demand (for the right to occupy the park until the homeless were permanently housed) was refused by the city administration, a continued defense of the park not only alienated growing numbers of potential allies but also undermined the political terrain on which housing issues were being fought out. In effect, the approach redefined the problem of homelessness—first, from a lack of affordable housing to the legitimate use of public space, and subsequently to a question of the legitimate use of the police—with each step narrowing the potential base of broader community support.61 In political terms, moreover, the Tompkins defeat only emboldened an emerging group of assertive Lower East Side conservatives whose agenda was to accelerate
Urban Movements, Local Control • 127
neighborhood gentrification. Later that same year, their leader, Antonio Pagan, who was the former director of a JPC-member organization called Lower East Side Coalition Housing Development (LESCHD), narrowly won election to the New York City Council, defeating longtime incumbent Miriam Friedlander.62 Pagan's victory put an official stamp on the defeat of progressive housing activism in the Lower East Side, while also setting the stage for new levels of factional strife in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, the JPC-dominated "pragmatic" wing imploded. As the neighborhood redevelopment plan slowly moved forward in the early 1990s, leaders of Lower East Side community housing groups who had often used the term "feeding frenzy" to describe the actions of for-profit property developers in the area now found themselves in an aggressive, no-holdsbarred competition for development subsidies. Conflicts between housing providers for site control over properties and for nonprofit development contracts resulted in vicious political infighting and a series of highly public feuds. These rivalries also made the turf wars endemic to community organizations ethnically and racially charged. Traditionally, groups had avoided direct competition by respecting their mutual "catchment areas," territories whose boundaries were generally set out in service contracts with the city's housing department. As funding sources diversified to include private-sector investors and nonprofit intermediaries, however, and as the numbers of undeveloped sites dwindled, groups began to bid for projects outside their traditional areas. New groups entered the field, such as Asian-Americans For Equality (AAFE). Formerly a social-action group based in Chinatown, AAFE competed head to head with established Latino housing groups such as LESCHD and Pueblo Nuevo. When AAFE won financing from the city's housing department and the Enterprise Foundation to rehabilitate three buildings north of Houston Street in 1993, Pueblo Nuevo and LESCHD cried foul, reasserting their right to develop housing within their catchment areas and questioning the integrity of the contracting process. The racial differences between the factions soon moved to the fore. When a LESCHD spokesperson implied that Latino organizations should get priority for housing in traditionally Latino areas, AAFE's housing director shot back, "We do not build Asian' housing."63 Corruption charges flew on both sides, and Councilmember Pagan, supporting his former organization, was accused of using his influence to delay governmental approval of the project.64 Most of the housing providers, in turn, clashed repeatedly with squatters, who now occupied many of the remaining undeveloped city-owned properties in the Lower East Side. Community board meetings, never placid in the best of times, became free-for-alls; on several
128 • Urban Movements, Local Control
occasions, police were called in to separate board members and restore order.65 In the process, all sides tended to ignore the major problem posed by the neighborhood-based process itself: too many community housing groups pursuing a shrinking supply of city-owned properties. Also lost in the melee were larger questions of community interest. Beyond the ever-escalating interorganizational conflicts over turf and resources, there were even divisive challenges within organizations for those community-development providers that survived the shakeout. The RAIN network of homesteaders, which had emerged from the 1980s with a promising community land trust in place, now battled internal disorganization when members refused to make binding commitments to keep their rehabbed units affordable.66 Even a stronger organization such as Cooper Square struggled, facing sharp challenges from neighborhood residents when it attempted to set up a limited-equity MHA to manage the rehabilitation of housing on the old renewal site.67 The group was slow to devote energy and resources to organizing residents, a crucial endeavor for MHAs. While also hampered by poor support from city housing officials and the outright opposition of Councilmember Pagan, Cooper Square's own leaders stirred up distrust and disunity within the association. These kinds of struggles were common, of course, to organizations attempting to evolve from social-action group to development partner, and over time Lower East Side-based community developers such as Cooper Square succeeded in setting up innovative community structures and creating or preserving hundreds of units of affordable, integrated housing.68 Yet when viewed from a movement perspective, and when measured against the original ambitions of Lower East Side housing activists, the inward turn of these groups seems to have been magnified by a narrowly neighborhood-based communitydevelopment approach. Beyond the zero-sum competitions for sites and subsidies, balkanization of community development at the neighborhood level meant that even successful projects enjoyed no institutionalized process by which their structures—or their political impacts—might grow beyond the neighborhood. Perhaps most disheartening were indications, in a study of MHAs conducted by John Krinsky and Sarah Hovde, that the associations tended to demobilize neighborhood residents or to channel their energies into community building within organizations rather than more broadly. In effect, as many Lower East Side activists stepped away from mobilization to build their organizations and projects, and as others pursued conflict strategies that marginalized the militant factions, each group ended up whittling down the community allegiances of residents and stakeholders.
Urban Movements, Local Control • 129
Squatters wait for police on East 13th Street, 1995. Photograph by Andrew Liechtenstein.
The political consequences of movement demise and community disarray were ultimately demonstrated by a spectacular series of street conflicts in the mid-1990s. Five buildings on East 13th Street became the focus of dramatic engagements—part street battles, part street theater—when New York City police officers attempted to take them back from squatters. These onceabandoned buildings, occupied for many years by roughly seventy-five to one hundred squatters, had been slated for rehabilitation under the compromise agreement signed by city housing officials and Lower East Side community board members. Refusing to vacate, the squatters argued that their continuous occupancy, as well as the work they had performed to fix up the buildings, ought to earn them recognition as legal occupants. Instead, the city of New York petitioned the courts to evict the squatters, claiming without much evidence that the five buildings posed an "imminent danger" to occupants.69 When after several years a state appellate court granted permission for city authorities to vacate the buildings, a police action "befitting a small invasion" (as a front-page New York Times article described it) then ensued. Hundreds of riot police, personally overseen by Police Commissioner William Bratton and backed by helicopters as well as an armored tank-like vehicle, prepared to seize the buildings as squatters formed human chains or barricaded themselves inside the buildings. After a prolonged standoff, platoons of officers stormed the buildings, arresting and
130 • Urban Movements, Local Control
"I'm here to save no one": squatter on East 13th Street, 1995. Photograph by Andrew Liechtenstein.
evicting their occupants.70 Some weeks later, a band of squatters briefly reoccupied two buildings under the cover of Independence Day fireworks.71 After the police had emptied the buildings several times, authorities cordoned off the entire block, set up a twenty-four-hour command post, and regulated all pedestrian traffic on the street. The block remained under fulltime police occupation for another two years, until the buildings were fully renovated by a community developer (LESCHD) and occupied by new residents.72 The battle over East 13th Street represented a discouraging, but quite telling, late chapter for the Lower East Side housing movement. The most striking aspect of the conflict was not the defeat of the squatters, nor even the remarkable show of force that had been mounted to subdue them, but the near-total absence of community support on their behalf. Although the protracted sieges brought hundreds of community residents into the street, most were there as curious spectators rather than militant supporters. Notably absent were dozens of Lower East Side housing organizations and their members. Most of these groups, following a decade of internecine conflict, supported quietly (or quite stridently in the case of LESCHD) the removal of the squatters, who in any case had often alienated potential supporters. The confrontations themselves drew considerable media coverage but did little to refocus the public agenda on issues of displacement and affordable hous-
Urban Movements, Local Control • 131
ing. Taking place on political terrain favorable to a hard-line administration, the conflicts in fact provided authorities with the opportunity to reinforce, in spectacular fashion, the political triumph of their own public-ordercentered vision of urban community. For all their sound and fury, then, the East 13th Street episodes were not a community-defining battleground but a dismal consequence of decade-long movement disintegration.
New Beginnings? This chapter has focused on the evolution of a Lower East Side-based housing movement over the course of nearly two decades. In the process, this evolution has told a different Lower East Side story. The major theme was not the overwhelming power of globalization, nor the co-optation of community development, nor even the self-destructive consequences of militancy. Instead, this account has emphasized the fragmenting impacts of "neighborhoodism." Theories of globalization do not by themselves explain the fate of movements. Broad discussions of globalization tend to imply that community fragmentation itself is the direct consequence of an emerging spatial order within cities or of a radical disempowerment of the nation-state. Yet the comparative study of cities has not supported the notion of a new spatial order, while confirming in key respects the enduring influence of the state.73 Earlier chapters of this book have argued that, since the 1970s, government policies in the United States have often responded to international economic challenges by supporting destructive, short-term-oriented urban development with manifestly uneven benefits—a process that I have called primitive globalization. Central to this process have been national policies that encourage unproductive economic competition between cities as well as city policies that spur destabilizing forms of neighborhood change. Such policy measures fostered a politics of fragmentation, but they also provided new issues—neighborhood abandonment and gentrification, publicsector retrenchment, wasteful subsidies for corporate expansion—for political actors to contest, though initially at the neighborhood level. Given the difficult constraints of this political context, community mobilization in the Lower East Side began the early 1980s with great vitality, heterogeneity, and promise. The movement's multiple strategic tendencies, from tenant organizing and protest to self-help homesteading, represented a source of strength, as activists across those tendencies often linked neighborhood survival to a broader politics of the city; in this sense, the movement was based in the neighborhood without being fully confined by it. Over the course of the decade, however, community groups came to define
132 • Urban Movements, Local Control
"saving the neighborhood" as a political project in which the neighborhood itself became both singular agent and privileged terrain. In doing so, militant and pragmatic actors alike ended up pursuing larger goals through the control of neighborhood turf. By the early 1990s, the two camps, already divided, began to disintegrate into factional disputes that were partly an outgrowth of earlier neighborhood-bound strategies. This account has underscored certain self-defeating consequences of a neighborhood focus. By emphasizing the fragmenting impacts of the movement's narrowed base, I am not suggesting that the powerful and destructive forces that confronted activists or the Lower East Side community should be ignored. Earlier chapters have made clear that larger economic and political changes, as well as shortsighted actions by local officials, were transforming the city and its neighborhoods in ways that were often harmful for lower-income residents. These broader changes, moreover, served to reconfigure the opportunity structure for urban movements, which initially faced few political openings beyond the neighborhood level. Yet to understand urban movements in a global age, it is also important to examine the ways in which they seek to reconstruct community on favorable or unfavorable political terrain. For this reason, it would become critical, over time, for activist groups in the Lower East Side and other areas to project power beyond the neighborhood if they were to influence policy or the remaking of the city. Such a strategy the Lower East Side-based groups did not, over time, pursue; whether or not explicit opportunities existed for such a course of action is a question for legitimate (though perhaps inconclusive) debate. What the groups did do, however, was attempt to defend neighborhood residents by controlling neighborhood space, an approach that served to intensify factional divisions to the point of almost infinite regress. In this sense, I am suggesting that the weaknesses of the Lower East Side-based movement were both structured and self-inflicted, a testament to the limited opportunities for community influence in the latetwentieth-century U.S. city, but also a verdict on the "enclave consciousness" of neighborhood-bound organizations and their leaders.74 Primitive globalization, in short, ensnared even well-intentioned activists in a politics of fragmentation and retreat. Like any community, the Lower East Side is a particular case, its story in many ways the product of unique conditions of time and place. This community's unusual levels of social heterogeneity and combativeness probably accounted for conflicts that were extreme in intensity if not in kind. Yet a similar political logic may have been at work in other urban neighborhoods of the period. In New York alone, there was a surge of neighborhood-based
Urban Movements, Local Control • 133
organizing in many areas of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, much of it (as in the Lower East Side) producing certain useful community-based housing initiatives without registering strong impacts on development politics or the larger transformation of the city.75 In a number of other U.S. cites, such as San Francisco, Boston, Minneapolis, and Chicago, community mobilizations helped spur brief or extended shifts in local political priorities— in part by pursuing a broader agenda—while also struggling with many of the internal contradictions addressed here.76 Seen from this perspective, then, the story of the Lower East Side may pose and illuminate a number of broader issues with respect to neighborhoods and activism. One of these issues relates to the heightened appeal of neighborhood as a surrogate for community in the United States during the past quarter century. Grassroots activists were not the only social actors who touted the long-term possibilities of neighborhood-based organizing, planning, and development. Communitarian theorists, as well, implied that neighborhood associations might lie at the heart of a much-needed democratic renewal in the nation's cities.77 Of course, communitarians often counterposed their own emphasis on consensus, self-restraint, and moral obligation to what they saw as the conflict- and demand-oriented approaches of liberal and radical activists. What surfaced in both approaches, however, seemed to be the notion—or at least the hope—that community building would not only begin but could somehow also remain and flourish in a sphere that was distinct from market and polity. If the urban politics of the past two decades is any lesson, however, there are serious limits to the capacity of the neighborhood to serve as such a sphere. It is a paradox that the neighborhood, such an accessible and seemingly powerful terrain for civic engagement, should so often prove to be disempowering for lower-income citizens. This is not always the case. Neighborhood-based activism has contributed to historic mobilizations on behalf of racial equality, successful confrontations with financial institutions over disinvestment (so-called redlining), and grassroots campaigns resulting in significant improvements in public services and governmental accountability. It has been supported by neighborhood-based service providers of great ingenuity, commitment, and innovation. Yet only in exceptional cases has neighborhood initiative launched a comprehensive community-controlled redevelopment process with the capacity to deliver widespread benefits to lower-income residents.78 The very accessibility of the neighborhood-based organization continues to make it a crucial entryway for engagement and activism, as well as a useful vehicle for certain kinds of service provision. From a movement perspective, however, the
134 • Urban Movements, Local Control
neighborhood performs a useful function to the extent that it serves as a springboard for the mobilization of lower-income demands beyond the neighborhood. The political forces that condition the opportunities for neighborhoodbased movements remain consistent. They include the shifting contours of the state, the potential involvement of lower-income residents, and an expanding terrain of inclusion and impact. In the following chapter, I will return to issues of urban movements and the prospects for community action in an age of neoliberal globalization. In the meantime, perhaps, an example of neighborhood mobilization from the late 1990s might suggest something of its enduring potential, as well as provide a more hopeful coda to the story of the Lower East Side. For much of the late twentieth century, public housing tenants remained an invisible political actor. In the Lower East Side, they were generally ignored by community housing coalitions and by local representatives, except at election time. Beginning in 1995, however, longtime neighborhood activist Margarita Lopez, a former homesteader and JPC leader, led a campaign to organize "the projects." With the help of activist organizations old and new, neighborhood forums were held to connect issues of concern to residents of both private and public housing. In response to a congressional bill to deregulate public housing, Lower East Side residents played a leading role in a nationwide campaign of opposition. This resistance helped drive a wedge between moderate and radical Republicans, which in turn scuttled proposals to abolish public housing entirely.79 Neighborhood organizers also helped stitch together a citywide coalition that successfully killed local proposals to "marketize" public-housing units in ways that threatened housing opportunities for the poor. This campaign set the stage, in turn, for the following year's battle, led by Met Council and other citywide organizations, to preserve the rent-stabilization system in New York City. It provided, moreover, a core group of mobilized voters for Lopez's successful campaign in 1997 to win the Lower East Side's City Council seat. Running against a primary competitor with deep pockets and political clout, Lopez won a surprising victory—with the help of 450 volunteers and 4,000 new voters from the East Side housing projects—in a campaign that championed affordable housing over a local politics of "exclusion."80 Although perhaps not dramatic or transformative, this series of actions represented an encouraging resurgence of coalition-building activism in the Lower East Side. Such steps began, in small ways, to rebuild a divided community. In doing so, they reaffirmed the role of government in protecting community residents. These actions also crossed a number of old
Urban Movements, Local Control • 135
boundaries—between private and public, low-income and middle-income, Latino and Anglo—and drew together different neighborhood-based constituencies into organizing, protest, and electoral mobilization. And in the process, through addressing local issues, these mobilizations again began to project the power of residents beyond the neighborhood.
This page intentionally left blank
5
Beyond Primitive Globalization Policy, Activism, and the Metropolis
This study has claimed that politics and state policies influence processes of economic development in a global age. Preceding chapters supported this contention by examining the logic of state action and urban development in the United States at different levels over the course of a twenty-five-year period. The intention has been to locate—through highly contextualized analyses of the revival of New York City, of the gentrification of the Lower East Side, and of the evolving strategies of neighborhood-based movement factions within the Lower East Side—the politics of globalization at multiple scales of the U.S. urban system. The central claim of the book was elaborated through three linked arguments. First, an underappreciated characteristic of public policies in the United States over the past quarter century was their use of governmental resources to spur short-term-oriented, and often socially destructive, forms of urban development. Second, this pattern of political action encouraged over time a downward spiral in the disposition and capacity of government to address collective social-welfare concerns. Third, these operations tended to detach citizens, residents, and governmental actors from the state itself, making the state not only a facilitator of neoliberal globalization but also a victim. Overall, this kind of dynamic was seen to constitute a core component of the U.S. response to late-twentieth-century economic challenges, a response that I have called primitive globalization. This chapter explores the implications of the study for future policy and action. A strong globalism, one that envisions an inexorable erosion of the power of state institutions, has seriously questioned the ability of subglobal activities—and particularly the capacity of national and local policies—to protect the social welfare of disadvantaged groups or to 137
138 • Beyond Primitive Globalization
advance a progressive political agenda. Because of what it perceives to be a heightened structural dependency of the nation-state on cross-border economic activity, left-of-center variants of this kind of globalism tend to suggest political strategies oriented around the building of transnational movements or cosmopolitan democracy. In pursuit of such strategies, recent antiglobalization movements have advanced crucial demands, mobilized significant numbers of supporters, and, at certain moments, generated effective pressure on international agencies to consider more stabilizing and equitable approaches to world governance. Yet it does not belittle these accomplishments to point out that a number of other analyses carry strategic implications that depart significantly from those of strong globalism, and that these approaches deserve renewed scrutiny as alternative or complementary responses to neoliberal economic development.1 This study has suggested that part of what passes for globalization results instead from governmental and political activity at multiple urban scales. Meanwhile, research in three distinct areas—urban governance, regional development, and comparative welfare-state politics—suggests a range of possible subglobal political opportunities for addressing issues of social inequality or community fragmentation in a globalizing era. In one such area, for example, certain urban scholars see emerging local strategies or a "new political culture" as enabling cities to develop community-government partnerships that move beyond class- and race-divided politics. From another field, enhanced metropolitan-governance structures in several parts of the United States have generated vigorous debate over whether business and middle-class dissatisfactions with sprawl might also address concerns about poverty, inequality, and racial exclusion. Meanwhile, a number of welfare-state scholars argue that a "new politics" offers considerable potential for sustaining nation-based institutions and policies across much of the developed world, even in the face of international economic pressures. In different ways, then, new-politics perspectives in each of these often unconnected literatures represent a significant analytical counterpoint to globalism and suggest the continued (or even renewed?) viability of three different political projects—the progressive city, the new regionalism, and the welfare state—pitched at three distinct levels of policy and action. The following discussion relies on the notion of primitive globalization, and on the empirical analyses that have been guided by it, in order to address the strategic prospects of these projects. After reviewing the major insights of this study, I consider its potential contribution to recent debates over the progressive city, regionalism, and the welfare state, focusing particularly on the United States but within a cross-national frame. The pur-
Beyond Primitive Globalization • 139
pose of this discussion is to draw out and assess, through an examination of the opportunities for political influence and policy innovation within a comparative context, the strategic implications of these debates for socialequity-oriented agendas. In the process, it becomes evident that these newpolitics perspectives offer compelling insights and, in varying degrees, useful counterpoints to narrow and debilitating notions of globalization. Examining these perspectives together, moreover, helps clarify what emerge as inescapable connections between welfare-state policies, urban development, and patterns of metropolitan governance. By the same token, however, unsatisfactory conceptions of the state and U.S. politics may lead new-politics approaches to underestimate the dangerous potential for intensified polarization and fragmentation inherent in current developments—even in well-meaning "solutions" to the very problems these perspectives seek to address. Because recurrent patterns of government activity exacerbate inequality and social exclusion, I argue that the critical task, for political strategies in all three areas, is to expand the capacity of the state to act productively, democratically, and in pursuit of collective social goals. In such an approach, building this capacity, and enhancing democratic engagement, are seen as central avenues for anchoring public responses to international economic integration in a logic of state responsibility, popular accountability, and social equity. This argument implies that any serious effort to move beyond primitive globalization—whether this involves strengthening the welfare state, building progressivism within the city, or pursuing a redistributive regionalism—must focus not so much on designing innovative policies or on elaborating new levels of governance as on the engagement and effective mobilization of underrepresented political actors: disaffected voters, citizens, and urban residents. Centered on this criterion, the following discussion suggests that although various subglobal levels do offer opportunities, the most critical arena for the involvement of the disenfranchised—and the most powerful lever for reshaping the U.S. engagement with globalization— is national politics.
Restating Globalization, Remaking New York This book has presented a new conception of the relationship between state and globalization in the United States. Challenging notions of globalization as an economic logic, such a conception also departs from approaches that center on the constructive capacities of "developmental" states. In place of these approaches, I have proposed a theory of primitive globalization that emphasizes the role of reactive, often destructive government policies—
140 • Beyond Primitive Globalization
makeshift measures to deregulate and subsidize business, displace the urban poor, and disassemble the welfare state—in establishing short-termoriented kinds of economic development. Because these actions also serve to uproot or separate many social actors (corporations, citizens, urban residents) from inherited sociopolitical conditions, including from the state itself, I have argued that this kind of state operates as both facilitator and victim of neoliberal globalization. Subsequent chapters have explored the implications of this theoretical approach for understanding urban transformation at several levels. One such implication is that national government remains, for better and for worse, a key influence over the ways in which cities pursue economic development. Chapter 2, for instance, examined the dynamic interplay between national and local actors in delivering the long and unsteady "rebirth" of New York. Beginning with responses to the city's fiscal crisis of the 1970s, national and local leaders came to build a neoliberal urban regime— a pattern of using state policies to stimulate interlocal economic competition and to fuel the urban land market—that has tended to exacerbate many of New York's challenges, from housing shortages to economic instabilities. By underlining the important contribution of this kind of politics and governmental action to urban redevelopment, the chapter challenges accounts that perceive the revival of New York as simply a local accommodation to broader economic forces such as globalization. In the process, however, this chapter also departs in key respects from those approaches that highlight the mediating functions of autonomous governmental institutions: here, government did not so much mediate as accentuate the destabilizing impacts of economic change. This attention to the disruptive impacts of certain kinds of public action was also used to confront dominant approaches to urban change at the neighborhood level. Chapter 3 examined the influence of a number of political and social forces—local policies, colliding resettlement patterns, community mobilization—on "neighborhood transition" in Manhattan's Lower East Side over the course of three decades. Beginning with a consideration of the area's multiple neighborhood ecologies, this chapter explored the contingent and contested elements of gentrification in order to better understand the political space for strategic intervention. By focusing on the shifting impacts of various forms of public action on processes of gentrification that are typically seen as market-driven, this frame suggests that spatial complexity and government complicity offer potential local levers for stabilizing or "heterogenizing" neighborhood change. Yet by demonstrating how New York City government ultimately squandered many
Beyond Primitive Globalization • 141
opportunities to use its influence to promote more balanced redevelopment in the Lower East Side, this account also highlights a disturbing tendency by neoliberal policies to facilitate lower-income community destruction and displacement above and beyond the impacts of structural economic change. Within this kind of political environment, it is often left to neighborhood-based activists to hold state actors accountable to the urban community. Chapter 4 examined the internal dynamics of the Lower East Side-based mobilization as it evolved during the 1980s and 1990s. Linking the movement's early vibrancy to the fact that it was based in the neighborhood but not bound by it, this account traced the internal divisions and diminishing returns that accompanied a shift in strategy from transforming the city to "saving the neighborhood." By focusing on how such a strategy led groups to pursue larger political aims through the control of neighborhood turf, it became clear that this "neighborhoodism" on the part of community activists—especially within an urban environment shaped by destabilizing economic forces and shortsighted policies—exacerbated the weakness and fragmentation of militant and pragmatic camps alike. Suggesting the enduring promise of neighborhood activism but also its inherent limitations when trapped within a localist frame, this section of the study emphasized the crucial need for neighborhood-based activism to serve as a springboard for projecting lower-income demands into the city. Taken together, these various analyses have furnished a vertical case study of the politics of globalization. What these accounts have in common is an attempt to understand, at different levels, the logic of political and governmental action in relation to economic development in late-twentiethcentury urban America. By focusing on the influence of government policies on a "global city" such as New York, it becomes clear that the state, even in an environment of increasing international integration, retains important strategic capacities to shape the ways in which cities respond to change. It is also apparent, however, that these capacities are often used to exert a socially destructive or debilitative influence—indeed, that in the United States there is a recurring pattern whereby state policies tend to facilitate shortterm-oriented kinds of economic development in the metropolis. In doing so, neoliberal policies exacerbate urban problems of polarization, instability, and fragmentation, particularly (but not exclusively) for lower-income community residents. These consequences are especially evident in the kinds of housing problems that are now being recognized—locally, regionally, and nationally—as constituting a major crisis of affordability. Yet limits to globalization also point to opportunities for change. The
142 • Beyond Primitive Globalization
evident influence of government policies on economic development, the enduring capacities of community actors, the recent emergence of pressures to address urban problems on a broader spatial scale—these realities suggest a structured potential for policy and activism to take on a more responsibly effective role, even in the absence of dramatic reforms in global governance. The following discussion examines a number of political analyses and strategies, emerging from the work of scholars and activists in disparate fields, that may offer promise for building the capacity for effective public action in the interests of urban residents.
The Progressive City More than two decades ago, political scientist Paul Peterson argued in his book City Limits that the mobility of economic actors makes cities unlikely to pursue redistributive policies. Contemporary globalism offers, if anything, a more emphatic version of this argument. It is true that a number of claims suggested by Peterson's influential work—that localities can be analyzed using utility models, that cities have unitary interests, that local officials are simply "dependent" on market forces—have been effectively challenged. A good many urban analyses, along with the present study, also suggest that U.S. policies and politics are partly to blame for the limits experienced by cities. For several decades, scholars and planners have labored to develop notions of the "progressive city," and to put these notions into practice in a number of cities. Yet the harsh reality remains that in the intervening years it has been difficult to sustain departures from elite-oriented strategies of urban growth, and this brute fact underscores the limits of a progressive localism. This fact has not prevented the emergence of a significant body of research that carefully examines the local alternatives that have emerged. Much work has been undertaken within the framework of urban regime theory, which contends that because shifting coalitions of public and private actors shape the direction of urban development, there remains significant potential for more balanced or community-oriented local policies.2 Although this study also suggests such potential endures, regime theory's weaknesses often hamper the analysis of urban politics, even on the theory's own "home turf," namely U.S. cities. One problem is that an emphasis on the structured possibility for local progressivism tends to encourage (perhaps hopeful) analysts to overstate its actual emergence.3 A second problem is that the concept of urban regime often devolves, in analytical practice, into a notion of local regime, a slippage that directs attention away from the ways in which the governance of cities is powerfully shaped by their
Beyond Primitive Globalization • 143
national environment. To make these criticisms is not to dismiss out of hand the potential for effective movements or better policies at the local level. But it does suggest that if national government in the United States continues to play a powerful role in urban governance (as argued in chapter 2), local alternatives to neoliberalism are unlikely to flourish or to be sustained over time unless they come to be supported by changes in nationalpolicy arrangements. Here, in fact, lies the ultimate limit of localism: Even where an alternative or progressive localism has emerged and "made a difference," its survival in any one city depends on a fortuitous confluence of local economic and fiscal stability, electoral mobilization, and effective leadership that are unlikely to coincide over the long term. This fragility means that progressive or liberal administrations (i.e., those that move beyond neoliberal strategies centered on ad hoc development subsidies and regulating the poor) do not leave behind durable institutional legacies for successors, nor do they ratchet up standards in other cities. Despite these constraints, certain local administrations have pursued useful tasks. One innovation has been to pursue meaningful community partnerships. Often motivated initially by fiscal load-shedding or political co-optation, certain of these "collaborations" evolve into good-faith efforts to support neighborhood-guided redevelopment or community-based service provision (as occurred for a time in the Lower East Side; see chapter 3). Indeed, the rough logic behind such partnerships—that state principals provide funding and formal accountability, while community-based agents organize residents or deliver services—remains compelling. The rub is that the conditions under which such partnerships operate predispose many of them to fail, or to succeed only in small ways, either because the governmental commitment is too inconstant or the capacities of community actors too often overmatched.4 Acknowledging this dilemma does not mean abandoning these partnerships. But unless stronger conditions for success are established, expectations should remain modest. These constraints also suggest that the large political claims that sometimes are made on the basis of such partnerships—that they precipitate, for example, new local governance arrangements or a "new political culture" marked by qualitatively greater levels of community participation and influence—should be greeted with a great deal of skepticism.5 In a second and less equivocal vindication of localism, state and local governments have also directed their own capital resources to substitute for reduced federal spending. A number of new housing programs have been created in this fashion, but New York's capital-budget-supported plan of the 1980s and 1990s (discussed in chapter 2) seems by far the most significant.6
144 • Beyond Primitive Globalization
This program was not exactly a redistributive program, which was one reason for its political support; housing was dispersed to an array of income groups. Yet Alex Schwartz, in a comprehensive reevaluation, has judged the initiative to be largely successful in its efforts to provide housing, transform poor neighborhoods, replace vacant land, and preserve buildings at risk of abandonment.7 Schwartz also recognizes, as do other sympathetic observers, that the fiscal conditions to support such a program pose a significant challenge. Yet these constraints result in part from tax policies and spending practices that, as my analysis suggested, can and should be altered. Proposals for resumption of a major affordable-housing initiative, in fact, were again attracting strong support among New York's business groups, politicians, and housing activists before the terror attacks of September 2001. A third type of late-twentieth-century local initiative stemmed from invoking the regulatory powers of the local state. Called Type II policies by Edward Goetz, such policies relied mainly on the taxing, land-use, and "exaction" powers of local government in order to require private economic actors to provide certain kinds of public goods.8 Linkage or inclusionaryzoning laws mandated that local developers produce (or provide financial assistance for) lower-income housing units as a small percentage of each housing development or commercial office project they undertook. New laws focused on preventing single-room-occupancy conversion or requiring one-for-one replacement. New York officials tended to reject these kinds of approaches; a commission appointed by Mayor Ed Koch voted down a linkage proposal, and a restrictive SRO conversion law was struck down b the courts. Although exactions became a frequent component of largescale development deals, they were generally negotiated ad hoc and tended to fit developer preference as much as public need. At the neighborhood level, Lower East Side groups pushed for inclusionary zoning, but to no avail. Ironically, while urban scholars focused most of their attention on would-be policy innovations, New York City's old, weakened, and muchmaligned rent-regulation system continued to operate as a brake on hypergentrification because it was too politically popular to abolish. Meanwhile, many of the newer alternative policies and partnerships, both in New York and in other U.S. cities, struggled to survive the harsh policy realm of the 1990s. Federal efforts to cut relief and deconcentrate the poor guide recent local efforts to address the housing crisis and build community.9 Such a historical arc suggests that the final quarter of the twentieth century may have seen the uncertain rise and fall of the progressive city— at least until national policies grow less restrictive. In this sense, Peterson's
Beyond Primitive Globalization • 145
conclusion about city limits remains cogent, not because the theory is compelling but because its empirical predictions are reproduced by a national urban-policy environment that so often undermines local capacities. Discussion will shortly turn to the possibilities for altering this larger environment. But, in the meantime, it is important to recognize that local organizing continues. Coalitions between community and labor recently experienced, in fact, a significant revival in a number of U.S. urban areas, reasserting the right of lower-income urban residents to live in the city. Service-sector unions, with large female and minority memberships, have forged alliances with clergy, community organizations, and consumer groups, often relying on large-scale sectoral organizing campaigns, civil disobedience, and boycotts to make gains.10 Local living-wage laws, which take in a new direction the progressive strategy of "mandating" local benefits in an open economy, have also been the fruit of broad coalition-backed efforts. According to a study by researcher Isaac Martin, twenty-two U.S. cities passed living-wage laws over a five-year period during the late 1990s.11 Bringing together strategies and actors from a number of organizing traditions, these mobilizations have focused directly on the shortcomings of business-subsidy development policies; though not directed toward housing per se, they also address a key economic cause of the housing- affordability crisis. Indeed, more than any other local organizing issue, the living wage not only pushes for the right of the poor to subsist in the gentrifying city, but also holds the local state, and those private economic actors who depend on government contracts, to certain standards of publicly mandated welfare.12 Martin's analysis also demonstrates that the political forces behind these campaigns are not simply local. Although success is explained in part by variation in local political coalitions across cities, most campaigns have been spearheaded by national or interlocal organizing entities, especially ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and IAF (the Industrial Areas Foundation); support by unions has also been important. A similar symbiosis of unions and community groups, benefiting from national and local organizing support, seems to have been responsible for the growing success of grassroots campaigns in Los Angeles.13 In short, even though the "progressive city" as an autonomous local enclave may fade, progressivism in the city remains alive and is even taking on new issues. Political growth and long-term social impacts—for the living wage as much as for earlier alternative-policy initiatives—rest on an ability to expand the numbers of local workers covered and, ultimately, on a capacity to "go national" in order to make a difference at the community level. This kind of scaling-up of a grassroots initiative in order to expand its reach
146 • Beyond Primitive Globalization
on the ground would not be unprecedented; the success of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which has enlarged access to credit in minority neighborhoods, was the product of precisely this kind of fluid political process.14 Expanding on these sorts of policy initiatives ultimately will require a broader political mobilization and electoral realignment. These larger changes may loom as a tall order, but in the long term there seems to be little alternative. It would be convenient if an externally imposed globalizing process were to lead ineluctably to a growing U.S. openness toward those alternatives to neoliberalism still being debated in many other prosperous democratic countries. If the past quarter century is any indication, however, more progressive policy responses to inequality, poverty, and community instability are unlikely to be taken seriously in the United States simply as a consequence of international economic and cultural integration. Indeed, as globalists often point out, the export of Americanstyle neoliberal ideas to other countries shows ideological influence running in the opposite direction. Instead, political risk taking, hard work, and greater awareness of the potential benefits of alternative approaches will be crucial to pushing the national agenda in the United States in a different direction. What sorts of localism might become possible, if national policies were to begin to move in a different, more constructive direction? In a recent comparative collection on globalization and cities, Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen have emphasized that many of the governmental policies that influence spatial patterns within and between cities are not specifically urban or "spatial" policies.15 From economic policies that shape revenues and income shares to social policies that affect access to benefits and services, these kinds of governmental decisions serve to inhibit or to exacerbate the potential for spatial inequality, segregation, and community destabilization. Within member states of the European Union, for instance, the overall levels of public-sector intervention via subsidies and benefits in the fields of housing, health, disability, unemployment, and social life are still relatively high compared to those in the United States. As a result, the welfare state softens sharp barriers, not only between rich and poor citizens but also between rich and poor areas.16 Such place-based disparities as do emerge within this different context present diemselves, in turn, as more amenable to policy actions that are spatially targeted.17 Thus, in certain European countries, it has been possible to raise social concerns about "divided cities" at the national level; to craft national policies that support local responses to negative manifestations of these divisions (e.g., spatial "exclusion"); to recognize, subsequently, that not all forms of spatial-community
Beyond Primitive Globalization • 147
differentiation are either undesirable or amenable to state influence; and then to recast policies in a more calibrated fashion.18 The point is not simply that such an approach seems to draw on the respective strengths of national and local governments to address a spatial problem. There is also the added political benefit that spatial policies in such a context are less likely to be confused with, or seen as a substitute for, broader welfare-state or economic-development policies—or somehow as potential antidotes to structural inequalities. This greater clarity might also protect local innovations from the perception, common in the United States, that such efforts invariably fail. National politics may also play a more subtle role in propelling local measures to address spatial problems in this environment. Even in European countries where urban policies often do not explicitly encourage local initiative, the moderating impacts of national policies on inequality and economic disruption may "permit" (even unintentionally, as it were) a certain latitude for local community-based actors to address contentious urban issues. In a case study of Belleville, a traditionally working-class quartier in Paris, Patrick Simon reports the persistence of a surprising level of social heterogeneity in the face of more than two decades of strong gentrification pressures. Many of the structural and ecological forces of transformation at work in Belleville seem to parallel, in fact, those witnessed in New York's Lower East Side: a nineteenth-century working-class district is reshaped first by European Jewish immigrants, then after World War II by new immigrants (in this case from North Africa and Asia); a wave of gentrification after the 1970s brings growing numbers of native-born middle- and upper-class residents to the area; the various class and ethnic groups struggle to protect their community terrains; and cross-class and interethnic alliances seek to preserve the area's diversity. In the case of Belleville, however, it seems that communities of Asian and North African immigrants have actually expanded into the new housing structures. Indeed, Simon suggests that while both of these ethnic communities must continue to struggle to "maintain their presence," all neighborhood groups coexist in a system of "relative cohabitation." Thus far, at least, the community strategy to preserve diversity continues to triumph over the municipality's efforts to "requalify," or gentrify, the neighborhood—unlike in the Lower East Side.19 The key source of this contrast seems to lie not so much in the actions of the local community organizations or local states (which appear to be fairly similar), but rather in the fact that the national state in France provides a different kind of social and urban regulation.20 This state regulation, in spite of its historic rigidity (which, as Simon points out, inhibits flexible
148 • Beyond Primitive Globalization
national responses to ethnic conflicts), serves to decelerate and buffer, mostly indirectly, the kinds of community destruction brought on by hypergentrification, as it does other destabilizing processes of urban restructuring. In other words, even the French national state, which traditionally has placed little emphasis on local initiative, seems to create conditions that permit local actors to negotiate conflicts between economic development and social cohesion more effectively than does U.S. neoliberalism, with its much-vaunted flexibility.21 The point is not that in France communities remain frozen in place; obviously, Paris neighborhoods gentrify. But government policies accord disadvantaged groups certain resources, as well as breathing space, for negotiating and complicating (in productive ways) the terrain of neighborhood gentrification, displacement, and conflict. This political space enhances, in turn, the potential for local responses to contribute to progress on larger social dilemmas, such as ethnic and racial discrimination. In U.S. cities, and in neoliberal Britain as well, national and urban politics furnishes fewer and fewer opportunities for mobilized neighborhood activism to make this kind of vital contribution.22 The relationship between national responses to globalization and local efforts to negotiate the economic and social differentiation of the city seems especially supportive in a small number of cases. Urban theorist and researcher Susan Fainstein contends that a distinct constellation of political forces have enabled Amsterdam to become the closest available approximation of the just city, or the egalitarian city.23 Much of her explanation for this urban success story focuses on the combined resiliency of the national economy and welfare state of the Netherlands. Over much of Amsterdam's late-twentieth-century history, government played a determining role in the city's physical development, particularly as a funder and planner of housing construction. Because subsidized housing units, as well as recipients of individual housing benefits, are scattered throughout the city, housing policy has sharply restricted spatial inequality by income. Partly as a result of concern that the city was excluding middle-class families who desired to remain in the city, housing policy shifted toward market-rate construction in the 1990s, though this approach was also used to "crosssubsidize" housing provision (see the discussion of this mechanism in chapter 3) for other groups. Although uneven spatial growth is now more evident than in the past, efforts to balance urban development, combined with the intact systems of income redistribution and social housing supported by the Dutch welfare state, are leading to gradual processes of gentrification that do not involve massive displacement of minorities or the formation of large-scale slums or ghettos.24 Such an "urban regime" also spurs
Beyond Primitive Globalization • 149
municipal authorities to accommodate multiple—and even antagonistic— local community interests; Amsterdam squatters, for example, unlike the Lower East Side squatters, seem to have gained significant tenure rights even as middle-class influence over the city was strengthened. These contrasts between Amsterdam and New York may seem dramatic, but Fainstein's analysis suggests that at least some of the differences are more in degree than in kind. Amsterdam is hardly an ideal city: fiscal constraints are real; ethnic and racial segregation is a growing concern; homelessness is on the rise. Conversely, many of the local policy tools used by Amsterdam officials have also been deployed, as we have seen, in New York. But what is strikingly different about this European city is a political environment marked by governmental efforts to wrestle with combined goals of economic growth, equity, and urban social heterogeneity, as well as by a belief that national/local institutional arrangements can work to pursue those goals. Notwithstanding a similar-sounding rhetoric in the United States, the relationship there between the national state and cities undermines the social production of such a consensus and fails to capitalize on the potential strengths of governmental levels. Given this endemic problem, what sorts of steps might bring U.S. cities—and the neoliberal state that persistently constrains and undermines them—closer to balancing short-term growth strategies with a concern for equity and community stability as well as more durable and broad-based forms of economic development? This question permits no easy answer. Although it may be possible to untangle the priority of causes behind a phenomenon such as "urban marginality,"25 and it may be useful to envision a menu of policy measures that might ameliorate it, any real-world response depends on popular support, political alignments, and economic and social conditions that cannot be foreseen. Nevertheless, this study's central argument—that neoliberal policies, by actively disembedding social actors, undermine the capacity of society to engage responsibly with globalization and urban transformation—suggests that strengthening the ability of government to act productively and democratically in the public interest is an urgent task. A major barrier to this task in the United States is the nonparticipation, or outright political exclusion, of much of the populace from any active role in public affairs. Whereas democratic theory maintains correctly that the influence of citizens and residents over their governments is not simply a question of electoral participation, it is inescapable that extremely low voter turnout sets the stage for destructive policies that brazenly cater to privileged interests. Of course, there are a great many analyses of the causes of nonparticipation and
150 • Beyond Primitive Globalization
citizen disengagement, and addressing these issues is well beyond the scope of this study.26 But it is difficult to envision any significant reversal in the recent downward spiral in governmental responsibility that does not depend on greater political participation, particularly by lower-income citizens and residents. Given the self-reinforcing nature of the U.S. neoliberal model as currently constituted, the need to seek out possibilities for democratic agency in the "slack resources" represented by nonparticipating citizens is greater than ever. What is the role for local or community action as part of this project? Looking ahead to the next quarter century, local organizing efforts require a strategy of democratic participation centered on political mobilization. Perhaps taking angry energy from the popular exclusion and political delegitimation witnessed in the contested U.S. election of 2000, local efforts to promote voter organization and participation in national electoral processes may encounter new opportunities over the coming decade. To develop a new activist base in pursuit of electoral reform, however, much of the important mobilizing activity must be local. On the one hand, local community organizations, including neighborhood-based groups, remain vital as bridges or springboards to broader citizen/resident activism, including involvement in political campaigns and electoral reform.27 On the other hand, involvement in broader activities—moving beyond single issues, working in coalitions, linking grassroots constituencies to advocacy organizations— could have healthy impacts on many local groups, enlarging their vision and "heterogenizing" their constituencies. By highlighting the importance of electoral participation and reform, I am not advocating the hijacking of local activism to serve a narrow national-party politics. Focusing on local, immediate, "winnable" issues must remain the day-to-day practice of organizers. Yet a recent survey conducted by Jack Rothman is suggestive: among a dynamic but divided array of Los Angeles-based activist organizations, the only organizing issue that all groups agreed upon as a significant priority was voting.28 Given this level of local fragmentation, it is possible that the right to vote, fueled by a recent sense of legitimate grievance, could again become a significant galvanizing and unifying issue. What remains clear, in the meantime, is that U.S. politics still concentrates the nation's problems in urban areas. This makes it likely that urban crises—which in recent decades have evolved from "fiscal" to "underclass" to "racial" dilemmas—will recur in some fashion, demanding political attention. Urban instability—or, as we will see in the following section, metropolitan instability—can be expected to persist. For growing numbers of
Beyond Primitive Globalization • 151
observers, this unstable metropolis also looms as an expanding terrain of political opportunity.
The New Regionalism Spatial economies in the United States are increasingly regional in scale. The fact that modern urban areas tend to "sprawl" beyond their traditional political boundaries is not new, of course. New York's Consolidation of 1898, for example, which led to the city's present boundaries, constituted an early response to the reality that metropolitan growth was already far outstripping the governmental jurisdictions of the day. Yet the centrifugal development patterns of the past two decades have only accelerated rates of outward expansion, stretching the metropolitan infrastructure across vast distances and effectively regionalizing markets in production, employment, and housing. Along with larger and more complex economies, these metropolitan patterns of development have also led to considerable economic inefficiencies, ecological strains, and fiscal and social inequalities. In response, there is growing discussion of the potential for new metropolitanwide structures to manage growth, redistribute resources, or strengthen communities at the regional level. The emergence of this "new regionalism" in the United States is still too recent to permit any definitive assessment of its implications. Yet the analysis of neoliberal politics and policies undertaken in this study may shed a useful light on the possibilities and pitfalls of emerging regional strategies. The following discussion focuses on two aspects of the politics of regionalism in the United States: first, the insights to be gained from a comparison with European regionalist initiatives, and second, the implications of the experience of local progressivism for the potential emergence of a "regionalism from below." In the process, I aim to draw attention to several challenges faced by any regionalist project that seeks to benefit lowerincome residents of urban areas. Regional perspectives begin with the observation that more Americans now reside in suburbs than in cities.29 In every region of the country— even in those, like the New York region, where the city population recently has posted significant gains—the fastest-growing parts of metropolitan areas are their outer reaches. Mass suburbanization truly exploded after World War II, when automobiles, highways, large-scale homebuilding, and shopping-center construction gave rise to a qualitatively new pattern of metropolitan settlement and consumption. This process of deconcentration, which came to include demographic dispersion not only from central
152 • Beyond Primitive Globalization
city to suburb but also from older, denser areas in the Northeast and Midwest to the newer urban areas of the South and West, continued in the decades that followed. In the final quarter of the twentieth century—a period, as we have seen, of significant central-city reinvestment—suburban growth maintained its dominance. Metropolitan land areas grew much faster than population, spawning what Deyan Sudjic has called the "hundred-mile city," a sprawling region whose edge cities and highway-linked communities host a growing portion of the area's residents, workers, and shoppers.30 The case for the new regionalism responds directly to the notion that the metropolitan region has become the central spatial organizing unit of the global era. As Manuel Pastor and his coauthors noted in their book Regions That Work, what often attracts mobile businesses to an area is not cheap costs per se but a regionally based infrastructure of skills, markets, suppliers, and design expertise. Silicon Valley and metropolitan Boston demonstrate the economic benefits of regional clusters that are successfully organized.31 Because of these benefits, and because of heightened economic competition between regions, business stakeholders have become interested in initiatives to promote intrametropolitan coordination that might enhance regional competitiveness. At the same time, the negative consequences of regional development (such as traffic congestion and loss of open space) have also raised the potential appeal of growth management to middle-class suburbanites, who have been, as Anthony Downs suggests, the major beneficiaries of sprawl.32 Meanwhile, racial minorities, struggling workers, and the poor—not to mention the local government officials who represent these residents—potentially could also have a strong economic interest in regional initiatives. Suburban exclusionism and fiscal inequities mean that regional deconcentration mostly benefits newer and wealthier enclaves at the expense of central cities, and to the detriment of older, decaying suburbs as well.33 Thus, a new political agenda has emerged in which certain visions of regional growth management—metropolitan governmental institutions, "smart growth" incentives, or regional governance structures—offer an umbrella under which a broad and diverse metropolitan coalition might assemble. Through measures such as urban growth boundaries, regional service-provision, and metropolitan redevelopment incentives, this new regionalism could potentially combine appeals to market competitiveness (such as economies of scale, reduced infrastructure costs, enhanced transportation networks), ecological stewardship (naturalresources management of air, water, sewage, and open space), and social equity (tax-base sharing, equitable school funding, open and affordable housing) into a viable political agenda. In this sense, redistributive mecha-
Beyond Primitive Globalization • 153
nisms might find a new home within a broader regionalism, as in the cases of Portland and Minneapolis-Saint Paul, where such ambitions have been put into motion. Regionalist proposals often throw a harsh light on the historic role of American government in supporting sprawl. The legacy of suburbanization provides an especially dramatic instance, in fact, of how U.S. policies have subsidized short-term-oriented spatial development and community fragmentation, a major theme of this study. Public measures favoring suburban versus central-city development have run the gamut, from housing and transportation to water-and-sewer infrastructure, education, and defense.34 To this day, the mortgage interest deduction, which benefits mostly affluent and suburban homeowners, amounts to a housing subsidy of well over $50 billion per year.35 Not all national policies have promoted decentralization, of course, and since the 1960s there also have been federal mandates for metropolitan planning and coordination, particularly in transportation. But even when federal allocations stipulate region-wide planning, as in recent years with transportation funding, the ensuing processes of regional coordination tend to be dominated by business, suburban, and highwayoriented stakeholders. Policies at the state level have an even longer history of facilitating suburban expansion and fragmentation at the expense of cities.36 Overwhelming governmental support for sprawl is thus a hallmark of the U.S. environment, and the growth patterns of the New York metropolis illuminate many of its social consequences. Kenneth Jackson, in a historical study of three communities within the New York region, has shown how government policies helped to shore up privilege in an elite community (Fairfield County, Connecticut), devastate the economy of a poor community (Newark, New Jersey), and punish a middle-class community (White Plains, New York) for its efforts to promote social integration.37 This invidious policy history has no real analogue within the European context. Strong national governments on the Continent typically have retained control over land use, relying on these powers to guide more citycentered (or planned-suburban) development. Nevertheless, the perception that "city-regions" are becoming engines of economic growth has spurred recent measures to promote intrametropolitan integration, including several by the European Union. In the process, though, the evolution and prospects of regionalism in each city-region are being strongly shaped by national/local context. France, for example, enjoys the most comprehensive city-regional structure in the form of its communautes urbaines, according to a comparative analysis by Peter Newman.38 Established in topdown fashion in the 1960s, these institutions share metropolitan planning,
154 • Beyond Primitive Globalization
development functions, and, in certain cases, tax revenues. In metropolitan areas such as Paris, where these structures do not exist, intraregional competition apparently tends to override strategic cooperation. Among other cases, Bologna, Italy, seems to comprise the single most advanced cityregion in Europe. As described by Christian Lefevre, the area's regional governance system depends on voluntary, flexible participation by municipalities, a feature common to most recent regionalisms in a "poststatist" Europe. In this case, its political support has rested upon the longtime dominance of the regional Communist Party as well as by unusual backing from the local actor with potentially the most to lose, the city of Bologna. Despite these conducive circumstances and considerable success, even here metropolitan regionalism has not yet evolved from technical planning network to full-fledged governmental structure, nor has it fully acquired legitimacy among the broader populace—problems shared by many other advanced European city-regions.39 The experience of Continental Europe seems to suggest the difficulties of achieving an equity-oriented regionalism, even in relatively propitious contexts. Meanwhile, Glasgow, Scotland, may illustrate the kind of regionalism produced by quite different political conditions. According to a study by Paul Kantor, several decades of regional planning and public intervention in this case have merely mirrored the preferences of private-sector economic actors—and thus have left metropolitan Glasgow with patterns of inequality not unlike those of many U.S. urban areas.40 The behavior of Glasgow's regional officials suggests, in fact, the broader tendencies of regionalism within a neoliberal environment, one in which political actors enjoy multiple incentives to promote growth in those places where, as Kantor notes, it is easiest to obtain rather than where it is most needed. The lessons from the United States are not necessarily more heartening. The case of Minneapolis-Saint Paul, which has instituted metropolitan tax-sharing measures, does suggest (when viewed along with several other examples) that modestly redistributive regionalisms are achievable within the United States.41 Yet the relatively small number of cases, as well as the limits of their achievement, suggests the uphill road faced by an ambitious, equity-oriented regionalism. Because of political obstacles, in fact, many recent commentators tend to rule out entirely the likelihood of creating metropolitan governments directly accountable to voters, a disturbing shortcoming.42 Indeed, pragmatic regionalists contend that, in light of the difficulties of achieving even basic mechanisms of regional coordination, the need to jettison controversial, equity-oriented demands may be paramount for progress. Assuming for a moment that this stripped-down approach could prove politically viable, it is worth speculating briefly on the
Beyond Primitive Globalization • 155
kind of regionalism that would be likely to ensue. New York might offer a convenient case. On the surface, no place reveals more dramatically the obstacles to regionalism than New York. Sprawling astride a 150-mile diameter from Trenton, New Jersey, to New Haven, Connecticut, the New York region— which spans three states, thirty-one counties, eight hundred municipalities, and more than a thousand service districts—currently has no metropolitan government or publicly operated, region-wide planning body.43 Despite the high levels of central-city redevelopment focused on earlier in this book, New York's strongest employment and residential growth in recent decades has taken place at its periphery, as Janet Abu-Lughod has pointed out.44 The spreading symptoms of sprawl-style development— traffic, pollution, infrastructure decay, loss of farm land and open space— coexist with highly balkanized governmental institutions that in many ways epitomize fragmentation and inhibit regional growth management. Yet the fact that the region stretches across three different states provides one reason that the emergence of a formal, publicly constituted regionalism is unlikely. As Abu-Lughod argues, it is a "pipe dream" to imagine that a metropolis that sprawls across three states (or even four states, if recent sprawl into eastern Pennsylvania is included) will give rise to something like a regional government anytime soon.45 Yet one would be mistaken to believe, simply on this basis, that New York's crosscutting jurisdictions constitute a prescription for regional gridlock and nothing more. A closer look reveals the important role historically of strong regional actors. Since the 1920s, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has operated as a powerful public-private entity, one that state and local administrator Robert Moses subsequently used as a model to create a number of public authorities of his own.46 Designed to manage the area's transportation infrastructure, these agencies at various times have also exerted leadership over broader issues of regional growth, including economic planning, realestate development, parks, and housing. During the 1990s, elected officials often accused the Port Authority of being an unaccountable bureaucracy; supporters tended to portray the agency as a disinterested representative of collective metropolitan interests sadly incapacitated by shortsighted state governors and the New York City mayor.47 In fact, the agency's operations reflected how regional-level public action often functioned to serve incremental and particularistic ends: charged with providing long-term, publicly backed investments to support short-term and business-oriented regional development, the authority pursued a course that compounded the contradictions of this unofficial mandate. After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the enormous influence and narrow financial calculus
156 • Beyond Primitive Globalization
of the Port Authority—owner of the trade center site—became starkly visible in the kinds of rebuilding proposals it favored. A second important metropolitan actor has been the Regional Plan Association (RPA), a civic group founded, also during the 1920s, by First National City Bank (now Citigroup). Taking on a more broadly visionary role than the Port Authority, the association has issued a succession of regional plans that seek to harmonize business-led growth with more ambitious government initiatives around public investment, infrastructure integration, and regional growth management. The RPA's Third Regional Plan, issued in 1996, called for a twenty-five-year, $75 billion program to invest in infrastructure, environment, and "quality of life" projects, including an expanded regional rail system, a new metropolitan "greensward" and growth boundary, and a series of economic development projects in New York City and in "regional downtowns."48 Most of these proposals would primarily benefit business and middle-class residents—the current beneficiaries of sprawl. The RPA contends that lower-income metropolitan residents als would gain indirectly from various regional improvements, and this argu ment may be correct. But what is not fully acknowledged in the RPA plan nor by most regionalists, is that strong growth boundaries and "in-fill" (inner-city) development, if pursued in earnest, would be a recipe for intensified gentrification—and thus for the sorts of destabilization and displacement of poor communities discussed earlier in this book. Now, in-fill development might be desirable in its own right, and an ambitious regional program of subsidized housing could begin to address concerns about lower-income displacement. Yet publicly subsidized lower-income housing and expanded residential opportunities for racial minorities receive very modest attention in the RPA plan, and this relative neglect is not un common in regionalist initiatives.49 New York does have, therefore, strong regional actors and a certain vision. What the longer-term priorities of these actors suggest, in fact, is an emerging basis for alliance between affluent city and affluent suburbs. Bringing together the commercial, residential, and leisure place-interests of the metropolitan upper tier, this kind of regionalism would center on a growing number of powerful but highly circumscribed (i.e., "pragmatic") region-building initiatives, particularly airport expansion, park protection, and regional rail. Again, several of these measures might be positive steps for many metropolitan stakeholders. But it is not difficult to imagine how these initiatives could spatially integrate the favored areas of the metropolis in ways that bypass and further marginalize the area's lower-tier communities.50
Beyond Primitive Globalization • 157
Could this kind of regionalism become more progressive if lowerincome metropolitan residents gained a seat at the table? Movements emerge, in part, from political opportunities shaped by government and by elite responses to perceived crises. During the late twentieth century, those opportunities tended to devolve to cities and neighborhoods, as the analysis in chapter 4 made clear. To the extent that a pragmatic regionalism comes to establish new regulatory institutions to manage urban development on a metropolitan scale, such a project could perhaps open up new political space for regionalisms from below, in which the shared circumstances of those who reap the fewest benefits from metropolitan growth might sharpen into shared grievance.51 Organizing efforts of this type have already emerged, in fact, in certain parts of the country; the Industrial Areas Foundation, a community-organizing network mentioned earlier in connection with local living-wage campaigns, has moved most actively on this front. Coalitions of planners, organizers, and academics have also provided useful analytical templates for bringing together many of the conceptual elements of a progressive regionalism.52 Yet the challenges of full-scale community building among the "regionally disadvantaged" could be daunting. Local and neighborhood-based groups would need to reorient much of their activity toward connecting across the barriers (economic, spatial, racial, and ethnic) of the fragmented metropolis. Even then, the ability to make use of movement-type tactics such as pressure and disruption on a regional scale— a lever that would be especially critical in the absence of metropolitan electoral accountability—presents its own challenges. Regionalisms from below are likely to prove necessary to shifting the current pragmatic agenda.53 Given the challenges they face, however, they are unlikely to be sufficient in the absence of other political pressures to alter the broader environment for the U.S. metropolis. Strong incentives from above might make a critical difference. Federal policy priorities—which, as we have seen, were fundamental to shaping the fragmented metropolis in the first place—will prove to be critical to the kind of regionalisms that emerge and take root in the United States. Economists have pointed to a number of federal policy proposals, useful for growth, that could also lend support to an equity-oriented regionalism. Congress, for instance, can reduce the unproductive bidding wars between regions (and between states) simply by prohibiting the competitive use of ad hoc subsidies and preferential taxes.54 Beyond this, federal officials could link tens of billions of dollars in transportation aid to regional efforts to reduce poverty, foster community development, and limit sprawl. Washington could also mandate regional housing assessments, and withhold funds
158 • Beyond Primitive Globalization
from regions that are out of compliance with their own affordable housing requirements; it could provide federal incentives or subsidies in support of regional living-wage laws.55 These kinds of proposals may strike many observers as unjustifiable federal interference in regional community affairs, or as implausible in light of the current political climate. Yet the fiscal burdens incurred by sprawl are already substantial, consuming perhaps 20 percent more in infrastructure costs than does compact development. State and local officials facing budget shortfalls can be expected to press the national government to subsidize an ever-greater portion of the tab. Viewed in this context, policies that tie federal disbursements to a metropolitan mandate for inclusionary zoning or to a state redevelopment fund for lowerincome housing may seem more reasonable.56 Regardless of whatever particular policy measures might be implemented, equity-oriented regions are unlikely to emerge without encouragement from above as well as grassroots pressure from below. A strategic observation made earlier, in discussion of the progressive city, may be relevant here: more feasible, and perhaps more desirable, than constructing the "progressive region" (aside from the occasional Portland, Oregon, or Montgomery County, Maryland) are efforts to build progressivism within regions and states. This means remaining skeptical toward the fabrication of more authoritative regional bodies so long as their powers would be less accountable politically than those of the state and local officials they displace. Instead, activists might do better by building progressive region-wide constituencies to press for more responsible federal and state policies toward urban areas—as certain groups, in fact, are already doing. This provisional approach to regionalism also makes it important, however, to reexamine whether national government and political conditions in the United States could support such policies. The question is taken up briefly in the following pages.
Nationalizing Globalization This chapter has explored the strategic implications of the claim that neoliberal responses to globalization constitute a kind of primitive globalization. Just as earlier sections of the book examined the logic of state action and urban development in the United States at different scales over the course of a twenty-five-year period, the goal here has been to address, at several of those levels, the current prospects for addressing social inequality and community fragmentation in processes of metropolitan change. This has meant interrogating the promise of subglobal political projects that counterpose themselves to neoliberal visions of economic globalism,
Beyond Primitive Globalization • 159
in particular the progressive city and the new regionalism. As we have seen, research on these strategies has made important contributions—urban progressivism by identifying a key role for public actors and local policy levers in shaping urban development, the new regionalism by highlighting a compelling rationale for new measures to integrate the fragmented metropolis. Yet I have maintained that the progressive city is too often undermined to represent, by itself, a sufficient vehicle for addressing urban inequality and community fragmentation. I have also suggested, in part by situating U.S. urban and regional governance within a cross-national comparative context, that national policies play an especially important role in supporting or undermining social-equity-oriented urban and regional initiatives. This latter claim, however, even if it is true, raises again a basic question first posed at the very beginning of this study: Are there good reasons to believe that nation-states, even if they wish to address the welfare of their cities and residents in productive ways, might be able to do so? Or is primitive globalization closing whatever windows of opportunity remain open? Recent work on comparative politics and the welfare state may provide insight into these questions. Research in this area has attempted to ascertain whether the countries of the developed world are moving away from distinctive national systems for organizing labor markets and providing social welfare. Such a focus, while not directly concerned with the possibilities for urban social equity, nevertheless may shed light on whether the nation-state capacities necessary to support progressive cities or regions might endure over the coming decades. Welfare-state analyses, like my own study, have been forced to confront the central globalist challenge: if growing economic interdependence between countries is creating a formidable set of international imperatives, then national patterns of social provision should be expected to decline in significance, to be replaced by generalized signs of retrenchment. As it happens, however, much of the recent research on comparative national politics suggests that welfare states—whether they are "liberal" (Anglo-America), "social-democratic" (Scandinavia), or "conservative" (Continental Europe) in the terms used by theorist Gosta Esping-Andersen—appear to be responding to economic challenges in ways that often reinforce a distinctly national character.57 This kind of evolution runs against predictions of convergence. Perhaps most encouraging is the indication that the more generous European welfare systems remain largely intact. To explain this evolution, Paul Pierson has theorized that a "new politics of the welfare state" tends to protect existing systems from retrenchment.58 Broad public support for programs and the presence of entrenched interest groups reinforce traditional paths of
160 • Beyond Primitive Globalization
institutional development; "blame-avoidance" strategies followed by government leaders further shore up established patterns. This is not to say that the various regimes do not face significant economic challenges. In fact, Pierson suggests that different regimes, experiencing different pressures, have responded to recent challenges by allowing market-driven low-wage work to proliferate (liberal regimes), or by creating employment through public-sector expansion (social-democratic regimes), or by protecting quality employment in regulated labor markets (conservative regimes). Each regime's favored strategy also incurs costs: wage inequality, poverty, and human-capital deficits (liberal regimes), fiscal pressures (socialdemocratic regimes), or high unemployment (conservative regimes). Yet, in spite of these pressures, structural political conditions have prevented most governmental leaders in the developed world from dismantling their longstanding social-welfare or employment programs and the government-led institutions that support them. Comparative research suggests, quite convincingly, that welfare-state regimes continue to be shaped by national politics. Several European systems have proven to be especially resilient, and new-politics analyses affirm that many states will continue to enjoy the institutional capacities to support a number of different policy approaches to social welfare, employment, and, perhaps, urban development.59 Certain analysts suggest that even the "liberal" regimes of the United States and Britain resist widespread retrenchment, and perhaps exhibit the potential for certain kinds of welfarestate expansion.60 Yet even though the new-politics perspective offers important insights, as well as a measure of grounded hope for the future, I believe that a focus on the welfare state as a kind of equilibrium system—in which bids for retrenchment serve to ratchet up resistance by status quo interests—fails to grasp the nature of the political threat to governmental capacities and to the prospects for social welfare in the United States. The past quarter century has witnessed a significant reshaping of the country's political and fiscal terrain, in part because public officials repeatedly deploy notions of market-centered economic development in order to rationalize ad hoc policies that benefit elite actors and undermine the state. Understanding this dynamic remains crucial to explaining why a "liberal" (or neoliberal) regime like the United States might suffer from recurrent bouts of fiscal strain: these episodes emerge not from structural conditions but from often eager governmental responses to the predatory, antitax activism supported by corporate and wealthy interests. The new-politics perspective, by replacing globalism's emphasis on economic structures with an
Beyond Primitive Globalization • 161
analysis centered on political structures, ends up underestimating the more fluid, agent-centered dynamics of welfare-state retrenchment.61 In this sense, there is good reason to believe that U.S. welfare-state politics is not in steady-state equilibrium but, rather, in downward spiral. Government leaders are weakening the capacity of the state to deliver social welfare—not invariably, of course, but over time—even while they strengthen its components that undergird neoliberal economic development. This dynamic exacerbates disaffection and political nonparticipation among the general populace. "Separation" or "detachment" from the state and from democratic politics—a major theme of this study—thus reveals its most disturbing and dangerous symptom. If the new-politics approach, with its emphasis on path dependency and equilibrium pressures, invites a certain complacency toward the future of welfare states, even neoliberal ones, the analysis advanced here clearly does not. I believe that the urgent task in the United States is to expand the capacity of the state to act productively, democratically, and in pursuit of collective social goals. This priority suggests that any subglobal effort to move beyond primitive globalization—whether this involves strengthening the welfare state, building urban progressivism, or pursuing a social-equity regionalism—should focus on the political engagement and effective mobilization of underrepresented actors: disaffected voters, citizens, and urban residents. And because no set of "governance institutions" offers such actors anything like the political power that has been historically achieved by subjects of a democratic state, I believe that the national or "domestic" polity—where, in spite of myriad insufficiencies, a set of rights continues to undergird the political capacities of citizens—remains the most critical arena for the advancement of the disenfranchised, as well as the most powerful lever for reshaping the U.S. engagement with globalization. This does not mean that local opportunities are unimportant. Urban communities remain key sites of political involvement and mobilization. Decentralization of state responsibilities for lower-income populations (in terms of employment, housing, and social regulation) makes "public action" visible, and potentially vulnerable to pressure and influence, at the local level. Coalition building among community, labor, and environmental organizations in cities or regions can shore up political spaces, redirect policy priorities, and propel broader electoral mobilizations. Yet beyond the building of urban and metropolitan-based alternatives, sustaining and expanding them requires new kinds of national/local partnership that are only sporadically available within a neoliberal environment. Thus, the task
162 • Beyond Primitive Globalization
of urban activists, as well as that of other citizens, is to construct a new national environment more conducive to stable and heterogeneous communities—one that can support strategies of public investment, fairer taxation, and a more stable playing field for economic regions.62 These kinds of federal measures also might be combined with other, more targeted "placebased" policies. But even by themselves these measures could do much to alter the environment within which places deal with questions of economic development and social equity. This emphasis on national politics and policies is not intended to turn back the clock to some "preglobal" historical moment in which autarchy, protectionism, or unreconstructed Keynesianism are magically restored. Globalization, in the limited sense of enhanced cross-border economic integration, is here to stay. Although predictions of global convergence are much overdrawn, it is clear that the centuries-old trajectory of modern capitalist development has proceeded toward organization of production, trade, and finance at an international scale. Since the 1970s, this process has accelerated—partially and unevenly, to be sure, and in ways that have been influenced, as I have shown, by subglobal responses and political developments. Yet there is little question that the capitalist economy of the future, though not likely to abolish nation-states or place attachments, will expand upon linkages that already crisscross territorial borders, articulating a range of new economic spaces. As in earlier stages, this international economy and its dominant features today—the ability of capital to move much more freely than labor, the tendency of governance institutions to protect investments but not workers—reflect the hegemonic interests of capital. But there are also significant elements of this system that do not simply reflect, or fully meet, the interests of multinational corporations. New immigrants and migrants have created new kinds of cross-border communities, setting in motion other kinds of globalizations from below.63 Transnational advocacy networks represent another, more politically defined bottom-up challenge to key components of the international economy, from the exploitation of sweatshop labor to the destruction of the rain forest. Even the highly restricted scope of global governance institutions— their failure to secure an adequate "architecture" for the international financial system, or sufficient safeguards for the natural environment, or adequate protections for the heath of the world's populations—results not simply from the domination of capital per se but from an early-twentyfirst-century neoliberalism that falls short even by the limited standards of corporate rationality.64 Nor is this neoliberal ascendancy, according to which markets are to be stimulated by states regardless of social conse-
Beyond Primitive Globalization • 163
quences, the product of economic interests alone. Key national political leaders have led the charge to refashion international agencies within the restrictive mold of neoliberal principles. The United States, as the world's superpower and dominant economic player, enjoys a privileged role in the international arena, and its representatives have done much to tailor international institutions to fit those principles. Redefining the project of this particular national actor, therefore, will prove necessary to reshaping the world. The enduring importance of national politics is not simply a question of government as actor, but of state and polity as vital arenas of conflict. Much social-movement activity in this global age still takes place within country-centered polities. In Europe, the epicenter of poststatism, much social-movement activity remains focused on nation-states; even here, as Sidney Tarrow has observed, "the formation of a global civil society is still a good way off."65 It seems even further away from the other side of the Atlantic. The experience of transnational advocacy networks may suggest why this is the case. Because of the extraordinary power of the United States, it is necessary for cross-border solidarity activists not only to center their activities on raising the consciousness of American citizens but also to do much of their work within, and through, the U.S. political system. To begin with, the significant political defeats suffered by neoliberal globalists during the 1990s—such as an initial congressional refusal to approve "fast-track" powers for free-trade expansion in the Western Hemisphere and the unraveling of the multilateral agreement on investment (MAI) negotiations—resulted largely from domestic pressures directed at Washington.66 But even beyond these high-profile episodes, Peter Evans has pointed out that transnational advocacy groups, committed though they may be to supporting local thirdworld organizing efforts, often achieve their biggest successes when they "shift the venue of conflict" to the United States. Thus, the Brazilian rubber tappers gained a major boost when transnational advocates were able to reposition their local struggle within U.S. congressional debates over the responsibilities of the World Bank; pressures from Washington motivated the bank, in turn, to exert influence over a recalcitrant Brazil.67 Different conflicts have produced different scenarios, of course, and in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks it was clear that activist opportunities would diminish. Yet Evans's analysis suggests that crucial levers for advancing many transnational struggles continue to lie embedded, for better or for worse, within the thickets of U.S. politics. These observations are not intended to disparage the internationalist focus of transnational movements, nor to discourage social-action networks from challenging neoliberal globalization by confronting its major
164 • Beyond Primitive Globalization
governance bodies. The demand that not only corporate rights but labor rights should be enforced by agencies that regulate the world economy, and that these agencies should be accountable to democratic controls, is ultimately an international issue. But a central road to this goal, and much of the political traction to push the effort forward, must run through the powerful nation-states of the developed world, especially the United States. This reality suggests that a broad range of "domestic" tasks—from creating fairer cities to strengthening social-welfare institutions—will be crucial to building a more advanced, and more humane, kind of globalization.
Postscript
Rebuilding after 9/11
The events of September 11, 2001, appeared to reinforce, at least at first, the global identities of New York and Washington, D.C. The specific targets of the attacks were important symbols: the World Trade Center represented the foremost urban icon of international capitalism, the Pentagon a central command post for the projection of military force to all corners of the world. At another, more human level, the victims of these assaults—people who hailed not only from many neighborhoods but from many lands—embodied the truly international character of the modern metropolis. In the immediate wake of the attacks, questions about security and urbanity in an era of permeable borders took on heightened urgency in cosmopolitan cities everywhere. Notions of the global city—as trans-corporate center, cultural crossroads, haven of civility—never seemed more salient. Yet it was soon difficult to escape the fact that dominant interpretations viewed the attacks not so much as blows against globalization or the global city as assaults against "America." Political leaders in the United States certainly articulated this position. The meaning of America—enemy of Islam? bulwark of democratic freedom?—and the nature of an appropriate American response occupied center stage in the ensuing public debate. The nation-state, often seen as supplanted by late-twentieth-century globalization, seemed to resume its place as primary actor and community in a new post-9/11 worldview. This "return of the state" quickly enhanced the authority of government officials in Washington and in New York. President Bush became the nation's commander in chief in a war against terrorism, while Rudolph Giuliani emerged as the nation's mayor, a model of American leadership in the face of urban crisis. Government power never had been absent, of course, but throughout the ensuing year—as issues of war 165
166 • Postscript
and domestic security stirred the national agenda and New York's leaders struggled to rebuild—questions about the purposes of public action were confronted by new and challenging circumstances. This book was nearly completed before the events of September 11. One year later, as this is being written, it is too soon to render an informed judgment on their full implications for the themes of this study. Nevertheless, it is possible to offer a brief comment that addresses, tentatively, a key contention of preceding chapters in the light of recent conditions: if late-twentieth-century U.S. policies became mired in destructive, shortterm-oriented economic development, as I have argued, then are post-9/11 challenges spurring the state beyond this logic of primitive globalization? It is important to recall that the year preceding the terror attacks had itself started off unpredictably by the standards of American politics. The presidential election of November 2000 was not officially decided until the following month, after a much-disputed series of judicial reviews. Ignoring questions about its legitimacy, the incoming Republican administration launched an assertive agenda centered on tax cuts, along with resurgent proposals to privatize the Social Security program. By summer, however, a weakening economy slowed the administration's momentum, and congressional Democrats (regaining control of the Senate after the defection of a Republican member) began to develop an agenda of their own. In New York City a similar dynamic was under way, as stock-market slides after years of local tax cuts ushered in a resumption of fiscal pressures. With Giuliani facing a term-limited end to his mayoralty and his harsh political style now wearing thin, would-be successors started to call for a return to fairness and conciliation in local leadership. A large field of Democratic mayoral candidates jockeyed in advance of the September primary, proposing new affordable-housing initiatives and other programs to benefit the "other New York" that lay beyond the wealthy precincts of Manhattan. Even a powerful cohort of business leaders—the Group of 35—endorsed a decentralizing strategy of development.1 The terror attacks of September 11 dramatically altered the political mood in New York and in the nation. It was not clear right away what the tenor of this change would be. Shock and horror, followed by spontaneous outpourings of assistance, fostered sudden networks of fellowship that cut across a great many social and spatial divides. The stories of donated fire trucks and impulsive cross-country journeys to help out the rescue effort are already enshrined in national memory. Perhaps less easily recalled are the near-global expressions of sympathy from abroad, as people gathered in public solidarity in cities throughout the world. Heartfelt connection was
Postscript • 167
also the local norm. Residents of Lower Manhattan, a longtime commercial district, found that tragedy and hardship gave them for the first time a community voice. The city's divisive mayor became its reassuring leader, even a "ministering angel of the streets."2 All over the greater New York area, in fact, strong feelings of grief and loss were accompanied by countless demonstrations of metropolitan civic pride, as residents not only sought out their neighbors but looked beyond their neighborhoods, boroughs, and towns to feel kinship and give comfort. Yet political developments soon ushered in a discordant climate of response. Even early on, there had been glimpses of a different reaction to crisis, as when citizens eager to contribute to recovery were told it would be best if they simply went shopping. In the days after the attack, President Bush pledged $20 billion in federal emergency aid to New York, but several months later more than half remained undelivered. New York Governor George Pataki put together a poorly assembled request for $54 billion in additional assistance that was much derided, and then rejected, by Washington legislators. After promising not to profit from New York's misfortune, New Jersey officials began to dangle financial incentives to lure downtown Manhattan firms across the river, leading many companies to brandish a "Jersey card" to leverage an even better deal to stay in New York. In November, Governor Pataki, along with Mayor Giuliani, announced the creation of a Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) to manage— along with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey—the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site.3 A subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation (the New York State public agency that had helped to shape the Times Square redevelopment), the LMDC henceforth became the central vehicle for coordinating the planning effort and allocating federal aid for the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan. Initial appointments to the agency's board were weighted toward business executives from the financial and communications sectors, as well as top officials from other public development agencies. There was one nonwhite member and one representative from the local community.4 If New York's shared trauma had generated extraordinary local solidarities, as well as diverse and deeply held notions about how the city might rebuild and recover, there were doubts about whether those sentiments would be fully reflected in the work of this public body. Among the challenges to rebuilding well in Lower Manhattan would be overcoming history. The World Trade Center itself had been spawned by the public pursuit of questionable corporate development.5 Government condemned the site, displaced its occupants, and paid for the design and
168 • Postscript
construction of the mammoth towers. From the time of the center's completion in the 1970s, weak market demand for downtown offices periodically forced New York State to rent space back to itself. Officials also dispensed a host of other subsidies to prop up a surrounding "financial-district" land market that struggled to compete with Midtown Manhattan. Only by the late 1990s did the trade towers consistently achieve full occupancy at prime commercial rents. The LMDC set about its business with what appeared to be a similarly shortsighted conception of development. Early on, its chairman supported a plan by the private leaseholder of the sixteen-acre World Trade Center site to quickly rebuild an office tower on an adjacent parcel even as the main planning process still was unfolding. In fact, a determination to replace the 11 million square feet of office space lost in the attacks seemed to become the LMDC's foremost priority, rationalized by the Port Authority's insistence on generating $120 million in annual revenues from the site. As it became clear that this priority was squeezing the ability of planners even to design a suitable memorial, LMDC leaders began to look beyond the site itself for more office and retail space, suggesting the clearance of surviving structures. In July 2002, the agency unveiled six official proposals for rebuilding. Although the plans varied in certain respects, they set out remarkably similar designs centered on commercial offices and retail stores. What the plans expressed most strongly (as the architecture critic for the New York Times noted at the time) was neither a solemn commemoration of tragedy nor a vision for renewal but the privatization of planning through the vehicle of public-private partnership.6 Not all of New York's efforts to recover were proceeding in such dismal fashion. City agencies, facing enormous deficits, were forced to slash their budgets by 20 percent, but the arrival of federal aid enabled some of those cuts to be restored. For the first time in years, in fact, it seemed that the city was no longer receiving fewer dollars in federal grants than it was sending to Washington in tax revenues.7 In the meantime, a new mayor, Republican Michael Bloomberg, began to find his footing. Bloomberg had emerged the surprising victor of a tumultuous election cycle, beginning with the cancellation of New York City's primaries as polls opened on the morning of September 11. Rescheduled for two weeks later, the primaries failed to result in any Democratic candidate winning sufficient votes to become the party's mayoral standard-bearer. In a bitterly contested runoff held in October, Public Advocate Mark Green edged Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer in a vote that was sharply divided along ethnic, racial, and class lines. Green, widely expected to become the city's mayor, was instead defeated in the November election by Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman who spent
Postscript • 169
nearly $70 million of his own money. Inheriting a city in crisis from an extraordinarily popular mayor, Bloomberg enjoyed little initial room for maneuver, but through small actions he did seek to establish a consensual political style. His administration signaled early on a less punitive approach to homelessness, and even ceded housing rights to the small numbers of squatters who remained in Lower East Side buildings.8 Cooperation between mayor and city council on budget issues improved as well, though grappling with the city's multi-billion-dollar deficit without gutting services would prove a daunting challenge unless further federal and state aid arrived or the mayor reversed his stated opposition to raising taxes. Bloomberg also prevailed on Governor Pataki to grant him greater influence over the LMDC, expanding and diversifying its leadership board. In the face of New York State-sponsored deals (financed with federal recovery money) to build luxury housing in Lower Manhattan, the mayor called for affordable housing to be made part of the downtown rebuilding process, though it was not yet clear how serious this priority might become. There was also positive ferment outside the official circles of policy making. As the LMDC's narrow conception of rebuilding became clear to many observers, a multitude of community-based planning endeavors sprang up to offer alternative visions of renewal. Architects, planners, and infrastructure experts devised more creative design proposals. A local preservationist group conducted workshops with residents throughout the region to generate a diverse set of "vision statements" on issues from commemoration to cultural expressions and sustainable development. Socialservice providers, unions, grassroots groups, and religious leaders came together in the Labor Community Advocacy Network to advance a longterm-oriented plan, including job creation for displaced service workers and support for their outlying neighborhoods.9 The Regional Plan Association, for its part, assembled more than seventy-five business, government, community, and civic groups to foster metropolitan-wide participation in the rebuilding process. In July 2002, as the LMDC was releasing its six proposals, this Civic Alliance convened a "Listening to the City" forum in which 4,500 New Yorkers shared their own perspectives. Across the very different opinions, one clear message emerged: the rebuilding effort, rather than producing unnecessary office space, ought to address the city's larger needs—an inclusive economy, affordable housing, vibrant cultural life— and involve a broader public in shaping the future of Lower Manhattan and its connection to the metropolis. Chastened, Governor Pataki announced that officials would scrap the six original plans and start afresh. LMDC and the Port Authority then
170 • Postscript
launched their own outreach campaign, holding a series of public meetings "intended to engage people throughout the region" in the process of rebuilding.10 A flurry of subsequent press releases announced a professional panel to review a new round of designs, a joint effort with the city planning department to investigate affordable-housing feasibility for Lower Manhattan, and a study of the commercial potential for new arts and entertainment venues in the area. City officials began, in turn, to press the Port Authority to give them control of the World Trade Center site in exchange for land underneath Kennedy and LaGuardia airports that the authority currently rented from the city. Although such a land swap might prove disadvantageous in strictly budgetary terms, many civic advocates and government officials greeted the plan with enthusiasm, contending that city control over rebuilding would lead to a better mix of development uses for a broader array of stakeholders. A city-guided process could also be subject to land-use laws that mandate community participation. Rebuilding Lower Manhattan, however, was only an uncertain piece in a larger development agenda. As the city neared the first anniversary of the trade-center attacks, the outlines of this agenda were becoming clearer. News that New York was a finalist in the U.S. national competition to play host to the 2012 Olympic Games drew attention to the Bloomberg administration's emerging blueprint to transform the West Side of Manhattan. This ambitious land plan envisioned office towers, parks, an expanded convention center, and a new stadium for what was mostly a small-manufacturing, warehouse, and residential area. Centered on a proposed $1.5 billion subway project extending westward from the Midtown business district, the plan promised to rely on tax-increment-financing (TIP) bonds—debt that would be repaid with anticipated increases in tax revenues within a designated Far West Side redevelopment area. The scope and strategic location of the project, not to mention the political weight behind it, underscored the reality that Midtown remained the corporate center of the city. The Times Square revival had already shown the financial rewards of expanding this center westward, and the post-9/11 migration of downtown offices to Midtown gave further momentum to this trend.11 The new plan swept up Mayor Giuliani's failed effort to build a West Side stadium into a much grander campaign to create a corporate office and entertainment district. Spearheaded by Bloomberg's deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding, Daniel Doctoroff (an early proponent of New York's Olympic bid), the West Side plan was also supported by an impressive cast of local and national power brokers, including the Group of 35.12 Despite the political clout behind it, however, the proposal's financial components were seen
Postscript • 171
as shaky by many observers. Recourse to the TIP scheme, implying that no government subsidies were required, was intended to provide reassurance that the project would not siphon public dollars away from Lower Manhattan or the city's outer boroughs. Yet early discussion of the TIP (expected to be the largest such financing mechanism ever used by a U.S. locality) failed to address the possibility of revenue shortfalls, higher municipal service costs within the redevelopment area, or the loss of tax revenues needed to pay for other local services.13 Beyond these fiscal concerns, the West Side plan posed a great many unanswered questions about its relationship to downtown recovery and to the city's transportation, housing, and economicdevelopment requirements over the coming decade. One year later, then, the shape of New York's future remained uncertain in spite of the evident resiliency of its people. If the heartening surge in "citizen planning" suggested to some observers the potential seeds of a new era of civic governance, the enormous challenges (financial, political, institutional) to anchoring public-sector activities in a constructive, democratic vision of the city were perhaps more conspicuous than ever. In reality, New York needed a "double recovery"—from the devastation of September 11 as well as from the development strategies of a quarter century—but remained far from the balanced, equity-oriented approaches that might guide such a dual renewal.14 Instead, dominant agendas seemed strikingly mismatched to the city's needs, from projects of gargantuan ambition focused on narrow patches of land to small-minded engagements with rebuilding responsibilities of truly historic magnitude. Of course, much was still to be decided. The same crisis that had given New York a taste of European-style national urban subsidy had also encouraged New Yorkers to give voice to their own notions of revival. In the process, the outlines of a broader, more rationalizing vision of metropolitan development—if not a just city at least a fairer, multicentered, interconnected city—became intermittently visible. For this vision to gain strength would require not simply local leadership and mobilized community pressure but, over time, an appreciable measure of federal support for charting new patterns of metropolitan development. National political leaders, however, showed little interest in developing a constructive economic agenda. Although the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks focused intensively on war and security, as well as on rebuilding, subsequent months turned the nation's attention to the destructive consequences of established economic practices. Beginning with Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom, and spreading through much of the "new economy" sector, news of corporate misconduct depressed the financial markets, accelerated job losses, and dramatized the dwindling
172 • Postscript
obligations of American business to workers and the broader social community. Revelations of corporate corruption, and its close ties to government policy makers, also offered a disturbing assessment of deregulation, corporate subsidy, and other policies to encourage short-term profit making. Yet, though market doldrums and business scandals temporarily derailed Social Security privatization, they failed to lead to significant corporate regulation, repeal of the mammoth tax cut, or major reassessments in other domestic policy areas. By the one-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks, it seemed doubtful—as public discussion again shifted to a likely military engagement overseas—that even the prospect of government deficits and prolonged recession would soon redirect a discredited economic strategy. Early observations, then, suggest a post-9/11 environment in the United States that seems conducive to primitive globalization. Such an inference, though perhaps pessimistic, confirms the contention of this study that reshaping American politics remains a crucial task. If antiglobalization strategies have become more uncertain since September 11, the agenda of the U.S. government has not, its state capacities misused at home now misdirected abroad. Recent events deepen the heavy costs of late-twentiethcentury patterns of public action, and lend greater urgency to moving beyond a state-supported path of neoliberal development. Although these same events seem initially to dimmish the prospects for reform, the history told here suggests that new opportunities can emerge, and it may still be possible for promising urban and regional projects to become building blocks of broader democratic renewal. An accountable national politics remains critical for making better cities and a stable global order.
Notes
Introduction 1. For important books addressing the redevelopment of New York within a larger conception of late-twentieth-century political economy and culture, see Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), and Sharon Zukin, The Cultures of Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995). A number of studies of New York employ a narrower or more traditional focus on politics and policy; the most important of these are John Hull Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York City Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), and Ester R. Fuchs, Mayors and Money: Fiscal Policy in New York and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also Martin Shefter, Political Crisis/Fiscal Crisis: The Collapse and Revival of New York City (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Charles Brecher, Raymond D. Horton, with Robert A. Cropf and Dean Michael Mead, Power Failure: New York City Politics and Policy since 1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Robert F. Pecorella, Community Power in a Postreform City: Politics in New York City (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E Sharpe, 1994); H. V. Savitch, Post-Industrial Cities: Politics and Planning in New York, Paris and London (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York (New York: Verso, 1993); and Fred Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America's Big Cities (New York: Free Press, 1997). Notable collections on the political economy of New York include John Hull Mollenkopf, ed., Power, Culture and Place: Essays on New York City (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988); Peter D. Salins, ed., New York Unbound: The City and the Politics of the Future (New York: Blackwell, 1988); Jewel Bellush and Dick Netzer, eds., Urban Politics, New York Style (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1990) John H. Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells, eds., Dual City: Restructuring New York (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991); Julia Vitullo-Martin, ed., Breaking Away: The Future of Cities (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1996); and Margaret E. Crahan and Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, eds., The City and the World: New York's Global Future (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1997). 2. Fainstein's original study was published in 1994. For a revised version that 173
174 • Notes to Introduction addresses recent developments, see Susan S. Fainstein, The City Builders: Property Development in New York and London, 1980-2000, 2d rev. ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), especially chapter 4, "Policy and Politics." 3. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Citie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 4. Jan Lin, Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 5. There is an enormous body of work on economic globalization. What I am calling globalist or strong-globalist approaches—those asserting that recent developments in international integration dramatically alter relations of power or the capacities of subglobal states—often disagree among themselves on many issues, including what globalization means and how it operates. There are also sharp differences between positive and critical globalisms. For influential examples of the positive approach, see Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: Harper Business, 1990), and Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999); see also the collections by Jagdish Bhagwati, A Stream of Windows: Unsettling Reflections on Trade, Immigration, and Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998) and The Wind of the Hundred Days: How Washington Mismanaged Globalization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). For early, critical approaches to globalization, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1974); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); see also many contributions to The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, ed. David Held and Anthony McGrew (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000). For a range of critical, strong-globalist analyses, see Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the Global System, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (New York: New Press, 1998); David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and William I. Robinson, "Social Theory and Globalization: The Rise of a Transnational State," Theory and Society 30 (2001): 157-200. Within the urban fields, the most important globalist contributions, beyond the work of David Harvey, are probably the literatures on "world cities" and "global cities." See, for example, John Friedmann, "The World City Hypothesis," Development and Change 17.1 (1986): 69-83, and Sassen, Global City. See also Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989). For challenges to the sweeping claims of globalism, see Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); Robert A. Beauregard, "Theorizing the Global-Local Connection," in World Cities in a World-System, ed. Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 232-48; and Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001). 6. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977). Part 8 (pp. 873-940) is titled "So-Called Primitive Accumulation." 7. The terms neoliberal and neoliberalism are associated with the ideas of
Notes to Introduction • 175 Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who drew upon classical liberal doctrines of limited government and free markets to advocate for the rights of the individual against those of a "coercive" state. Neoliberal capitalism or development refers to an economic approach emphasizing the superiority of market-determined allocation, profit-maximizing behavior, and laissez-faire policies. By making reference to neoliberal politics and a neoliberal state, I will suggest, following the perspective of a number of writers, that free trade and unfettered markets are in fact the product of political ideologies, activities, and policies. As will become clear, my own conception also takes seriously the coercive powers of the state but theorizes them within a quite different conception of the social order. For important neoliberal statements, see F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), and Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). For a useful distinction between neoliberal ideology and "actually existing neoliberalism," see Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, "Cities and the Geographies of Actually Existing Neoliberalism,'" in Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in Western Europe and North America, ed. Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002). 8. See Robert Boyer, "The Convergence Hypothesis Revisited: Globalization but Still the Century of Nations?" in National Diversity and Global Capitalism, ed. Suzanne Berger and Ronald Dore (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Unversity Press, 1996), 29-59; Robert Boyer, "State and Market: A New Engagement for the Twenty-first Century?" in States against Markets: The Limits of Globalization, ed. Robert Boyer and Daniel Drache (New York: Routledge, 1996), 89-114; Robert Boyer, "The Political in the Era of Globalization and Finance: Focus on Some Regulation School Research," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.2 (June 2000): 274-322; Linda Weiss, "Globalization and the Myth of the Powerless State," New Left Review 225 (September/October 1997): 3-27; Linda Weiss, The Myth of the Powerless State (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998); Stephan Leibfried, "National Welfare States European Integration and Globalization: A Perspective for the Next Century," Social Policy and Administration 34.1 (March 2000): 44-63; and Elmar Rieger and Stephan Leibfried, "Welfare State Limits to Globalization," Politics and Society 26.3 (September 1998): 363-90. 9. See Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); both of these points are discussed in Theda Skocpol's contribution, "Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research," 3-37. See also Fred Block, "State Theory in Context," in his collection Revising State Theory: Essays in Politics and Postindustrialism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 3-35. 10. See Colin Hay, "Anticipating Accommodations, Accommodating Anticipations: The Appeasement of Capital in the 'Modernization' of the British Labour Party, 1987-1992," Politics and Society 25.2 (June 1997): 234-56; and Colin Hay, The Political Economy of New Labour: Labouring under False Pretences? (New York: Manchester University Press, 1999). 11. Andrew Sayer, "The 'New' Regional Geography and Problems of Narrative," Environment and PlanningD: Society and Space 7.3 (1989): 253-76. 12. See Smith, Transnational Urbanism, 72-98. For important theoretical statements on this issue, see Stuart Hall, "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity," in Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for
176 • Notes to Introduction the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 19-39; and Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 27^7. Other collections on the theme of globalization, locality, and difference include Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996); Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, eds., Transnationalism from Below (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998); Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998); Michael Burawoy, Joseph A. Blum, Sheba George, ZsuZsa Gille, Teresa Gowan, Lynne Haney, Maren Klawiter, Steven H. Lopez, Sean t) Riain, and Millie Thayer, Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Arjun Appadurai, ed., Globalization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). 13. An analysis of post-1960s economic restructuring, for example, presents an extensive review of national policies, highlighting the sharply bifurcating impacts of taxes, transfers, and spending patterns on urban residents. See Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, 271-84. 14. See Smith, Transnational Urbanism; his revisionist narrative of Los Angeles is presented in chapter 4. 15. See, for instance, Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes. In certain respects, this work, along with Brecher et al., Power Failure, extends and further develops an earlier kind of localist study; see the classic pluralist account by Wallace S. Sayre and Herbert Kaufman, Governing New York City: Politics in the Metropolis (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1960). For a review of pluralist approaches to urban power, see David Judge, "Pluralism," in Theories of Urban Politics, ed. David Judge, Gerry Stoker, and Harold Wolman (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995), 13-34. 16. Fainstein, City Builders, is an important exception, though, like regimeoriented case studies, it is mostly concerned with identifying local outcomes. Fuchs, Mayors and Money, addresses intergovernmental relations but within a pluralist framework that is also focused locally. For other exceptions, see a number of contributions to Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Urban Politics in a Global Economy, ed. Mickey Lauria (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997), especially Christopher Leo, "City Politics in an Era of Globalization," 77-98; Joe Painter, "Regulation, Regime, and Practice in the United States," 122-43; and Robert A. Beauregard, "City Planning and the Postwar Regime in Philadelphia," 171-88. Seminal formulations of urban regime theory include Stephen Elkin, City and Regime in the American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Clarence N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989); and Clarence N. Stone, "Urban Regimes and the Capacity to Govern: A Political Economy Approach," Journal of Urban Affairs 15.1 (1993): 1-28. For a sympathetic appraisal, see Gerry Stoker, "Regime Theory and Urban Politics," in Judge, Stoker, and Wolman, Theories of Urban Politics, 54-71. 17. The market and demographic orientation of the early literature was especially true in the United States. For examples of this older literature on revitalization, see Dennis E. Gale, "Middle-Class Resettlement into Older Neighborhoods," Journal
Notes to Introduction • 177 of the American Planning Association 45.3 (July 1979): 293-309; and Kathryn P. Nelson, Gentrification and Distressed Cities: An Assessment of Trends in Intrametropolitan Migration (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). For political-economy work on the relationship of gentrification to a class-based restructuring of the city, see the contributions to Gentrification of the City, ed. Neil Smith and Peter Williams (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986); see also Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gen trification and the Revanchist City (NewYork: Routledge, 1996); Blair Badcock, "Building upon the Foundations of Gentrification: Inner-City Housing Development in Australia in the 1990s," Urban Geography 16.1 (1995): 70-90; and Juliet Carpenter and Loretta Lees, "Gentrification in New York, London and Paris: An International Comparison," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 19.2 (March 1995): 286-303. 18. In recent years, a small number of comparative researchers have begun to focus on the state as a mediating factor in processes of neighborhood revitalization. See, for example, Joyce Gelb and Michal Lyons, "A Tale of Two Cities: Housing Policy and Gentrification in London and New York," Journal of Urban Affairsirs15.4 (1993): 345-66; and Nick Bailey and Douglas Robertson, "Housing Renewal, Urban Policy and Gentrification," Urban Studies 34.4 (1997): 561-78; see also Badcock, "Building upon the Foundations of Gentrification." 19. For the implication that globalization undermines, more or less fatally, the capacities of place-based movements, see the three related works by Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996); The Power of Identity (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997); and End of Millennium (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998). For less pessimistic discussions of the prospects for urban movements, see Margit Mayer, "Urban Movements and Urban Theory in the Late-20thCentury City," in The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late-20th-Century City, ed. Robert A. Beauregard and Sophie Body-Gendrot (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1999); and Susan S. Fainstein and Clifford Hirst, "Urban Social Movements," in Judge, Stoker, andWolman, Theories of Urban Politics, 181-204. 20. Friedmann, "World City Hypothesis." 21. Castells, Power of Identity, 243-307, 350. 22. Such debates are to be found in Paul Sweezy, Maurice Dobb, Kohachiro Takahashi, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Georges Lefebvre, Giuliano Procacci, Eric Hobsbawm, and John Merrington, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1978); and T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 23. State of New York, State Comptroller, Office of the State Deputy Comptroller for the City of New York, No Room for Growth: Affordable Housing and Economic Development in New York City (New York, October 1999). 24. See, for example, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, ed., From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York's Lower East Side (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994); Smith, The New Urban Frontier; and Christopher Mele, Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 25. On the significance of continued national differences, see especially Paul Pierson, "Three Worlds of Welfare State Research," Comparative Political Studies
178 • Notes to Chapter 1 33.6/7 (August/September 2000): 791-821; and Paul Pierson, "Post-Industrial Pressures on the Mature Welfare States," in The New Politics of the Welfare State, ed. Paul Pierson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 80-104. On important urban and regional variations related to national politics, see Patrick Le Gales, "Regulations and Governance in European Cities," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22.3 (September 1998): 482-506; and Richard Child Hill and Kuniko Fujita, "State Restructuring and Local Power in Japan," Urban Studies 37.4 (April 2000): 673-90. 26. For a comparative analysis of privatization, see Harvey Feigenbaum, Jeffrey Henig, and Chris Hamnett, Shrinking the State: The Political Underpinnings of Privatization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also Hector E. Schamis, Re-Forming the State: The Politics of Privatization in Latin America and Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
1. Primitive Globalization? 1. For strong-globalist arguments from a number of perspectives, see Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: Harper Business, 1990); Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the Global System, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and William I. Robinson, "Social Theory and Globalization: The Rise of a Transnational State," Theory and Society 30 (2001): 157-200. On developmental states and globalization, see Linda Weiss, The Myth of the Powerless State (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998); see also Chalmers Johnson, "The Developmental State: Odyssey of a Concept," in The Developmental State, ed. Meredith Woo-Cumings (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 32-60. 2. For strong-globalist claims within the urban literature, see John Friedmann, "The World City Hypothesis," Development and Change 17.1 (1986): 69-83; John Friedmann, "Where We Stand: A Decade of World City Research," in World Cities in a World-System, ed. Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21-47; Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989), 190-221, 222-48; Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); Anthony D. King, Global Cities: Post-Imperialism and the Internationalization of London (New York: Routledge, 1990); and David Clark, Urban World/ Global City (New York: Routledge, 1996). Important studies that draw attention to local resurgence or disjuncture include Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 27-47; Doreen Massey, "Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place," in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and Lisa Tickner (New York: Routledge, 1993), 59-69; Stuart Hall, "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity," in Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 19-39; and Mike Featherstone, "Localism, Globalism, and
Notes to Chapter 1 • 179 Cultural Identity," in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson andWimal Dissanayake (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 46-77. Manuel Castells combines a strong-globalist analysis with a discussion of localist and local-state resurgence in his important three-volume study: The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), The Power of Identity (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997), and The End of Millennium (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998). 3. For recent work on comparative political economy or the comparative politics of welfare states, see Robert Boyer, "The Political in the Era of Globalization and Finance: Focus on Some Regulation School Research," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.2 (June 2000): 274-322; Paul Pierson, "Three Worlds of Welfare State Research," Comparative Political Studies 33.Q17 (August/September 2000): 791-821; and Fiona Ross, "Interests and Choice in the 'Not Quite So New' Politics of Welfare," West European Politics 23.2 (April 2000): 11-34. For recent urban studies that theorize state policies and politics within global, transnational, or comparative contexts, see Patrick Le Gales, "Regulations and Governance in European Cities," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22.3 (September 1998): 482-506; Susan S. Fainstein, "Can We Make the Cities We Want?" in The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late-20th-Century City, ed. Robert A. Beauregard and Sophie Body-Gendrot (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1999), 249-72; and Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001). 4. Although few writers explicitly embrace a notion of globalization as an entirely self-reinforcing economic logic, what commentators refer to as a "strong" or "hard" globalist position does contend that economic forces of international integration are sufficiently powerful and inexorable as to constitute the central logic of social development in our time. In economic terms, the heart of the globalist argument is the notion of "factor-price equalization," which argues that when factors of production, goods, and services can move freely about the world, the pursuit of profits should lead over time to a convergence in wages, prices, and rents. International economic competition and trade accelerate; domestically rooted producers are shoved aside by transnationally active firms; wages of first-world workers fall and those of third-world workers rise. See Lester C. Thurow, The Future of Capitalism (New York: Penguin, 1996), 164-84. For early, important efforts to define globalization, see Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 55-78; and David Held, "Democracy: From City-States to a Cosmopolitan Order?" Political Studies 40 (1992): 10-39. See also David Held and Anthony McGrew, "The Great Globalization Debate: An Introduction," in The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, ed. David Held and Anthony McGrew (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), 1-45, as well as many other selections in this volume. 5. Whereas earlier explanations of global economic arrangements were dominated by modernization theory and world-systems theory, recent debates over the causes of globalization have focused on a mixed range of factors, many of them linked to economic changes over the past quarter century. Most commentators have emphasized that economic globalization since the 1970s has followed a neoliberal turn toward unfettered capital mobility, flexible production, market-driven technological
180 • Notes to Chapter 1 development, unregulated labor markets, and export-oriented trade. Debates over each of these developments have mapped out a range of analytical positions on economic actors and periodization—for example, on the novelty versus the historical continuity of international financial flows, or on the centrality of small firms versus large firms to new production regimes—with important implications for overall conceptions of globalization. Compare, for example, Ohmae, The Borderless World, and Robert Zevin, "Are World Financial Markets More Open? If So, Why and with What Effects?" in Financial Openness and National Autonomy: Opportunities and Constraints, ed. Tariq Banuri and Juliet B. Schor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 43-83; compare also Michael J. Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 1984), and Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean: The Changing Landscape of Corporate Power in the Age of Flexibility (New York: Basic Books, 1994). In terms of causation, many accounts highlight the significance of technological innovation and corporate profit seeking, while certain theorists also underscore the leading role of a deregulated financial sector, the search for lower labor costs, or the ascendancy of neoliberal ideology. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Conditions of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989); and David Harvey, "Globalization in Question," Rethinking Marxism 8.4 (winter 1995): 1-17; Robert J. S. Ross and Kent C. Trachte, Global Capitalism: The New Leviathan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); Sassen, Global City, Lester C. Thurow, Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle among Japan, Europe, and America (New York: William Morrow, 1992); and many of the contributions to Globalization: Critical Reflections, ed. James H. Mittelman (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1996). Discussion over impacts often has focused on the prospects for economic stability or centralization and control in a world that may be "multipolar" (i.e., lacking in a global hegemon), on increases in wealth among underdeveloped regions, on income polarization worldwide, and on the broader implications of increasing investment in information and services. 6. Many proponents of this kind of argument still advocate, of course, for controls on capital mobility or strengthening democratic governance. Yet this position has difficulty pointing to ways in which instances of political resistance—whether they are understood as irrational fundamentalisms (Thurow, Future of Capitalism), zero-sum nationalisms (Reich, Work of Nations), or militant particularisms (Harvey, "Globalization in Question")—can hope to be effective when transnational corporations are seen as being bound in no effective way by territorial imperatives, state regulation, or national allegiance. 7. See Held, "Democracy"; also see David Held, "Democracy and the New International Order?" in Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order, ed. Daniele Archibugi and David Held (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 96-120; Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up (Boston: South End Press, 1994); Robert W. Cox, "A Perspective o. Globalization," in Mittelman, Globalization, 21-30; and Saskia Sassen, "The Spatial Organization of Information Industries: Implications for the Role of the State," in Mittelman, Globalization, 33-52. 8. Karl Marx, "The Communist Manifesto," in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 221-47; see also Robert Boyer, "The Convergence Hypothesis Revisited: Globalization but Still the Century of
Notes to Chapter 1 • 181 Nations?" in National Diversity and Global Capitalism, ed. Suzanne Berger and Ronald Dore (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 29-59; and Paul Bairoch "Globalization Myths and Realities: One Century of External Trade and Foreign Investment," in States against Markets: The Limits of Globalization, ed. Robert Boyer and Daniel Drache (New York: Routledge, 1996), 173-92. For other insightful challenges to the more sweeping claims of globalism, see Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); and Dean Baker, Gerald Epstein, and Robert Pollin, eds., Globalization and Progressive Economic Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 9. Robert Wade, "Globalization and Its Limits: Reports of the Death of the National Economy Are Greatly Exaggerated," in Berger and Dore, National Diversity and Global Capitalism, 60-88. 10. Riccardo Petrella, "Globalization and Internationalization: The Dynamics of the Emerging World Order," in Boyer and Drache, States against Markets, 62-83; and Thurow, Future of Capitalism. In the United States, international integration has comprised only one development among many that have served to hurt the wages of American workers; other, more internal factors may include capital mobility within the United States and weakened labor unions, as well as shifts in government taxes and transfers. 11. See, for example, international restructuring and national conceptions of response in Hilary Silver, "National Conceptions of the New Urban Poverty: Social Structural Change in Britain, France, and the United States," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17.3 (September 1993): 336-54; and William K. Tabb, The Postwar Japanese System: Cultural Economy and Economic Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 311-37. On the persistence of nationalism, see Anthony D. Smith, "Towards a Global Culture?" Theory, Culture and Society 7.2-3 (June 1990): 171-91. 12. For the concept of embeddedness, see Mark Granovetter, "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness," American Journal of Sociology 91.3 (November 1985): 481-510. For its use in questions of national differences, see Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Stephen Woolcock, "Competition among Forms of Corporate Governance in the European Community: The Case of Britain," in Berger and Dore, National Diversity and Global Capitalism, 179-96; Andrea Boltho, "Has France Converged on Germany? Policies and Institutions since 1958," in Berger and Dore, National Diversity and Global Capitalism, 89-104; Marc V. Levine, "Globalization and Wage Polarization in U.S. and Canadian Cities: Does Public Policy Make a Difference?" in North American Cities and the Global Economy: Challenges and Opportunities, ed. Peter Karl Kresl and Gary Gappert (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995), 89-111; Richard B. Freeman, "Lessons for the United States," in Working under Different Rules, ed. Richard B. Freeman (New York: Russell Sage, 1994), 223-39; and Kath leen Thelen and Ikuo Kume, "The Effects of Globalization on Labor Revisited: Lessons from Germany and Japan," Politics and Society 27A (December 1999): 477-505. 13. See Linda Weiss, "Globalization and the Myth of the Powerless State," New Left Review 225 (September/October 1997): 3-27, and Weiss, Myth of the Powerless State; see also Linda Weiss and John M. Hobson, States and Economic Development: A
182 • Notes to Chapter 1 Comparative Historical Analysis (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1995). For a somewhat related approach that is also quite insightful, see Evans, Embedded Autonomy. 14. It is also increasingly apparent that prolonged economic stagnation in a number of the East Asian countries raises serious empirical questions (not addressed here) about the impending economic supremacy of developmentalism. 15. See the contrasting futures of the nation-state offered by Hirst and Thompson, Globalization in Question, and Castells, Power of Identity. The term "powercontainer" is used in Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, 2d ed. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 12. 16. Compare, for example, John A. Hall and G. John Ikenberry, The State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 1-3, and Colin Hay, Re-Stating Social and Political Change (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), 1-10; see also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983). 17. Among the many treatments of these theoretical developments, see Bob Jessop, The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods (New York: New York University Press, 1982); Robert R. Alford and Roger Friedland, Powers of Theory: Capitalism, the State and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis, eds., Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 18. See Clyde W. Barrow, Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), especially 146-57. 19. In addition to Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), see Theda Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988). 20. Theda Skocpol, "Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research," in Evans et al., Bringing the State Back In, 13. 21. Fred Block, Revising State Theory: Essays in Politics and Post-Industrialism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 19-22. See also Adam Przeworski, The State and the Economy under Capitalism (New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990), 64-65. 22. See, for example, Barrow's summary of the debates between Skocpol, G. William Domhoff, and Jill Quadagno in Critical Theories of the State, 136-45. 23. Przeworski, The State and the Economy under Capitalism. 24. There were probably many reasons why debates between neo-Marxian and neo-Weberian perspectives blurred the implicit conceptual agreement on the strategic, constructive nature of major state policies themselves: the two sides were determined in opposition; the empirical cases under debate were decisional (rather than "macroscopic"), which means that they did not empirically address patterns of state-society interaction; and, perhaps most important, those cases tended to be instances of welfare-state building, such as the New Deal, in which the policies were seen by both camps as constructive achievements. Both sides tended, Ideologically, to assume a long-term historic inclination toward increasing state capacity, on the one side because of bureaucratic expansion or constituent demand, and on the other because of class struggle or the need for state management of crisis tendencies. In
Notes to Chapter 1 • 183 any event, conceptions of state actions as destructive, counterproductive, or disembedding tended to go unposed, except, of course, within the very different theoretical universe of Hayekian neoliberalism. 25. Richard A. Grasso, "The Best Is Yet to Come: Globalization, America, and the New York Stock Exchange," Vital Speeches of the Day 63.7 (January 15,1997): 216. 26. For criticism of the reifying tendencies of globalist discourses, see John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (New York: New Press, 1998), 55-77; J. K. Gibson-Graham, "Querying Globalization," Rethinking Marxism 9.1 (1996/97): 1-27; and Roland Robertson and Habib Haque Khondker, "Discourses of Globalization: Preliminary Considerations," International Sociology 13.1 (March 1998): 25-40. 27. Primitive accumulation also figured importantly in Marxist discussions of the causes of underdevelopment and imperialism; see Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). 28. Smith's discussion actually refers to previous accumulation or, more precisely, an accumulation of stock previous to capitalist commodity production: "A stock of goods of different kinds ... must be stored up somewhere sufficient to maintain [a man], and to supply him with the materials and tools of his work.... This accumulation must, evidently, be previous to his applying his industry for so long a time to such a peculiar business" (Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes oftheWealth of Nations, 2 vols. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976], 1: 291) Evidently, Marx translated the term previous as ursprunglich, a word Marx's English translators rendered, in turn, as "primitive." See Michael Perelman, Classical Political Economy: Primitive Accumulation and the Social Division of Labor (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), 6. 29. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1:873. 30. Perelman contends that Marx referred elsewhere to his own discussion of primitive accumulation as nothing more than a "historical sketch," to restrict the theoretical and political implications that might be drawn from it. See Perelman, Classical Political Economy, 8. 31. Marx, Capital, 1:876, 883. 32. Ibid., 1:896. 33. For a discussion of Marx's own disclaimer of any formal theoretical claims adhering to the notion of primitive accumulation, see Perelman, Classical Political Economy, 8. It seems clear that Marx's own understanding of these actions by the state was that they were critical to the genesis of capitalism but not its mature operation, in which the "silent compulsion of economic relations" (Capital, 1:899) becomes sufficient to ensure the functioning of markets. Despite this disclaimer, Marx's general discussion in part 8—a sweeping and remarkable survey of the protean guises in which state activities move history forward—develops the concept of primitive accumulation in a manner that seems to outstrip the often subordinate role of state and politics in Marx's political economy and in subsequent Marxist theory. For one example of the way in which subsequent historical-materialist theory has handled this question, see Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (NewYork: Pantheon, 1970), 273-308. 34. The classic debates are contained in Sweezy et al., Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, and in T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (New
184 • Notes to Chapter 1 York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See also R. J. Holton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985); and Ira Katznelson, Marxism and the City (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1992), 157-202. For other accounts that focus on state, city, and early modern capitalism, see Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000-1950 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); and Charles Tilly and Wim E Blockmans, eds., Cities and the Riseof States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994). 35. Yet the limits of this sort of generalization—if national and local differences fail to be heeded—are addressed later in this chapter. 36. See Patrick J. Akard, "Corporate Mobilization and Political Power: The Transformation of U.S. Economic Policy in the 1970s," American Sociological Review 57.5 (October 1992): 597-615; David Plotke, "The Political Mobilization of Business," in The Politics of Interests: Interest Groups Transformed, ed. Mark P. Petracca (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), 175-98; and StanLuger, Corporate Power, American Democracy, and the Automobile Industry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 37. Colin Hay, "Anticipating Accommodations, Accommodating Anticipations: The Appeasement of Capital in the 'Modernization' of the British Labour Party, 1987-1992," Politics and Society 25.2 (1997): 234-56. See also Fred Block, "Political Choice and the Multiple 'Logics' of Capital," in Revising State Theory, 171-85; and Przeworski, State and Economy under Capitalism, 96-103. 38. From a very large literature on governmental fragmentation, parties, interests, and the implications for American politics, see E. E. Schattschneider, Party Government (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1942) and The Semi-Sovereign People (New York: Hinsdale, 111.: Dryden Press, 1975); Robert A. Dahl, "Madisonian Democracy," in A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); Martin Shefter, "Party, Bureaucracy and Political Change in the United States," in Political Parties: Development and Decay, ed. Louis Maisel and loseph Cooper (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1978), 211-65; Ira Katznelson, "Rethinking the Silences of Social and Economic Policy," Political Science Quarterly 101.2 (1986): 307-25; Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, "Poor Relief and Theories of the Welfare State," in Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, updated ed. (New York: Vintage, 1993), 407-80; and Theda Skocpol, "State Formation and Social Policy in the United States," in Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 11-36. 39. lohn Walton, Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 287-339. 40. See Susan S. Fainstein and Norman Fainstein, "The Ambivalent State: Economic Development Policy in the U.S. Federal System under the Reagan Administration," Urban AffairsrsQuarterly25.1 (September 1989): 41-62. 41. See, for example, Christopher Howard, The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 42. For use of the term "vicious downward spiral," see G0sta Esping-Andersen, "After the Golden Age? Welfare State Dilemmas in a Global Economy," inwWelfare States in Transition: National Adaptations in Global Economies, ed. Gosta EspingAndersen (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996), 8. 43. In addition to Piven and Cloward, "Poor Relief and Theories of the Welfare
Notes to Chapter 1 • 185 State," and Freeman, "Lessons for the United States," see John Myles, "When Markets Fail: Social Welfare in Canada and the United States," in Esping-Andersen, Welfare States in Transition, 116-40. 44. See Friedmann, "The World City Hypothesis"; Sassen, Global City; and Peter J. Taylor, "World Cities: The Rise and Fall of Their Mutuality," in Knox and Taylor, World Cities in a World-System, 48-62. 45. See Ann Markusen and Vicky Gwiasda, "Multipolarity and the Layering of Functions in World Cities: New York City's Struggle to Stay on Top," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 18.2 (June 1994): 167-93; and Donald Lyons and Scott Salmon, "World Cities, Multinational Corporations, and Urban Hierarchy: The Case of the United States," in Knox and Taylor, World Cities in a World-System, 98-114. 46. On civic culture, see Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod, "Comparing Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles: Testing Some World Cities Hypotheses," in Knox and Taylor, World Cities in a World-System, 171-91. As for the economic importance of particular places, it is clear that localities may draw on place-based institutional attributes as developmental advantages. See Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, eds., Globalization, Institutions, and Regional Development in Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Allen J. Scott, ed., Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 47. See Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy"; Hall, "The Local and the Global"; Featherstone, "Localism, Globalism, and Cultural Identity"; and Arif Dirlik, "The Global in the Local," in Wilson and Dissanayake, Global/Local, 21-45. 48. On nation-state and local state, see Castells, Power of Identity, 243-307, 350; on the space of flows, see Castells, Rise of the Network Society, 376-428. 49. See Robert C. Wood, 1400 Governments: The Political Economy of the New York Metropolitan Region (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961); and Michael N. Danielson, The Politics of Exclusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). For other work analyzing the importance of U.S. policy for spatial patterns of development during the post-World War II period, see John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Ann Markusen, Peter Hall, Sabina Deitrick, and Scott Campbell, The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Historical case studies also reveal the often destructive role of public policies in postwar urban decline and "renewal"; see Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993); and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). 50. For this formulation, see Christopher Leo, "City Politics in an Era of Globalization," in Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Urban Politics in a Global Economy, ed. Mickey Lauria (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997), 77-98. 51. See, for example, Caroline Andrew and Michael Goldsmith, "From Local
186 • Notes to Chapter 1 Government to Local Governance—and Beyond?" International Political Science Review 19.2 (1998): 101-17; and Pierre Hamel, Henri Lustiger-Thaler, and Louis Maheu, "Is There a Role for Social Movements?" in Sociology for the Twenty-First Century: Continuities and Cutting Edges, ed. Janet L. Abu-Lughod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 165-80. 52. Peter Marcuse, "Space and Race in the Post-Fordist City: The Outcast Ghetto and Advanced Homelessness in the United States Today," in Urban Poverty and the Underclass: A Reader, ed. Enzo Mingione (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 176-216. 53. See The State of the Cities (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1997). There is a fuller discussion of these questions for the case of New York in chapter 2 of the present volume. 54. See Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell, "Searching for a New Institutional Fix: The After-Fordist Crisis and the Global-Local Disorder," in Post-Fordism: A Reader, ed. Ash Amin (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994), 280-315. For similar conclusions within a somewhat different formulation, see Alan Harding and Patrick Le Gales, "Globalization, Urban Change and Urban Policies in Britain and France," in The Limits of Globalization: Cases and Arguments, ed. Alan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1997), 181-201. 55. See, for example, Le Gales, "Regulations and Governance in European Cities." 56. See Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen, "Conclusion: A Changed Spatial Order?" in Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? ed. Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), 272; see also Richard Child Hill and Kuniko Fujita, "State Restructuring and Local Power in Japan," Urban Studies 37A (April 2000): 673-90. 57. See Castells, Rise of the Network Society, 1-25; Power of Identity, 243-353; and End of Millennium, 4-69, 206-309. It should be noted that, for Castells, globalization is part of the broader emergence of a new mode of development resulting in the "information age." The interaction of three historical processes—a revolution in information technology, an economic crisis of capitalism and statism, and the emergence of cultural social movements—is seen to set in motion the development of a "network society" organized around a globally integrated, information-oriented economy and an electronically mediated, identity-based culture. Although it is not possible in this context to take full measure of these important works, two further objections (in addition to the one I make with respect to the state) can be offered in response to the emphasis on the discontinuity between contemporary globalization and the political economy of a generation ago. One is that Castells asserts, unconvincingly, that the new techno-economic paradigm has brought about a durable solution to problems of economic productivity. A second is that the ability of his carefully differentiated, often persuasive analyses of national and regional dynamics to stand alone, without the technological or globalist frame, may undermine the necessity of this larger frame; this is true, for example, of the account of U.S. politics in Power of Identity (287-97). 58. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994). See also Giovanni Arrighi, "Globalization and the Rise of East Asia: Lessons from the. Past, Prospects for the Future," International Sociology 13.1 (March 1998): 59-77.
Notes to Chapter 1 • 187 59. See Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century, 24, 332-56; and Arrighi, "Globalization and the Rise of East Asia." Using a concept of "systemic cycles of accumulation" in which each long wave of economic expansion is seen to move through similar phases of material (trade and production) and then financial expansion, Arrighi traces an overlapping succession of hegemonic regimes (Genoese, Dutch, British, U.S.) that span six centuries. In this view, the current U.S. regime of accumulation, which, like all aging regimes, is facing a surplus-capital crisis, is engaging in an "autumnal" bout of financialization that should eventually prove fatal to its hegemony. 60. See Arrighi, "Globalization and the Rise of East Asia." One dissimilarity between contemporary geopolitics and past patterns of regime change (and this may partly account for stalemate) is, as Arrighi concedes, the fact that the military prowess of the aging hegemon, the United States, has not shifted along with its capital surpluses to its supposed successors in Asia. For a useful discussion of this issue, see Bruce Cumings, "The Korean Crisis and the End of'Late' Development," New Left Review 231 (September/October 1998): 43-72. As for the question of level of analysis, it may be notable that two late-1990s measures promising to accelerate international economic integration—"fast-track" trade and the multilateral agreement on investment (MAI)—were defeated not by supranational or interstate discord but by opposition within the United States. See I. M. Destler, "U.S. Trade Governance in the New Global Economy," in Brookings Trade Forum 1999, ed. Susan M. Collins and Robert Z. Lawrence (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 141-66. 61. A fuller treatment of the significant differences between regulationist approaches is found in Amin, Post-Fordism. Although regulation theory rests on an elaborately developed set of concepts, its primary concern is to explain the coherence of a particular phase, or mode, of capitalist development (e.g., U.S. Fordism as an ideal type) in terms of the relationship between its "regime of accumulation" and "mode of regulation." In this theoretical context, regime of accumulation designates an array of economic regularities, composed centrally of distinctive types of labor process and market orientation, that drive the accumulation process of a given era; mode of regulation involves a certain ensemble of socially institutionalized practices (such as intrafirm organization, interfirm relations, monetary approach, response to unionization, form of state intervention, demand structure, and cultural norms) that "regulate" or reproduce a given accumulation regime. 62. See Robert Boyer, The Regulation School: A Critical Introduction, trans. Craig Charney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); see also Boyer, "The Convergence Hypothesis Revisited"; Boyer, "The Political in the Era of Globalization and Finance"; and Robert Boyer, "State and Market: A New Engagement for the Twenty-first Century?" in Boyer and Drache, States against Markets, 81-114. 63. See Bob Jessop, "Towards a Schumpeterian Workfare State? Preliminary Remarks on Post-Fordist Political Economy," Studies in Political Economy 40 (spring 1993): 7-39; Bob Jessop, "Capitalism and Its Future: Remarks on Regulation, Government and Governance," Review of International Political Economy 4.3 (autumn 1997): 561-81; Bob Jessop, "The Entrepreneurial City: Re-Imaging Localities, Redesigning Economic Governance, or Restructuring Capital?" in Transforming Cities: Contested Governance and New Spatial Divisions, ed. Nick Jewson and Susanne MacGregor (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Bob Jessop, "The Crisis of the National SpatioTemporal Fix and the Tendential Ecological Dominance of Globalizing Capitalism," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.2 (June 2000): 323-60. The
188 • Notes to Chapter 2 Schumpeterian workfare state or regime attempts, economically, "to promote flexibility and permanent innovation in open economies by intervening on the supply side and tries to strengthen as far as possible the structural competitiveness of the relevant economic spaces" (Jessop, "Capitalism and Its Future," 572). 64. For a similar observation, see Jamie Peck, Workfare States (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), 80-81. See also Evelyn Z. Brodkin, "Inside the Welfare Contract: Discretion and Accountability in State Welfare Administration," Social Service Review 71.1 (March 1997): 1-33. 65. See Joe Painter, "Regulation, Regime, and Practice in Urban Politics," in Lauria, Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory, 122-43. 66. For an earlier version of this point, see William Sites, "Primitive Globalization? State and Locale in Neoliberal Global Engagement," Sociological Theory 18.1 (March 2000): 121^4. For the notion of chaotic conception, see Andrew Sayer, Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 138; and Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (NewYork: Vintage, 1973), 100. 67. See Margaret S. Archer, "The Dubious Guarantees of Social Science: A Reply to Wallerstein," International Sociology 13.1 (March 1998): 5-17; see also Margaret S. Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 12-16, 81-84. 68. This way of framing my approach draws on the perceptive discussion in John Walton, "Making the Theoretical Case," in What Is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry, ed. Charles C. Ragin and Howard S. Becker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 121-37. For a different but quite interesting discussion of theory and method within ethnographic approaches to globalization, see Michael Burawoy, "Introduction: Reaching for the Global," in Michael Burawoy, Joseph A. Blum, Sheba George, Zsuzsa Gille, Teresa Gowan, Lynne Haney, Maren Klawiter, Steven H. Lopez, Sean 6 Riain, and Millie Thayer, Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 1-40. 2. Building an Urban Neoliberalism 1. This claim was posted (as of March 2001) on the Web site of the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau. See http://www.nycvisit.com. 2. For fiscal year 2000, the Giuliani administration projected an operating surplus of $2.9 billion; see City of New York, Office of Management and Budget, Executive Budget, Fiscal Year 2001: Message of the Mayor, 4. For a description of the State of the City Address, see Elizabeth Bumiller, "Giuliani Turns Showman in Broad State of City Address," NewYork Times, January 14,2000, A23, national edition. 3. For poverty data, see Stephanie Aaronson and Stephen V Cameron, Poverty in New York City, 1996: An Update and Perspectives (NewYork: Community Servic Society of NewYork 1997), 12. For income data, see Jiali Li and Emily Zimmerman, Low-Income Populations in New York City: Economic Trends and Social Welfare Programs, 1995 (NewYork: City of New York, Human Resources Administration, 1996), 11, as well as City of NewYork, Independent Budget Office, Big City, Big Bucks: New York City's Changing Income Distribution (NewYork, June 2000). The city's reliance on the financial sector is addressed in State of NewYork, State Comptroller, Office of the State Deputy Comptroller for the City of NewYork, New York City's Economic and
Notes to Chapter 2 • 189 Fiscal Dependence on Wall Street (New York, August 1998). The impact of economic development trends on housing costs is discussed in State of New York, State Comptroller, Office of the State Deputy Comptroller for the City of New York, No Room for Growth: Affordable Housing and Economic Development in New York City (New York, October 1999). 4. See City of New York, New York City Council, Hollow in the Middle: The Rise and Fall of New York City's Middle Class (New York, December 1997), and New York City's Middle Class: The Need for a New Urban Agenda (New York, December 1998). See also the report by the coalition Housing First!, New York's Affordable Housing Crisis: Context, Principles, and Solutions (New York, luly 2001); www.housingflrst.net. 5. For the seminal study, see Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). See also lohn Friedmann, "The World City Hypothesis," Development and Change 17.1 (1986): 69-83; and lohn Friedmann, "Where We Stand: A Decade of World City Research," in World Cities in a World-System, ed. Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21-47. For other studies of New York as a global city, see Margaret E. Crahan and Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, eds., The City and the World: New York's Global Future (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1997). 6. See lohn Hull Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York City Politics (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1992), especially 190-207. For another important study of New York that has emphasized the role of local politics in the city's late-twentieth-century development, see Martin Shefter, Political Crisis/Fiscal Crisis: The Collapse and Revival of New York City (New York: Basic Books, 1985). See also Charles Brecher and Raymond D. Horton, with Robert A. Cropf and Dean Michael Mead, Power Failure: New York City Politics and Policy since 1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Robert F. Pecorella, Community Power in a Postreform City: Politics in New York City (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994); and a number of the contributions to Urban Politics: New York Style, ed. lewel Bellush and Dick Netzer (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1990). 7. Mollenkopf, Phoenix in the Ashes, 199-200. See also lames Traub, "Giuliani Internalized," New York Times Magazine, February 11, 2001, 62. 8. There is a significant body of historical work that examines the politics and policy of land-use development in New York. On public measures that shaped the real-estate market of the nineteenth-century city, see Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); Eugene P Moehring, Public Works and the Patterns of Urban Real Estate Growth in Manhattan, 1835-1894 (New York: Arno Press, 1981); and David C. Hammack, Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). On early-twentieth-century initiatives, see Kenneth Jackson, "The Capital of Capitalism: The New York Metropolitan Region, 1890-1940," in Metropolis 1890-1940, ed. Anthony Sutcliffe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 319-54; Peter Marcuse, "The Beginnings of Public Housing in New York," Journal of Urban History 12.4 (August 1986): 350-90; and Owen D. Gutfreund, "The Path of Prosperity: New York City's East River Drive, 1922-1990," Journal of Urban History 21.2 (January 1995): 147-83. 9. See Janet L. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
190 • Notes to Chapter 2 10. First published in 1994, this work has been revised and republished: Susan S. Fainstein, The City Builders: Property Development in New York and London, 1980-2000, 2d ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001). The ambiguity I refer to continues in the revised edition in part because of observed empirical divergences between the real-estate markets and policy-making contexts of the two cities during the second half of the 1990s; see the discussions at the end of chapter 3, "Markets, Decision-Makers, and the Real-Estate Cycle," and at the end of chapter 4, "Policy and Politics." 11. The term urban regime has been much used—and, some have suggested, abused—in the academic study of urban politics. My use of this term, which is broader than in much of the scholarly work linked to "urban regime theory," is intended to refer to an institutionalized relationship between government and economic actors that guides a distinctive orientation toward urban development. In contrast to many case studies guided by urban regime theory, this conception—following Beauregard and Painter (and in certain respects also reconnecting with an early formulation by Elkin)—emphasizes that urban regimes are not simply or even predominantly local. Hence, I preface the term here with "national." See Joe Painter, "Regulation, Regime, and Practice in Urban Politics," 122-43, and Robert A. Beauregard, "City Planning and the Postwar Regime in Philadelphia," 171-88, both in Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Urban Politics in a Global Economy, ed. Mickey Lauria (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997). For seminal statements of urban regime theory, see Stephen Elkin, City and Regime in the American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Clarence N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989); and Clarence N. Stone, "Urban Regimes and the Capacity to Govern: A Political Economy Approach," Journal of Urban Affairs 15.1 (1993): 1-28. 12. See, for example, the discussion of earlier New York City crises in Shefter, Political Crisis/Fiscal Crisis, chapters 3 and 8. 13. See Stephen A. Marglin and Juliet B. Schor, eds., A Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 14. On housing decline in New York in the early 1960s, see Rental Housing in New York City, vol. 1, Confronting the Crisis, ed. Ira S. Lowry (New York City: New York City-Rand Institute, 1970), 6. 15. For a reconstruction of the ways in which urban-renewal initiatives were understood in their day, see Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993). The term federal bulldozer is the title of a study by Martin Anderson: The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949-1962 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964). On the politics of postwar urban renewal and public-private partnerships, see John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), as well as the contributions in Gregory D. Squires, ed., Unequal Partnerships: The Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment in Postwar America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989). For detailed examinations of urban renewal in New York, see Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1974); and Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993). 16. For a comparative analysis of economic decline, see Andrew Glyn, Alan
Notes to Chapter 2 • 191 Hughes, Alain Lipietz, and Ajit Singh, "The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age," in Marglin and Schor, Golden Age of Capitalism, 39-125. On governmental and political causes of urban fiscal stress, see L. J. Sharpe, "Is There a Fiscal Crisis in Western European Local Government? A First Appraisal," in The Local Fiscal Crisis in Western Europe: Myths and Realities, ed. L. J. Sharpe (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1981), 5-28; and Frances Fox Piven, "Federal Policy and Urban Fiscal Strain," Yale Law and Policy Review 2.2 (spring 1984): 291-320. 17. For comparative rankings of U.S. cities in the mid-1970s, see Richard P. Nathan and Charles Adams, "Understanding Central City Hardship," Political Scienc Quarterly 91.1 (spring 1976): 47-62. Ester R. Fuchs provides a detailed and comparative discussion of the complex causes of fiscal crises in the 1970s among U.S. cities in chapter 2 of her book Mayors and Money: Fiscal Policy in New York and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Most municipalities would not find themselves confronted by a full-blown debt crisis, as the local variety of political and governmental configurations (including significant differences in intergovernmental relations and service responsibilities between states and cities as well as disparities in interest-group pressures and party structures) enabled many city executives to weather the economic slide without the threat of default. Yet many cities, including Newark, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Boston, did experience acute fiscal pressures (see Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 226). In effect, the combination of economic stagnation, a decentralized intergovernmental system, and postwar suburbanoriented spending contributed to a widespread propensity in the United States toward urban fiscal stress. 18. See, for example, the fiscal gimmicks described by Shefter, Political Crisis/ Fiscal Crisis, 60-65, 106. 19. The many studies of the crisis, while often addressing multiple and over lapping causes, do tend to provide significant differences in emphasis. For interpretations that see a local and misguided liberalism at work, see Ken Auletta, The Streets Were Paved with Gold (New York: Vintage, 1980), and Charles R. Morris, The Cost of Good Intentions: New York City and the Liberal Experiment (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980); for a focus on the instrumental role of banks, see Jack Newfield and Paul Du Brul, The Permanent Government (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1981); and for an emphasis on the structures of the larger political economy, see William K. Tabb, The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982). For "regime"-oriented studies concerned with the politics of the crisis and its resolution, see Robert W. Bailey, The Crisis Regime: The MAC, theEFCB, and the Political Impact of the New York City Financial Crisis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), as well as Shefter, Political Crisis/Fiscal Crisis. 20. According to Eric Lichten, this figure was mentioned by financier Felix Rohatyn in an interview with David Susskind in 1984; see Lichten, Class, Power and Austerity: The New York City Fiscal Crisis (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1986), 128. 21. SeetheDaz'/yAfezfs, October 30,1975,1. 22. Simon's testimony in hearings before the U.S. Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs is quoted in Lichten, Class, Power and Austerity, 189. 23. See Fuchs, Mayors and Money, which offers extensive comparative research suggesting that greater government-mandated service burdens (rather than
192 • Notes to Chapter 2 discretionary spending on the poor) are key to recurrent bouts of fiscal stress in New York and several other cities; see also Ester R. Fuchs, "The Permanent Urban Fiscal Crisis," in Breaking Away: The Future of Cities, ed. Julia Vitullo-Martin (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1996), 49-73. On the role of developers in the fiscal crisis, see Norman I. Fainstein and Susan S. Fainstein, "The Politics of Urban Development: New York City since 1945," City Almanac 17.6 (1984): 1-26; on the banks, see Newfield and Du Brul, The Permanent Government, and Lichten, Class, Power and Austerity; on planners, see Dick Netzer, "The Economy and the Governing of the City," in Bellush and Netzer, Urban Politics. 24. Roger Starr, "Effluents and Successes in Declining Metropolitan Areas," in Post-Industrial America: Metropolitan Decline and Inter-Regional Job Shifts, ed. George Sternlieb and James W. Hughes (New Brunswick: Center for Urban Policy Research, State University of New Jersey, 1975), 262. On triage and planned shrinkage, see also Roger Starr, "Making New York Smaller," New York Times Magazine, November 14, 1976, 32; Joseph P. Fried, "City's Housing Administrator Proposes 'Planned Shrinkage' of Some Slums," New York Times, Februarys, 1976, 35; and the discussion in Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 224-32. 25. Starr, "Making New York Smaller," 106. 26. On Starr's resignation, see Joseph P. Fried, "Starr, New York City's Housing Chief, Will Leave Post by Fall, Officials Say," New York Times, May 22,1976, 29. For Rohatyn's use of the approach, see Francis X. Clines, "Blighted Areas' Use Is Urged by Rohatyn," NewYork Times, March 16,1976, sec. 1,1. 27. See, for example, the Temporary Commission on City Finances, The City in Transition: Prospects and Policies for New York, Final Report (New York: Arno Press, 1978). As events of the coming decades would show, fiscal stability tended to remain elusive even as other goals were more fully realized. 28. See the data and discussion in Fuchs, Mayors and Money, 111-14. On the distributions of service cuts, see also Raymond D. Horton and M. McCormick, "Services," in Setting Municipal Priorities, 1981, ed. Charles Brecher and Raymond D. Horton (Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun, 1980), 85-112, and Peter Marcuse, "The Targeted Crisis: On the Ideology of the Urban Fiscal Crisis and Its Uses," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 5.3 (September 1981): 330-55. 29. For a critical study of the ICIP program, see The New York City Industrial and Commercial Incentive Program: Every Day Is Christmas, a report by State Senator Franz S. Leichter, 28th S.D., Manhattan (NewYork, 1985). On 421a, see George Sternlieb and David Listokin, "Housing," in Setting Municipal Priorities, 1986, ed. Charles Brecher and Raymond D. Horton (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 382-411; on the revamping of J-51, see Charles Kaiser, "'J-51' a Way to Save Failing Properties," New York Times, February 1, 1976, sec. 8, 1. On the development projects, see John Mollenkopf, "Economic Development," in Setting Municipal Priorities, 1984, ed. Charles Brecher and Raymond D. Horton (NewYork: NewYork University Press, 1983), 131-57. 30. For the notion of a bankers' coup, see Newfield and Du Brul, The Permanent Government. 31. Data on intergovernmental aid show that, in the aggregate, federal aid to cities continued to climb through 1978, then began to fall. See Susan S. Fainstein and Norman Fainstein, "The Ambivalent State: Economic Development Policy in the U.S.
Notes to Chapter 2 • 193 Federal System under the Reagan Administration," Urban Affairs Quarterly 25.1 (September 1989): 41-62. 32. On festival malls and general shifts in federal urban policy, see Dennis R. Judd and Todd Swanstrom, City Politics: Private Power and Public Policy (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 290-93; see also Dennis R. Judd, "Constructing the Tourist Bubble," in The Tourist City, ed. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 35-53. On Carter's visit to the South Bronx, see Ronald Lawson with Reuben B. Johnson III, "Tenant Responses to the Urban Housing Crisis, 1970-1984," in The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904-1984, ed. Ronald Lawson (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 235. 33. See Patrick J. Akard, "Corporate Mobilization and Political Power: The Transformation of U.S. Economic Policy in the 1970s," American Sociological Review 57.5 (October 1992): 597-615; and David Plotke, "The Political Mobilization of Business," in The Politics of Interests: Interest Groups Transformed, ed. Mark P. Petracca (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), 175-98. The impact of this new business mobilization was probably to hasten the dissolution of the older urban-centered coalition of interests that had been the powerful constituent group of postwar urban policies. See the discussions in Mollenkopf, The Contested City, and in Peter Dreier, "America's Urban Crisis: Symptoms, Causes, Solutions," in Race, Poverty, and American Cities, ed. John Charles Boger and Judith Welch Wegner (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 79-141. 34. On New York City revenues, see James A. Krauskopf, "Federal Aid," in Setting Municipal Priorities, 1990, ed. Charles Brecher and Raymond D. Horton (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 117-37. On the Presidential Commission report, see Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, 293-94. 35. On Reagan's proposals and budget shifts, see Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, 293-304; on housing and urban development cuts, see Fainstein and Fainstein, "The Ambivalent State," as well as Paul Pierson, "Retrenchment in a Vulnerable Sector: Housing," in Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 74-99. 36. For spending cuts, see Fainstein and Fainstein, "The Ambivalent State," and Krauskopf, "Federal Aid." 37. Anthony Downs, "Contrasting Strategies for Economic Development of Metropolitan Areas in the United States and Western Europe," in Urban Change in the United States and Western Europe: Comparative Analysis and Policy, 2d ed., ed. Anita A. Summers, Paul C. Cheshire, and Lanfranco Senn (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 1999), 36-37. 38. For city responses to the new circumstances of the early 1980s, see, among other collections, Susan S. Fainstein, Norman I. Fainstein, Richard Child Hill, Dennis R. Judd, and Michael Peter Smith, Restructuring the City: The Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment (New York: Longman, 1983); and Beyond the City Limits: Urban Policy and Economic Restructuring in Comparative Perspective, ed. John R. Logan and Todd Swanstrom (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). On Chicago, see the contributions to Harold Washington and the Neighborhoods: Progressive City Government in Chicago, 1983-1987, ed. Pierre Clavel andWimWiewel (New Brunswick, N.J. Rutgers University Press, 1991), as well as Barbara Ferman, Challenging the Growth Machine: Neighborhood Politics in Chicago and Pittsburgh (Lawrence: University Press
194 • Notes to Chapter 2 of Kansas, 1996). On Boston, see Peter Dreier and W. Dennis Keating, "The Limits of Localism: Progressive Housing Policies in Boston, 1984-1989," Urban Affairs Quarterly 26.2 (December 1990): 191-216; and Peter Dreier and Bruce Ehrlich, "Downtown Development and Urban Reform: The Politics of Boston's Linkage Policy," Urban Affairs Quarterly26.3 (March 1991): 354-75. 39. On Moses, see Caro, The Power Broker, and Schwartz, The New York Approach. 40. See Kevin R. Cox, "Globalisation, Competition and the Politics of Local Economic Development," Urban Studies 32.2 (March 1995): 213-24. 41. Major business groups included the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, New York Partnership, Economic Development Council, and the Citizens Budget Commission. The important development boosters were the Real Estate Board of New York and the Citizens Housing and Planning Council; the latter was headed for a time by former housing commissioner Roger Starr. See Shefter, Political Crisis/Fiscal Crisis; and Susan S. Fainstein and Norman Fainstein, "The Effectiveness of Community Politics: New York City," in Breaking Chains: Social Movements and Collective Action, vol. 3 of Comparative Urban and Social Research, ed. Michael Peter Smith (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 108-32. 42. See Harry DeRienzo and Joan B. Allen, The New York City In Rem Housing Program: A Report (New York: New York Urban Coalition, 1985). 43. The two primary DAMP programs were the Community Management Program (CMP) and the Tenant Interim Lease (TIL) program. Community Management contracted with neighborhood-based organizations to operate a select group of mostly occupied city-owned residential properties; by 1984, twenty-two groups managed a total of 168 buildings (about 3,600 units), supported by approximately $20 million in community-development funding to be used for repair and rehabilitation. TIL provided organized tenant associations with an opportunity for self-management and partly subsidized self-help rehabilitation, toward the eventual goal of conversion to limited-equity cooperatives; the program included 302 buildings (roughly 6,700 units) in 1984, by which time about sixty buildings had completed and exited the program. See the following reports by the City of New York, Department of Housing Preservation and Development: The In Rem Housing Program: First Annual Report, September 1978 to September 1979 (October 1979) and The In Rem Housing Program: Fifth Annual Report (1983), as well as DeRienzo and Allen, The New York City In Rem Housing Program. 44. See Edward A. Gargan, "City Planning Commission Finds Its Power Is Eroding," New York Times, June 29, 1981, Bl. See also Norman I. Fainstein and Susan S. Fainstein, "Economic Restructuring and the Politics of Land Use Planning in New York City," Journal of the American Planning Association 53.2 (spring 1987): 237-48; and John Mollenkopf, "City Planning," in Brecher and Horton, Setting Municipal Priorities, 1990, 141-72. 45. Peggy Moberg, "Planning for People vs. Development for Profit," City Limits, January 1983,13. 46. See Josh Barbanel, "Campaign Contributors," New York Times, November 27, 1985, 16; and Jewel Bellush, "Clusters of Power: Interest Groups," in Bellush and Netzer, Urban Politics, New York Style, 296-338. 47. See, for example, City of New York, "New York City: An Economic Renais-
Notes to Chapter 2 • 195 sance," advertising supplement to Forbes duly 5, 1982), 63-64, in which a text signed by Koch—next to a large photograph of himself—proclaimed: "The City's remarkable recovery and aggressive pro-business policy have effected a turnaround. . . . Our public-private partnership has worked to create a true economic renaissance." 48. See lames Pickman and Benson F. Roberts, "Tapping Real Estate Markets to Address Housing Needs," New York Affairs 9.1 (1985): 3-17. 49. See Frank DeGiovanni and Lorraine Minnite, "Patterns of Neighborhood Change," in Dual City: Restructuring New York, ed. lohn H. Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991), 267-311; and Terry 1. Rosenberg Poverty in New York City, 1991: A Research Bulletin (New York: Community Service Society of New York, 1992). 50. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, I am using the term regime to mean a type of institutionalized relationship between government and economic actors that guides an orientation toward urban development. "National/local" is intended to reinforce the point that urban regimes are not simply local. 51. On this counsel to Koch, see Shefter, Political Crisis/Fiscal Crisis, 206. 52. The statement on housing units is by Rutgers University Professor George Sternlieb, quoted in loseph Berger, "Failure of Plan for Homelessness Reflects City Housing Crisis," New York Times, February 19,1985, Al. 53. In terms of homelessness, average daily use of shelters in New York City increased from 2,703 residents in lanuary 1981 to 10,064 in lanuary 1987. See Emanuel Tobier, "The Homeless," in Brecher and Horton, Setting Municipal Priorities, 1990 307-38. For various definitions of housing crisis in the mid-1980s, see Robert Hayes, "The Mayor and the Homeless Poor," City Limits, August/September 1985, 6-9; lane Benedict, "Will the Tide Turn to Publicly Owned Housing?" Tenant, March 1985,1; and Anthony DePalma, "Will Shortage of Housing Crimp Economic Growth?" New York Times, August 18,1985, sec. 4, 20. 54. See loyce Purnick, "Koch to Announce Plan for 250,000 Apartments," New York Times, April 30,1986, B3. 55. On business concerns, see Thomas ]. Lueck, "As Housing Costs Mount, New York Companies Move Away," New York Times, March 3, 1987, sec. 2, 1; and Thomas ]. Lueck, "Retraining and Housing Called Keys to Growth," New York Times, March 5,1987, sec. 2,1. For the community-oriented analysis of the plan, see Bonnie Brower, Missing the Mark: Subsidizing Housing for the Privileged, Displacing the Poor (New York: Association of Neighborhood and Housing Development and the Housing lustice Campaign, 1989). In response to community pressure, the later years of the plan increased the proportion going to low-income groups. See the retrospective assessment by Alex Schwartz, "New York City and Subsidized Housing: Impacts and Lessons of the City's $5 Billion Capital Budget Housing Plan," Housing Policy Debate 10.4 (1999): 839-77. 56. The Private Ownership Management Program expanded from 38 to 277 buildings between fiscal years 1985 and 1989; the other alternative management programs (the Community Management Program, the Tenant Interim Lease program, and the Urban Homesteading Program) increased from 479 to 503 during the same period. See City of New York, District Resource Statements (New York: Office of Management and Budget and Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Fiscal Years 1985 to 1989).
196 • Notes to Chapter 2 57. For the impacts of the stock-market problems on the local land economy, see Mark McCain, "New Data Shows Sharp Impact of Crash," New York Times, March 13, 1988, sec. 8, 9; Thomas J. Lueck, "Koch Looks to Rivers for Development," New York Times, February 12, 1989, sec. 10, 1; and Thomas J. Lueck, "A Skyscraper High Office Space Surplus," New York Times, October 22,1989, sec. 10,1. 58. For ICIPs, see City of New York, Department of Finance, Annual Report to the City Council on the Industrial and Commercial Incentives Program (New York, 1990). For J-51, total units granted benefits increased by about 35 percent between fiscal year 1986 and fiscal year 1990. See City of New York, J-51 Tax Exemption/ Abatement Program, Fiscal Year 1990, Annual Report (New York, 1990). 59. See "Housing for All," newsletter produced for Housing Action Week by Listeners' Action on Homelessness and Housing, December 18,1988 (author's files). 60. On Dinkins's aides and business supporters, see Frank Lynn, "Dinkins Team: Old Hands Join a Few Newcomers," New York Times, November 4,1989,29; and Sam Roberts, "Dinkins Gaining Support among Business Executives," NewYork Time September 26,1989, Bl. 61. The quote is from "On the Record: Housing Commissioner Felice Michetti," City Limits, October 1990, 8-9. On the expansion of the plan, see Don Terry, "Dinkins Expands Housing Plan to Assist the Poor," New York Times, May 17,1990, B3. 62. On federal grants-in-aid, see U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, no. 507, "Federal Grants-in-Aid Summary: 1970-1999"; on federal housing and urban spending, see U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables: Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2001 (Washington, D.C., 2000), 67-69, 87-90. See also U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, The President's National Urban Policy Report (Washington, D.C., 1990). 63. See James C. McKinley Jr., "Dinkins Shifts on Fiscal Plan under Pressure," New York Times, November 13, 1991, Bl; and James C. McKinley Jr., "Vallone Offers Own Plan for City's Fiscal Problems," New York Times, November 22,1991, B3. 64. The use of ICIPs, which postponed property taxes for up to twenty-three years on new and renovated commercial buildings, had become increasingly widespread in the late 1980s. Yet a study conducted by State Senator Franz Leichter of ICIP applications between 1988 and 1990 calculated that more than half of the awards—slated to cost the city $245 million over the next ten years—were needless commercial property-tax exemptions. See It's Still Christmas Every Day: The NYC Industrial and Commercial Incentive Program, a report by State Senator Franz S. Leichter, 28th S.D., Manhattan (NewYork, 1990); this report is on file at the NewYork City Municipal Reference Library. Although defenders of the program claimed that by 1991 it had saved or created more than seventy thousand jobs, no audit had been done to certify whether the promised jobs actually materialized. See Walter Fee, "Getting All of the Breaks: City Gives Tax Favors to the Richest," New York Newsday, December 17, 1991, 6. The J-51 tax-incentive program for apartment owners, which had been greatly expanded in the late 1980s, presented a similar dilemma: no one could be sure the program actually provided an incentive. Granting exemptions and abatements on property taxes based on improvements, alterations, or rehabilitations to housing units, J-51 tax benefits totaled more than $100 million annually during the second half of the 1980s (City of New York, J-51 Tax Exemption/Tax Abatement Program, Fiscal Year 1990, Annual Report).
Notes to Chapter 2 • 197 65. See A. Breznick, "Dinkins Nears Revision of ICIP Program," Grain's New York Business, December 17, 1990; James C. McKinley Jr., "Tax Incentive for Builders Is Extended," New York Times, February 26,1992, Bl; James C. McKinley Jr., "Dinkins Pledges Four-Year Corporate Tax Freeze," New York Times, October 20,1992, B9; and City of New York, Department of Finance, Finance New York: Industrial and Commercial Incentive Program, Annual Report (New York, 1993). 66. See City of New York, Department of City Planning, Annual Report on Social Indicators, for 1993 and 1994. According to the latter, the total numbers of subsidized housing starts fell from 26,352 units in fiscal year 1989 to 14,880 units in fiscal year 1993. 67. For the quotation from labor leader and erstwhile Dinkins supporter Dennis Rivera, see Sam Roberts, "Gadflies of Today Parcel the Blame among Old Allies," New York Times, July 1,1991, B1. See also Josh Barbanel, "Teachers Union's Crucial Alliance with Dinkins Is Shattered," New York Times, October 15,1993, B4. 68. Japanese investment in New York real estate, which rose from $800 million to more than $10 billion between 1984 and 1990, helped carry the land boom several years past the Wall Street crash, but soon dropped off, as did other sources of foreign investment. See Ashley Dunn, "New Wave from Southeast Asia Is Hitting New York Real Estate," New York Times, August 29, 1994, Al. On vacancy rates, see City of New York, Department of City Planning, Annual Report on Social Indicators, 1993. On housing abandonment, see Victor Bach and Sherece Y. West, Housing on the Block Disinvestment and Abandonment Risks in New York City Neighborhoods (New York: Community Service Society of New York, 1993). In New York as a whole, the numbers of rental properties in serious tax arrears climbed from 1,690 to 2,903 between 1988 and 1992 (Bach andWest, Housingon the Block, 37). 69. For data on growth and unemployment, see City of New York, Department of City Planning, Annual Report on Social Indicators, 1993; and State of New York, Office of the State Deputy Comptroller for the City of New York, Recent Trends in the New York City Economy, May 8, 1995. The city's trends in income inequality and poverty between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s followed the United States generally, but the bottom three-fifths of New York City's families lost income more dramatically than those in the nation. The percentage income share of New York's lowest fifth declined by 40 percent; see Li and Zimmerman, Low-Income Populations in New York City, 11. Meanwhile, real spending by federal, state, and local authorities on public assistance (exclusive of Medicaid) for the city's poor declined roughly 20 percent between 1975 and 1992 (from $3.2 billion to $2.6 billion in 1992 dollars). See Philip Thompson and Charles Brecher, Poverty and Public Spending Related to Poverty in New York City, Background Paper (New York: Citizens Budget Commission, 1994). 70. See Sassen, Global City. See also John H. Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells, "Introduction," 3-22, and Matthew P. Drennan, "The Decline and Rise of the New York Economy," 25-41, both in Mollenkopf and Castells, Dual City. 71. See Donald Lyons and Scott Salmon, "World Cities, Multinational Corporations, and Urban Hierarchy: The Case of the United States," in Knox and Taylor, World Cities in a World-System, 98-114. 72. Charles Brecher, Elizabeth Roistacher, and Sheila Spiezio, Professional Business Services in the New York City Economy (New York: Citizens Budget Commission, 1995), 25.
198 • Notes to Chapter 2 73. For an extended analysis of New York's global functions in relation to those of other U.S. cities—and an argument that reasserts the importance of examining cities within their national urban systems—see Ann Markusen and Vicky Gwiasda, "Multipolarity and the Layering of Functions in World Cities: New York City's Struggle to Stay on Top," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 18.2 (June 1994): 167-93. 74. See New York City Partnership, "From Schools to Skyscrapers: Building an Effective Development Process for New York City" (New York, April 1990); this report is on file at the City of New York's Municipal Reference Library. 75. See New York Chamber of Commerce and Industry and New York City Partnership Privatization Task Force, "Putting the Public First: Making New York Work through Privatization and Competition" (NewYork, [1993]), 7. Although Rudolph Giuliani would be elected mayor on a platform that embraced a number of privatization measures, few of the initiatives mentioned in this proposal—from placing tolls on Manhattan bridges to creating an independent authority to manage the city's public hospitals—were acted upon. 76. See Thomas J. Lueck, "Fund Set Up to Help City with Projects," New York Times, August 22,1994, Bl. For the history and subsequent fortunes of the New York City Investment Fund, see Kim Nauer, "The Apprenticeship of Money Kravis," City Limits, March 1997, 26-29. 77. Thomas J. Lueck, "Pared Budgets Don't Cut Flow of Tax Breaks," New York Times, July 5,1995,A1. 78. For an extensive discussion of both the causes and the politics of this issue, see Peter Marcuse, "Space and Race in the Post-Fordist City: The Outcast Ghetto and Advanced Homelessness in the United States Today," in Urban Poverty and the Underclass: A Reader, ed. Enzo Mingione (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 176-216. 79. For official accounts of governmental steps to address Nimby problems, see City of New York, City Planning Commission, Criteria for the Location of City Facilities (New York, 1990); and City of New York, Department of City Planning, Fair Share: An Assessment of New York City's Facilities Siting Process (New York, 1995). 80. See Catherine S. Manegold, "Giuliani, on Stump, Hits Hard at Crime and How to Fight It," New York Times, October 13,1993, Al; James Dao, "Dinkins and Giuliani Split on Public Safety Issues," New York Times, October 11,1993, Al; and Celia W. Dugger, "New York Rivals Differ Strikingly on Dealing with City's Poorest," New York Times, October 2,1993, Al. 81. For a close analysis of voting patterns in the 1993 election, see Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes, 209-27. 82. Quoted in David W. Dunlap, "Taking City Planning in a New Direction," New York Times, April 24,1994,1. 83. The $348 million went to eleven corporations, most of them financial services and media firms; see Lueck, "Pared Budgets Don't Cut Flow of Tax Breaks." On the Lower Manhattan proposals, see Lower Manhattan Task Force, A Plan for the Revitalization of Lower Manhattan (New York, 1994), held on file at the City of New York's Municipal Reference Library. 84. On the rationale for Clinton-era economic policies, see, for example, Alan Greenspan, "Statements to Congress," Federal Reserve Bulletin 84.8 (August 1998): 643-47; see also Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, Growing Prosperity: The
Notes to Chapter 2 • 199 Battle for Growth with Equity in the Twenty-first Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,2000). 85. A number of Clinton policies also helped poor and lower-middle-class Americans but, except for expansion of the earned-income tax credit, most of these benefits were fairly modest. See John Myles and Jill Quadagno, "Envisioning a Third Way: The Welfare State in the Twenty-first Century," Contemporary Sociology 29.1 (January 2000): 156-67. 86. From 1992 to 1994, the increase in HUD's budget authority was from $25 billion to $26.3 billion; see U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables: Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2001 (Washington, D.C., 2000), 88-89. 87. Small portions of the crime bill were also earmarked for prevention. For a discussion of the crime bill, as well as an extended analysis of devolution, see John Kincaid, "De Facto Devolution and Urban Defunding: The Priority of Persons over Places," Journal of Urban Affairs 21.2 (1999): 135-67. 88. For an early assessment of TANF, see the contributions to Economic Conditions and Welfare Reform, ed. Sheldon Danziger (Kalamazoo, Mich.: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1999). 89. See "Reinvention of HUD and Redirection of Housing Policy," in Joint Hearings before the Subcommittee on Housing Opportunity and Community Development and the Subcommittee on HUD Oversight and Structure of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, United States Senate (March 14,29, April 7, and May 4, 1995). For a political interpretation linking the attack on urban aid to the declining electoral clout of cities, see Karen M. Paget, "Can Cities Escape Political Isolation?" American Prospect 36 (January/February 1998): 54-62. 90. U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables: Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2001 (Washington, D.C., 2000), 89. See also, on Section 8 subsidy cuts, Alex F. Schwartz and Avis C. Vidal, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Impact of Federal and State Policy Changes on Housing in New York City," in Housing and Community Development in New York City: Facing the Future, ed. Michael H. Schill (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 233-59. 91. The research literature on this question is large and unequivocal. See, for example, Lynn W. Bachelor, "Stadiums as Solution Sets: Baseball, Football and the Revival of Downtown Detroit," Policy Studies Review 15.1 (spring 1998): 89-101; Andrew Zimbalist, "The Economics of Stadiums, Teams and Cities," Policy Studies Review 15.1 (spring 1998): 17-29; Norman Krumholz, "Equitable Approaches to Local Economic Development," Policy Studies Journal 27.1 (1999): 83-95; and Mark S. Rosentraub, "Are Public Policies Needed to Level the Playing Field between Cities and Teams?" Journal of Urban Affairs 21A (1999): 377-95. On the political economy of tourism, see Judd and Fainstein, The Tourist City. 92. Larry Bennett, "The New Style of U.S. Urban Redevelopment: From Urban Renewal to the City of Leisure," paper presented to the Joint Urban and Education Workshop, University of Chicago, Chicago, Februarys, 2000. 93. See Alexander J. Reichl, Reconstructing Times Square: Politics and Culture in Urban Development (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999); and Brett Pulley, "A Mix of Glamo[u]r and Hardball Won Disney a Piece of 42 Street," New York Times, July 29, 1995.
200 • Notes to Chapter 2 94. Charles V. Bagli, "Jets, Citing Benefits to New York City, Detail Plan for Stadium," New York Times, January 27, 2001, A12, national edition. 95. For a careful analysis of New York's record on policing, see Judith A. Greene, "Zero Tolerance: A Case Study of Police Policies and Practices in New York City," Crime and Delinquency 45.2 (April 1999): 171-87. Greene observes that stateby-state comparisons from the 1990s show that violent-crime rates were down significantly irrespective of growth in prison population and style of policing (e.g., "zero tolerance" versus "community policing"). See also Jeffrey Pagan, Franklin E. Zimring, and June Kim, "Declining Homicide in New York City: A Tale of Two Trends," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 88.4 (summer 1998). What did seem clear was that New York's policing strategy resulted in increases in police-brutality complaints, particularly by African-Americans and Latinos. See Amnesty International, Police Brutality and Excessive Force in the New York City Police Department, Report 51/36/96 (New York, June 1996). 96. Greene points out that "reclaiming the open spaces of New York," originally only one of New York's six crime-fighting strategies, was moved to the top of the list when city officials began to make the claim that Giuliani administration reforms were actually causing the decreases in crime ("Zero Tolerance," 173). For more detail on CompStat (which simply stands for "computer statistics"), see Victor Goldsmith, Philip G. McGuire, John H. Mollenkopf, and Timothy A. Ross, eds., Analyzing Crime Patterns: Frontiers of Practice (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2000). 97. The welfare caseload figures are from the City of New York, Executive Budget, Fiscal Year 2001 .-Budget Summary (Proposed), released April 18, 2000, 21. 98. Others included a company calling itself the Psychic Network, whose practices of recruiting welfare recipients to work from home as telephone psychics generated a brief public-relations flap when it was reported in the press. See Nina Bernstein, "New York Drops Psychic Training from Welfare-to-Work Program," New York Times, January 29,2000, A12. 99. For welfare implementation in New York, see the following: City of New York, Independent Budget Office, Welfare Reform Revisited: Implementation in N York City, September 24, 1998; Vivian S. Toy, "Tough Workfare Rules Used as Way to Cut Welfare Rolls," New York Times, April 15, 1998, Al; Steven Greenhouse, "Many Participants in Workfare Take the Place of City Workers," New York Times, April 13, 1998, Al; Alan Finder, "Evidence Is Scant That Workfare Leads to Full-Time Jobs," New York Times, April 12,1998, sec. 1,1; Rachel S. Swarns, "Mothers Poised for Workfare Face Acute Lack of Day Care," New York Times, April 14,1998, Al; and Amy Waldman, "Neighborhood Report: New York Up Close; Litter Fluctuates with Workfare," New York Times, March 15, 1998, sec. 14, 6. For a detailed analysis of the organizing campaigns against WEP—and of the impact of WEP on relationships between nonprofit welfare advocacy groups, community organizations, municipal labor unions, and government agencies—see John Krinsky, "Work, Workfare and Contention in New York City: The Potential for Flexible Identities in Organizing Opposition to Workfare," Critical Sociology 24.3 (1998): 277-305. 100. See City of New York, Department of City Planning, Consolidated Plan: Annual Performance Report, vol. 1 (New York, 1998). The local administration got credit for extending a significant portion of its share of federal community-development funding to supporting rehabilitation and maintenance of the city's existing in rem (owner-abandoned) housing stock, although much of this spending was required by
Notes to Chapter 2 • 201 law. See City of New York, Independent Budget Office, New York City's Use of Community Development Block Grant Funds, April 1998. The administration cultivated neighborhood-based for-profit firms (often minority-owned) but also provided some support for the not-for-profit community organizations that remained the backbone of the city's "third-sector" housing. See Ross Gittell and J. Phillip Thompson, "InnerCity Business Development and Entrepreneurship: New Frontiers for Policy and Research," in Urban Problems and Community Development, ed. Ronald F. Ferguson and William T. Dickens (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999); an Frank P. Braconi, "In Re In Rem: Innovation and Expediency in New York's Housing Policy," in Housing and Community Development in New York City: Facing the Future, ed. Michael H. Schill (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 93-118. As in other service areas, the administration did attempt to use withdrawal of funding contracts to silence critics of its housing policies. See Glenn Thrush and Kemba Johnson, "Supplanting ACORN," City Limits, November 1997, 5. 101. On housing expenditures, see Schwartz, "New York City and Subsidized Housing." In addition, the housing department's force of inspectors, charged with investigating code violations and dangerous conditions in 140,000 apartment buildings, was cut to two hundred, a quarter of the number from two decades earlier; see City of New York, Independent Budget Office, Analysis of the Mayor's Preliminary Budget for 2000, March 23, 1999. 102. For discussions of in rem housing and public housing, see a number of contributions to Schill, Housing and Community Development in New York City. On recent plans and conflicts over New York City public housing, see U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Public and Indian Housing, New York City Housing Authority, PHA Plans—Final: Five-Year Plan for Fiscal Years 2000-2004, December 2,1999, and PHA Plans—Draft: 5 Year Plan for Fiscal Years 2001-2005, n.d see also J. A. Lobbia, "Unwelcome Mat: New Public Housing Rules Shun the Poorest New Yorkers," Village Voice, October 19, 1999, 55-61. 103. Dan Barry, "Giuliani Seen as Weighing Higher Office," New York Times, March 6,1998, A18, national edition. 104. The percentage change in "real gross city product" for 2000 ended up being 5.9 percent. See the executive budget and historical tables in City of New York, Office of Management and Budget, Monthly Report on Current Economic Conditions, August 2002; electronic access to these reports was available at www.nyc.gov. 105. For unemployment data, see City of New York, Office of Management and Budget, Monthly Report, August 31, 2000. On Wall Street profits, see City of New York, Office of Management and Budget, Executive Budget, Fiscal Year 2001, "Message of the Mayor," 30. 106. For data on commercial real-estate activity, see Monthly Report. On government surpluses, see "Message of the Mayor," 4. 107. City of New York, Department of City Planning, Demographic Profiles: New York City, 1990-2000 (New York, 2001), and Demographic Profiles: New York City, 1980 and 1990 (New York, 1992). See also "A Picture of New York," New York Times, March 16,2001, A18, national edition. 108. See State of New York, State Comptroller, Office of the State Deputy Comptroller for the City of New York, New York City's Economic and Fiscal Dependence on Wall Street (New York, August 1998). 109. See two reports: State of New York, State Comptroller, Office of the State
202 • Notes to Chapter 2 Deputy Comptroller for the City of New York, Recent Trends in the New York City Economy (New York, April 2001) and Recent Trends in the New York City Economy (New York, August 1999). 110. See, for example, State of New York, New York City's Economic and Fiscal Dependence on Wall Street, 1998; and State of New York, Recent Trends in the New York City Economy, 1999. 111. In addition to the income data presented earlier from Li and Zimmerman, Low-Income Populations in New York City, see a more recent study by the City of New York's Independent Budget Office (IBO). This data, taken from a sample of New York State income tax returns filed by city taxpayers, indicated that the share of income received by city filers with annual incomes above $125,000 swelled from 28.2 percent to 40.6 percent over the 1987-97 period. Changes in income from wages and salaries alone were highly skewed toward the affluent, while middle-income and low-income taxpayers saw their income shares decline after 1994. Profits from stocks, bonds, and real estate boosted income shares still higher for the wealthiest. See City of New York, Independent Budget Office, Big City, Big Bucks: New York City's Changing Income Distribution (New York, June 2000); this IBO study, unlike census data, was able to examine income derived from capital gains. 112. See City of New York, Independent Budget Office, "New York City's Tax on the Working Poor" (New York, March 1998). 113. After 1996, rents continued to increase faster than incomes. See City of New York, Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Housing and Vacancy Survey, 1996 (New York, 1996) and Selected Findings of the 1999 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (New York, 1999). See also Michael H. Schill and Benjamin P. Scafidi, "Housing Conditions and Problems in New York City," in Schill, Housing and Community Development in New York City, 11-52. 114. See State of New York, State Comptroller, Office of the State Deputy Comptroller for the City of New York, No Room for Growth: Affordable Housing and Economic Development in New York City (October 1999). Affordability problems were also evident (though less dramatic) nationwide, where neither individual-level nor household-level incomes among less well educated and blue-collar/service workers increased as much as constant-quality housing prices during the 1990s. See Joseph Gyourko and Joseph Tracy, "A Look at Real Housing Prices and Incomes: Some Implications for Housing Affordability and Quality," Federal Reserve Bank of New York Economic Policy Review 5.3 (September 1999): 71. 115. Because increasing numbers of the city's better-paying jobs were already being occupied by suburban commuters, one fear was that over time a combination of "commuter fatigue" and employer site selection would accelerate (re) sub urbanization—a pattern of jobs following residence. See: City of New York, New York City Council, Hollow in the Middle; and City of New York, New York City Council, New York City's Middle Class; see also State of New York, No Room for Growth. Regardless, the recent curtailment of the city's commuter tax soon would have significant fiscal impacts. 116. For housing proposals, see Housing First!, New York's Affordable Housing Crisis: Context, Principles, and Solutions (New York, July 2001); Martha E. Stark and Doug Turetsky, "Homeward Bound: A 21st Century Affordable Housing Agenda for New York," in Rethinking the Urban Agenda: Reinvigorating the Liberal Tradition in New York City and Urban America, ed. John Mollenkopf and Ken Emerson (New York:
Notes to Chapter 3 • 203 Century Foundation, 2001); Peter Marcuse, "Building a Future," City Limits, July/ August 2000, 30. 117. See Elisabeth Bumiller, "In Annual Address, Giuliani Pins His Legacy on Education Proposals," NewYork Times, Januarys, 2001, A19, national edition. 118. Although this issue is complicated and far from settled, several analyses provide support for the argument that national factors remain preeminent. First, gross trends in inequality, poverty, and changes in the labor force in New York have mirrored those in the United States generally; see John R. Logan, "Still a Global City: The Racial and Ethnic Segmentation of New York," in Marcuse and van Kempen, Globalizing Cities, 158-85; and Abu-Lughod, America's Global Cities, 271-320. Second, research on many non-U.S. cities also confirms that patterns of inequality and urban development remain strongly linked to national context. See, for example, C. Hamnett and D. Cross, "Social Polarisation and Inequality in London: The Earnings Evidence, 1979-1995," Environment and Planning C 16.6 (1998): 659-80; Paul Waley, "Tokyo: Patterns of Familiarity and Partitions of Difference," in Marcuse and van Kempen, Globalizing Cities, 127-57; and Susan S. Fainstein, "The Egalitarian City: The Restructuring of Amsterdam," International Planning Studies 2.3 (October 1997): 295-314. 119. In addition to studies mentioned in note 118, see Christopher Leo, "City Politics in an Era of Globalization," in Lauria, Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory, 77-98; and Le Gales, "Regulations and Governance in European Cities." 120. Paul E. Peterson, City Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 3. Public Action 1. Harry Schwartz, assisted by Peter Abeles, Planning for the Lower East Side (NewYork: Praeger, 1973), 10. 2. In 1998, more than 23 percent of the population of Community District 3 received some form of governmental assistance, including TANF, Home Relief, SSI, orMedicaid; see the City of New York, Department of City Planning, Community District Needs, Manhattan CBS (NewYork, 1998). See also Jagna Wojcicka Sharff, King Kong on 4th Street: Families and the Violence of Poverty on the Lower East Side (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998); and Janet L. Abu-Lughod, ed., From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York's Lower East Side (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994). 3. See, for example, the following exchange: Howard Sumka, "Neighborhood Revitalization and Displacement: A Review of the Evidence," and Chester Hartman, "Comment on 'Neighborhood Revitalization and Displacement: A Review of the Evidence,'" Journal of the American Planning Association 45.4 (1979): 480-94; see also the exchange between Larry S. Bourne, "The Myth and Reality of Gentrification: A Commentary on Emerging Urban Forms," and Blair Badcock, "Notwithstanding the Exaggerated Claims, Residential Revitalisation Really Is Changing the Form of Some Western Cities: A Response to Bourne," Urban Studies 30.1 (1993): 183-95. More recently, neo-urbanist planner Andres Duany, in an essay posted on the listserve of the Community and Urban Section of the American Sociological Association, provoked a series of exchanges that yet again rehearsed many of the old arguments; see Andres Duany, "Three Cheers for Gentrification," The American Enterprise 12.3 (April/May 2001): 37-39. 4. From the older revitalization literature, see Dennis E. Gale, "Middle-Class
204 • Notes to Chapter 3 Resettlement into Older Neighborhoods," Journal of the American Planning Association 45.3 (July 1979): 293-309; and Shirley Bradway Laska and Daphne Spain, eds., Back to the City: Issues in Neighborhood Renovation (Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon Press, 1980). For recent writings that invoke many similar themes, see Roberta Brandes Gratz with Norman Mintz, Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998); Todd W. Bressi, "Urbanism Downtown: Strategies for Albuquerque and Milwaukee," Places 13.2 (spring 2000): 32-37; and Vincent Scully, "The American City in A.D. 2025," Brookings Review 18.3 (summer 2000): 4-5. 5. Early reports on Census 2000 data by the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research at the State University of New York at Albany suggest that recent patterns of metropolitan racial segregation are largely extending, rather than contravening, older patterns. See http://www.albany.edu/mumford. 6. The seminal analyses of gentrification developed by Neil Smith and his colleagues, many focusing on the Lower East Side, place a strong emphasis on economic causes at each level of determination—from broader economic restructuring and inner-city disinvestment/investment cycles to neighborhood economic actors such as land speculators or "investment pioneers," who expand the gentrified terrain. See, for example, Neil Smith, "Gentrification and Uneven Development," Economic Geography 58 (1982): 139-55; Neil Smith, "Gentrification, the Frontier, and the Restructuring of Urban Space," in Gentrification of the City, ed. Neil Smith and Peter Williams (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 15-34; Neil Smith, Betsy Duncan, and Laura Reid, "From Disinvestment to Reinvestment: Mapping the Urban 'Frontier' in the Lower East Side," in From Urban Village to East Village, ed. Abu-Lughod, 149-67; Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996), 3-29, 189-209; and Neil Smith and James DeFilippis, "The Reassertion of Economics: 1990s Gentrification in the Lower East Side," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23.4 (December 1999): 638-53. 7. The decade of the 1980s produced a large political-economy literature that related shifts in urban land use to broader theories of economic and spatial restructuring. In addition to work by Neil Smith (see note 6), see David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Mark Gottdiener, The Social Production of Urban Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); see also Blair Badcock, "Building upon the Foundations of Gentrification: Inner-City Housing Development in Australia in the 1990s," Urban Geography 16.1 (1995): 70-90. Whereas early class-centered studies of gentrification often divided into "production-side" versus "consumption-side" explanations, more recent work has attempted to integrate the two approaches, often by reconceptualizing urban culture. See, for example, Sharon Zukin, "Gentrification, Cuisine, and the Critical Infrastructure: Power and Centrality Downtown," in Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and Christopher Mele, Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 8. For a fuller discussion of both traditions, see Patricia Wittberg, "Perspectives on Gentrification: A Comparative Review of the Literature," Research in Urban Sociology 2 (1992): 17-46. 9. Urban-ecology studies of neighborhood transition extend as far back as the early days of Chicago School sociology; see, for example, Harvey W. Zorbaugh, The
Notes to Chapter 3 • 205 Gold Coast and the Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929). For more recent studies in this tradition that emphasize agency and contingency, see Richard Taub, D. Garth Taylor, and Jan D. Dunham, Paths of Neighborhood Change: Race and Crime in Urban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Gerald D. Suttles, The Man-Made City: The Land-Use Confidence Game in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 10. Stephen Daly, "The Shape of Its Future Splits the East Village," New York Times, March 20,1983, sec. 8,14. 11. In addition to political-economy studies cited earlier, Smith's recent work has also focused on politics and the state; see, for example, Neil Smith, "Which New Urbanism? New York City and the Revanchist 1990s," in The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late-20th-Century City, ed. Robert A. Beauregard and Sophie Body-Gendrot (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1999), 185-208. 12.1 should emphasize that discussion of Lower East Side community groups in this chapter is limited to their role as partners with government in developing subsidized housing; consideration of their own capacities and accomplishments as movement actors is deferred to chapter 4. 13. On nineteenth-century housing reform, see Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957); Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Universit Press, 1989), 250-67; Anthony Jackson, A Place Called Home: A History of Low-Cost Housing in Manhattan (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976); and Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 14. On the renewal schemes of the 1920s and early 1930s, see Ann L. Buttenwieser, "Shelter for What and for Whom? On the Route toward Vladeck Houses, 1930-1940," Journal of Urban History 12.4 (August 1986): 391-413; and Suzanne Wasserman, "Deja Vu: Replanning the Lower East Side in the 1930s," in Abu-Lughod, From Urban Village to East Village, 99-120. 15. On these initiatives, see Peter Marcuse, "The Beginnings of Public Housing in New York," Journal of Urban History 12 A (August 1986): 353-90; and Rosalie Genevro, "Site Selection and the New York City Housing Authority, 1934-1939," Journal of Urban History 12.4 (August 1986): 334-52. 16. Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993); and Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). See also Sophie Gendrot and Joan Turner, "Ethnicity and Class: Politics on Manhattan's Lower East Side," Ethnic Groups 5.1-2 (July 1983): 79-108. 17. U.S. Bureau of the Census, General Characteristics of the Population, by Census Tracts, 1950,1960,1970; Leo Grebler, Housing Market Behavior in a Declining Area: Long-Term Changes in Inventory and Utilization of Housing on New York's Lower East Side (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); Schwartz, Planning for the Lower East Side; and Christopher Mele, "Neighborhood 'Burn-Out': Puerto Ricans at the End of the Queue," in Abu-Lughod, From Urban Village to East Village, 125^0. 18. For a careful analysis of the distribution of these cuts, see Ester R. Fuchs, Mayors and Money: Fiscal Policy in New York and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 111-14.
206 • Notes to Chapter 3 19. See Bernard Weinraub, "Renovations on Lower East Side Creating New Living Quarters," New York Times, May 5,1963, sec. 8,1, and Bernard Weinraub, "Lower East Side Vexed by Housing," New York Times, July 7,1963, sec. 8,1. By examining selected census tracts in the East Village in 1960 and 1970, we can see that numbers of college-educated residents (a well-established sign of the kind of residential inmigration associated with gentrification) had already increased during this period even though overall residential population declined. In tract 38, for example, the number of residents (twenty-five years or older) with at least one year of college education increased from 1,125 to 1,874; in tract 40, the increase was from 1,005 to 1,513. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, General Characteristics of the Population, by Census Tracts, 1960 and Social Characteristics of the Population, by Census Tracts, 1970. 20. For numbers of J-51 units in the Lower East Side (Community District 3), see City of New York, Department of City Planning, Housing Database: Public and Publicly Aided Housing in New York City: 1985 Update Volume (New York, 1985); for a locational analysis of J-51 benefits in Manhattan, see David Wilson, "Institutions and Urban Revitalization: The Case of Manhattan" (Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1986). On the revamped J-51 program, see Charles Kaiser, "'J-51' a Way to Save Failing Properties," New York Times, February 1, 1976, sec. 8, 1; and George Sternlieb and David Listokin, "Housing," in Setting Municipal Priorities, 1986, ed. Charles Brecher and Raymond D. Horton (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 382-411. 21. For those who study map gentrification, an extended note of explanation on the issue of redemptions data is in order. My analysis relies on redemptions, rather than tax arrears data, in order to track the progression of market revival in the Lower East Side. (For a seminal analysis using tax arrears data, see Neil Smith, Betsy Duncan, and Laura Reid, "From Disinvestment to Reinvestment: Mapping the Urban 'Frontier* in the Lower East Side," in Abu-Lughod, From Urban Village to East Village, 149-67; an adapted version of this analysis is also presented in Smith, The New Urban Frontier, 189-209.) One problem with using annual tax-arrears data from the Lower East Side during the 1970s and early 1980s is that the enforcement and penalties against landlords carrying arrears fluctuated during this period; first, because a new law (Local Law 45, New York's "quick-vesting" law) taking effect in 1978 suddenly enabled city authorities to seize tax-delinquent properties more rapidly than in the past, and second, because actual property seizures ("vestings") shifted from borough to borough each year. The result was that the numbers of Lower East Side properties in arrears or seized by authorities in any given year related as much to government policy and implementation of the law as they did to market conditions, making taxarrears data a much less certain instrument for measuring market-generated revitalization than it might appear. For this reason as well, it makes sense to examine vestings data not annually but in clusters of years linked to the timing of Manhattanborough vestings; thus, a first phase, 1977-80, clustered around the first big wave of Manhattan vestings (peaking in 1978); a second phase, 1981-84, clustered around the second wave of Manhattan vestings (mostly in 1981); and a third phase, 1985-88, clustered around two smaller foreclosure waves (1985 and 1987). For a complete annual listing of numbers of properties vested in the Lower East Side between 1975 and 1990, see William Sites, "Market, Community, and Local State: Neighborhood Revitalization in New York's Lower East Side" (Ph.D dissertation, City University of New York, 1994), 66.
Notes to Chapter 3 • 207 Therefore, my analysis, seeking to avoid the methodological problems with arrears data, instead uses data on redemptions—which, again, are vested properties that their former owners reacquire—in order to map spatially the major periods and locations of market interest in Lower East Side properties. The advantage of redemptions data is that reacquisition of properties by owners was relatively easy throughout the entire period of study, and that redemptions tended to distribute themselves around the vestings clusters: 1977-80, 1981-84, and 1985-88. When these data are mapped, it becomes clear that owner interest in reacquiring seized properties tended to cluster spatially: During the first period (1977-80), redemptions were clustered predominantly in the western half of the community district, concentrating especially in the East Village area. This finding is not inconsistent per se with those of earlier researchers, such as Smith and his colleagues—that property revival in the Lower East Side began in the East Village—but it makes two quite different points: first, that rather than taking city government's relationship to property holding as an index of market conditions, one can take market conditions as a consequence, at least in part, of city government's policies with respect to properties; and second, that city government's early redemption program, like its other policies, tended to facilitate revival in certain neighborhoods (such as the East Village) but not in others. The implication of this analysis, when combined with further evidence presented later in this chapter, will be a more discontinuous picture of gentrification in the Lower East Side, in which differences between Lower East Side neighborhoods can be seen and in which public action plays an important role at each stage. Vestings data used here were made available to the author from the City of New York, Department of General Services, Division of Real Property, Integrated Property Information System (IPIS) Database, February 4, 1991. 22. Elizabeth Gold, "Looking East at Another Village," Villager, June 8,1978,11. 23. "Loisaida" is Spanglish for Lower East Side; its use by neighborhood activists and residents dates from the 1970s. See Mario Maffi, Gateway to the Promised Land: Ethnic Cultures in New York's Lower East Side (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 53-54. 24. On postwar demographic changes and Puerto Ricans in New York, see Nathan Kantrowitz, Ethnic and Racial Segregation in the New York Metropolis: Residential Patterns among White Ethnic Groups, Blacks, and Puerto Ricans (New York: Praeger, 1973); Masha Sinnreich, "Background Paper," in New York—World City: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Future of New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1980); and Edwin Melendez, "Hispanics and Wage Inequality in New York City," in Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition, ed. Gabriel Haslip-Viera and Sherrie L. Baver (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Press, 1996), 189-210. 25. For an analysis of property-ownership patterns during the 1970s, particularly the "slumlord" empire operated by Harry Shapolsky (who controlled eighty-five properties in the Lower East Side as of 1971), see Kurt Hollander, "Developments on the Lower East Side," The Portable Lower East Side 4.1 (spring 1987). For a discussion of Loisaida community organizations, seeMele, Selling the Lower East Side, 180-219; see also Nuyorlean Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings, ed. Miguel Algarin and Miguel Pinero (New York: William Morrow, 1975). 26. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, General Characteristics of the Population, by
208 • Notes to Chapter 3 Census Tracts, 1970 and General Characteristics of Persons, by Census Tracts, 1980, Census Tracts 26.01 and 26.02. See also Mele, "Neighborhood 'Burn-Out.'" 27. Only 129 out of the 454 Lower East Side properties vested in the period 1976-79 were located in Lower East Side census-tract areas that contained fewer than 35 percent Latino residents. This figure was calculated by matching the locations of vested properties listed in the city of New York's Integrated Property Information System Database with tract-level census data on persons of Spanish language from the 1970 census (U.S. Bureau of the Census, Social Characteristics of the Population, 1970). 28. Quoted in Jeff Trachtman, "New Activism Surfaces As East Village Residents Combat Urban Ills," Villager, June 8,1978. 29. On immigration and the transformation of Chinatown, see Roger Waldinger, Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in PostIndustrial New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 44-45,122-28; Jan Lin, Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Peter Kwong, The New Chinatown: Labor and Politics, 1930-1950, rev. ed. (New York: New Press, 2001); and Min Zhou, Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). On the issue of ethnic turf, Zhou reports that for many years Chinese residents had not dared to venture north of Canal Street, not even for a stroll (189). 30. See Zhou, Chinatown, 95, 186-87; and Lin, Reconstructing Chinatown, 32-36, 59-62, 79-105. 31. These figures come from City of New York, Department of Housing Preservation and Development, The In Rem Housing Program: Third Annual Report (New York, October 1981); and from City of New York, IPIS Database. 32. See, for example, Neil Smith, "After Tompkins Square Park: Degentrification and the Revanchist City," in Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st-century Metropolis, ed. Anthony D. King (London: Macmillan, 1996), 93-107. 33. Frank E DeGiovanni, Displacement Pressures in the Lower East Side (New York: Community Service Society of New York, 1987), 24. 34. Tom Robbins, "The Changing Face of Norfolk Street," City Limits, June/July 1981, 8-10; and Martin Gottlieb, "Space Invaders: Land Grab on the Lower East Side," Village Voice, December 14,1982,10. 35. Smith, New Urban Frontier, 189-209. 36. "Lower East Side Real Estate Profile," Real Estate Newsletter, Manhattan edition, November 4,1985,1. 37. The only major study of gentrification in this period by the city's planning department focused almost entirely on market and demographic forces; see City of New York, Department of City Planning, Private Reinvestment and Neighborhood Change (New York, March 1984). 38. "Lower East Side Real Estate Profile," 2. 39. Ibid., 6. 40. Susan Baldwin, "The City and Clinton Tenants Spar on Leases," City Limits, December 1980,11. 41. Demolitions data are computed by the author from City of New York, Office of Management and Budget and Department of Housing Preservation and Development, District Resource Statements, fiscal years 1979 to 1989, Manhattan Com-
Notes to Chapter 3 • 209 munity District 3. Lack of availability of data for the years 1981 and 1984 suggests that the total for the eleven-year period is higher than indicated. 42. City of New York, Manhattan Community Board 3, "Minutes and Resolutions," January 24, February 28, and April 25, 1978; City of New York, City Planning Commission, "Files on Findings and Recommendations," April 3, 1978, Exhibit A, C 770487 PPM; City of New York, Board of Estimate, Journal of Proceedings, April 6, 1978,674. 43. See Grace Glueck, "The Mayor's Lower East Side Story: Tenements into Co-ops for Artists," NewYork Times, August 11,1981, C9. 44. According to 1980 census data, median household incomes in the two tracts surrounding the artist housing sites were roughly $7,800 and $4,500, respectively, well below the income levels necessary for existing residents to afford the units. 45. The housing commissioner's comments are from Paul La Rosa, "A Com munity Divided," Daily News, November 11,1982, Manhattan section, Ml.The council member is quoted in Chuck Delaney, "Lofts for Whose Living?" City Limits, October 1981, 21. For the activist's statement, see Leslie Bennetts, "Sixteen Tenements to Become Artist Units in City Plan," New York Times, May 4,1982, B6. 46. City of New York, Board of Estimate, "City Planning Commission Report on the Artists Homeownership Program," Calendar of the Board of Estimate, February 10, 1983, 18-31. See also "Stirring Distrust on the Lower East Side," editor's reply, City Limits, January 1983, 6; and Marshall Berman, "A Struggle to the Death in Whic Both Sides Are Right," Village Voice, July 12,10-17. 47. Alex Michelini, "City Eyes Auctions of Lower East Side," Daily News, July 25, 1984. 48. Jim Sleeper, "Furor over City's Lower East Side Scheme," City Limits, August/September 1984, 8. 49. Lisa W. Foderaro, "Will It Be Loisaida or Alphabet City?" New York Times, May 17,1987, sec. 8, 20; see also Winston Williams, "Apartment House Carter Helped Rebuild Is Revivifying Pride," New York Times, June 5,1987, B3. 50. Jane Benedict, "Gliedman Goes to Trump," Tenant, April 1986, 2. 51. For the comment by the community board member, see Alan Finder, "Lower East Side Housing: Plans and Conflict," NewYork Times, May 14,1988,34; the statement by the JPC leader is from an interview by the author with Frances Goldin, chairperson of the Lower East Side Joint Planning Council (JPC), NewYork, June 10, 1991. 52. City of New York, Manhattan Community Board 3, "Memorandum of Understanding" (an agreement between Manhattan Community Board 3 and the City of New York's Department of Housing Preservation and Development), September 30,1987. 53. The city's housing department contended that it had no jurisdiction over zoning provisions. The Department of City Planning and the City Planning Commission (CPC), which did, were not receptive to community-based initiatives—the CPC chair apparently referred to them as "the worst kind of planning"—though certain Lower East Side community leaders continued to press the issue. This quotation is from John Mollenkopf, "City Planning," in Brecher and Horton, Setting Municipal Priorities, 1990,159. 54. On the Lower East Side and NewYork markets, see Peter Grant, "The Lower
210 • Notes to Chapter 3 East Side: 'It's Going to All Come Up One Day/ " New York Observer, March 14, 1988, 8; and Mark McCain, "New Data Shows Sharp Impact of Crash," New York Times, March 13, 1988, sec. 8, 9. On revisions to the compromise cross-subsidy plan, see City of New York, Manhattan Community Board 3, "Minutes and Resolutions," December 12, 1988, December 20, 1988, and January 24,1989, as well as "Amendments to the September 30, 1987, Memorandum of Understanding" [1989]. 55. "On the Record: Housing Commissioner Felice Michetti," City Limits, October 1990, 8-9. 56. Interview by author with Frances Goldin, 1991. 57. Alan Finder, "Lower East Side Housing: Plans and Conflict," New York Times, May 14,1988, 33. 58. In other words, speculative investment, spreading eastward through Avenues B, C, and D of the barrio (which real-estate brokers were now marketing as Alphabet City), was not yet accompanied by large numbers of new residents. See Smith, Duncan and Reid, "From Disinvestment to Reinvestment"; and Mele, Selling the Lower East Side, 220-54. 59. Total population in the most deteriorated Loisaida tracts (tracts 26.02 and 26.01), which between 1970 and 1980 had dropped from 17,496 residents to 4,572 residents, increased only to 5,502 residents by 1990. Most of this increase was accounted for by college graduates—a sign of nascent gentrification—but the fraction of the 25+ population who were college grads was still under one-third (1,092 out of 3,553) even after ten years of intense market stimulus in the East Village. Clearly, in this part of the neighborhood, in-migration lagged behind reinvestment, as was argued by Smith, Duncan, and Reid (ibid). Yet the Lower East Side case in general suggests that whether or not reinvestment precedes in-migration, or vice versa, depends to a great extent on neighborhood conditions. In the East Village, where housing conditions were better, new settlement preceded reinvestment; in devastated Loisaida, reinvestment preceded new settlement. City policies played a key role in both instances, if in different ways: in the first by the use of tax policy, and in the second by the use of city-owned properties. 60. If the latter approach had gone forward in the early 1980s, as planned, this kind of fire sale not only would have accelerated destabilizing forms of gentrification in Loisaida but, most probably, would have deepened the wave of property abandonment that took place when the real-estate market cycled downward at the end of the decade. Even without a mass sell-off, fifty-seven abandoned Lower East Side properties were seized by city government between 1987 and 1990 alone. (This figure is from the author's calculations based on the IPIS database.) See also Victor Bach and Sherece Y. West, Housing on the Block: Disinvestment and Abandonment Risks in Ne York City Neighborhoods (New York: Community Service Society of New York, 1993). 61. Zhou, Chinatown, 188. 62. Lin, Reconstructing Chinatown, 151-58. 63. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Race and Hispanic Origin, by Census Tract, 1990, Census Tract 30.01. Block-level data within tracts 36.01, 30.01, 14.02, and 22.01 fu ther capture the heterogeneity of the area; see City of New York, Department of City Planning, 1990 Census: Total Population by Race and Hispanic Origin, New York City and Boroughs, by Census Tract and Block, Manhattan (Public Law File 94-171, February 1991). 64. Mele, Selling the Lower East Side, 298-302.
Notes to Chapter 3 • 211 65. This statement is reported in Sarah Ferguson, "Bucking for Realtors," Village Voice, September 14,1993,14. 66. New York City Rent Guidelines Board, 1998 Recent Movers Study, August 6, 1998,17. 67. See Rachelle Garbarine, "Residential Real Estate; Rental Complex Offers Open Space in East Village," NewYork Times, August 6, 1999. 68. Frank Rich, "An East Village Story," New York Times, March 2, 1996; Trip Gabriel, "The East Village: In Again," NewYork Times, August 11,1996; and Peter Hellman, "Rents Run Amok," New York Magazine, June 17, 1996. See also Mele, Selling the Lower East Side. 69. In four census tracts (36.01, 30.01, 22.01, and 14.02) in which Hispanics constituted the largest resident cohort in 1990, there were significant declines in the number of residents of Hispanic origin by 2000. (Although the data suggest declines on the order of 15 to 40 percent, depending on the tract, changes in reporting make precise correlations between the two sets of figures impossible.) See City of NewYork, Department of City Planning, Population Division, Table PL-ID: Total Population by Mutually Exclusive Race and Hispanic Origin, New York City Census Tracts, 2000. 70. See William L. Hamilton, "Greener Pastures on Orchard Street (Call It LoHo)," NewYork Times, January 6, 2000, Bll. 71. City of NewYork, Manhattan Community Board 3, "Percentage of Population on Public Assistance (TANF or Safety Net)," from Manhattan Community District 03: Trend Data over Five Years (1993-1998), unpublished. 72. City of NewYork, Department of City Planning, Population Division, Table PL P-101A: Total Population by Mutually Exclusive Race and Hispanic Origin, New York City Community Districts, 2000. The percentage figures based on this data are Asian and Pacific Islander Nonhispanic (35.2 percent), White Nonhispanic (28.2 percent), Hispanic (26.9 percent), and Black/African-American Nonhispanic (7.1 percent). Although these figures might suggest that remarkable community diversity endures, this observation should be tempered by the fact that there were considerable disparities in household size and incomes across racial/ethnic groups (though precise data were not yet available). 73. These figures were calculated by comparing two listings: City of New York, Department of General Services and Department of City Planning, Atlas of City Property, vol. 3: Manhattan (December 1990), and City of NewYork, Department of City Planning and Department of Citywide Administrative Services, Gazetteer of City Property 1998 (November 1998). 74. City of NewYork, Manhattan Community Board 3, District Needs Statement, Fiscal Year 2001. 75. First American Real Estate Solutions, Datadisc: Manhattan NY (January 2000), Jack Brause Library, NewYork University. Data reported here were derived from searches for sales dates between December 21,1994, and December 21,1999, within zip codes 10002,10003,10009. 76. See City of NewYork, Manhattan Community Board 3, District Needs Statement, Fiscal Year 2001. See also Hamilton, "Greener Pastures on Orchard Street (Call ItLoHo)." 77. See Louis Winnick, "When an Apartment Fulfilled an Ideal," New York Times, July 22, 2000, A15.
212 • Notes to Chapter 4 78. See Joe Heaphy, "Lay of the Landlords," City Limits, July/August 2000, 16; and Naush Boghossian, "The HUD Haggle," City Limits, July/August 2000,17. 79. This federal policy shift and its implications for New York were analyzed in chapter 2. 80. One consequence, perhaps unintended, is that this binary focus neglects the impacts of restructuring on intermediary socioeconomic strata. As I contended in chapter 2 on New York, and as the case of the Lower East Side also suggests, certain kinds of urban restructuring may price out not only lower-income residents but middle-class households as well. 81. See Loretta Lees, "Gentrification in London and New York: An Atlantic Gap?" Housing Studies 9.2 (1994): 199-217; Elvin K. Wyly and Daniel J. Hammel, "Islands of Decay in Seas of Renewal: Housing Policy and the Resurgence of Gentrification," Housing Policy Debate 10.4 (1999): 711-71; and Jason Hackworth, "Postrecession Gentrification in New York City," Urban Affairs Review 37.6 (July 2002): 815-43.
4. Urban Movements, Local Control 1. For a defense of squatting and theTompkins Square resistance, as well as a sampling of radical critique of gentrification, see Your House Is Mine, newspaper and book editions, edited by Andrew Castrucci and Nadia Coen (New York: Bullet Space, 1993). 2. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 376-428. 3. See Neil Smith, "'Class Struggle on Avenue B": The Lower East Side as Wild Wild West," 3-29, and "From Gentrification to the Revanchist City," 210-32, in The New Urban Frontier. Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996). 4. Margit Mayer, "Urban Movements and Urban Theory in the Late-20thCentury City," in The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late-20th-Century City, ed. Robert A. Beauregard and Sophie Body-Gendrot (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1999), 209-38. 5. Christopher Mele, Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 276. 6. Comment by staff planner, New York Department of City Planning, in personal communication to the author, 1989. Over the years, New York Times coverage of the Lower East Side conflicts has also tended to emphasize the area's "internal contrasts and contradictions," the clash of "so many different constituencies," its "contentiousness and factionalism." See Lisa Belkin, "The Gentrification of the East Village," New York Times, September 2, 1984, sec. 8, 1; and John Kifner, "Worlds Collide inTompkins Sq. Park," NewYork Times, July31,1989, B5. 7. See, for example, Robert Fisher, Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America, updated edition (NewYork: Twayne Publishers, 1994). 8. For a fuller sense of the profusion of Lower East Side neighborhood groups during these periods, see many of the contributions to Janet L. Abu-Lughod, ed., From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York's Lower East Side (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994). 9. Castells, Rise of the Network Society, 378. 10. This is clear not only in regard to business and financial services, but also with respect to medical, cultural, and entertainment institutions, universities and
Notes to Chapter 4 • 213 many other corporate institutions. See Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Saskia Sassen and Frank Roost, "The City: Strategic Site for the Global Entertainment Industry," in The Tourist City, ed. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 143-55. From a quite different perspective, see also Gerald D. Suttles, The Man-Made City: The Land-Use Confidence Game in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 11. For neighborhood-level case studies, see Tony Robinson, "Gentrification and Grassroots Resistance in San Francisco's Tenderloin," Urban Affairs Review 30.4 (March 1995): 483-513; Larry Keating, "Atlanta: Peoplestown—Resilience and Tenacity versus Institutional Hostility," in Rebuilding Urban Neighbohoods: Achievements, Opportunities and Limits, ed. W. Dennis Keating and Norman Krumholz (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1999), 33-50; and Larry Bennett, Neighborhood Politics: Chicago and Sheffield (New York: Garland, 1997), 165-213. See also a number of contributions to Robert Fisher and loseph Kling, eds., Mobilizing the Community: Local Politics in the Era of the Global City (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1993). For theoretically oriented overviews, see Susan S. Fainstein and Clifford Hirst, "Urban Social Movements," in Theories of Urban Politics, ed. David ludge, Gerry Stoker, and Harold Wolman (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995), 181-204; and Henri Lustiger-Thaler and Louis Maheu, "Social Movements and the Challenge of Urban Politics," in Social Movements and Social Classes: The Future of Collective Action, ed. Louis Maheu (London: Sage, 1995), 151-68. 12. See, for example, Peter Marcuse, "Not Chaos, but Walls: Postmodernism and the Partitioned City," in Postmodern Cities and Spaces, ed. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), 243-53; and Gerald E. Frug, City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1999). 13. John Walton, Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 2. 14. Craig Calhoun, "Community without Propinquity Revisited: Communications Technology and the Transformation of the Urban Public Sphere," Sociological Inquiry 68.3 (August 1998): 373-97. 15. See Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1977); Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); and Fainstein and Hirst, "Urban Social Movements." 16. For discussions of the history and political implications of New York's community boards, see Peter Marcuse, "Neighborhood Policy and the Distribution of Power: New York City's Community Boards," Policy Studies Journal 16 (winter 1987): 277-89; Robert F. Pecorella, Community Power in a Postreform City: Politics in New York City (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 123-37; David Rogers, "Community Co,. trol and Decentralization," in Urban Politics, New York Style, ed. Jewel Bellush and DickNetzer (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), 143-87. 17. Compare, for example, Randy Stoecker, "The CDC Model of Urban Redevelopment: A Critique and an Alternative," Journal of Urban Affairsrs.19.1 (1997): 1-22, and Herbert J. Rubin, Renewing Hope within Neighborhoods of Despair: The
214 • Notes to Chapter 4 Community-Based Development Model (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). See also Avis C. Vidal, Rebuilding Communities: A National Study of Urban Community Development Corporations (New York: Community Development Research Center, Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy, New School for Social Research, 1992); Rachel G. Bratt, "Community-Based Housing: Strengths of the Strategy amid Dilemmas That Won't Go Away," in The Affordable City: Toward a Third Sector Housing Policy, ed. John Emmeus Davis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 122-44; L. M. Salamon, "The Marketization of Welfare: Changing Nonprofit and For-Profit Roles in the American Welfare State," Social Service Review 67.1 (March 1993): 16-39; Julia Koschinsky, "Challenging the Third Sector Housing Approach: The Impact of Federal Policies (1980-1996)," Journal of Urban Affairs 20.2 (1998): 117-35; andTodd Swanstrom, "The Nonprofitization of United States Housing Policy: Dilemmas of Community Development," Community Development Journal 34.1 (1999): 28-37. 18. Important exceptions include John Emmeus Davis, Contested Ground: Collective Action and the Urban Neighborhood (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), and Stoecker, "The CDC Model of Urban Redevelopment." 19. For the Lower East Side rent strikes of 1904 and 1907-8, see Jenna Weissman Joselit, "The Landlord as Czar: Pre-World War I Tenant Activity," in The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904-1984, ed. Ronald Lawson, with the assistance of Mark Naison (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 39-50; and Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890-1943 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 74-82. For housing battles in the Lower East Side during the 1930s, see Peter Marcuse, "The Beginnings of Public Housing in New York," Journal of Urban History 12.4 (August 1986): 353-90; Joseph A. Spencer, "Tenant Organization and Housing Reform in New York City: The Citywide Tenants Council, 1936-1943," in Community Organization for Urban Social Change: A Historical Perspective, ed. Robert Fisher and Peter Romanofsky (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 127-56; Ann L. Buttenwieser, "Shelter for What and for Whom? On the Route toward Vladeck Houses, 1930-1940," Journal of Urban History 12.4 (August 1986): 391-413; Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1993), 25-60; and Suzanne Wasserman, "DejaVu: Replanning the Lower East Side in the 1930s," in Abu-Lughod, From Urban Village to East Village, 99-120. On Title I urban renewal in the Lower East Side, see Joel Schwartz, "Tenant Power in the Liberal City, 1943-1971," in Lawson, The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904-1984, 134-208; and Sophie Gendrot and Joan Turner, "Ethnicity and Class: Politics on Manhattan's Lower East Side," Ethnic Groups 5.1-2 (July 1983): 79-108. 20. See Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, "Disruptive Dissensus: People and Power in the Industrial Age," in Reflections on Community Organization: Enduring Themes and Critical Issues, ed. Jack Rothman (Itasca, 111.: F. E Peacock, 1999), 169. 21. This point about geographical proximity and political identity is made by Marcuse, "Beginnings of Public Housing in New York"; it also emerges implicitly in many of the other historical analyses of the Lower East Side cited earlier. 22. Katznelson, City Trenches. 23. This community identity was in part the product of geography; located at
Notes to Chapter 4 • 215 the eastern edge of lower Manhattan, the Lower East Side was underserved by transportation links to the rest of the borough and physically distinguished from surrounding areas by its tenement housing stock. See Harry Schwartz, assisted by Peter Abeles, Planning for the Lower East Side (New York: Praeger, 1973), 5-10. 24. In this sense, the political "neighborhood" of the Lower East Side of the 1980s was quite large, more like the size of one of Chicago's traditional "community areas" than the more circumscribed spatial unit of many neighborhoods. 25. Accordingly, there is no attempt to be exhaustive here. For a much fuller sense of the complexity of the Lower East Side "movement field," as well as the challenges of defining a singular political identity for the area, see the various contributions to Abu-Lughod, From Urban Village to East Village. 26. See Alan Oser, "Rehabilitation Tested on Lower East Side," New York Times, October 31,1980, A21; and Martin Gottlieb, "Space Invaders: Land Grab on the Lower East Side," Village Voice, December 14,1982,10. 27. Founded in 1968 in opposition to an urban renewal scheme, the JPC was not incorporated until its effort to develop a community-based housing plan in the early 1980s. See Gendrot and Turner, "Ethnicity and Class"; see also Wasyl Klokiw, "Beyond the Co-op: Prospects for Landbanking on the Lower East Side of Manhattan," M.S. thesis in Urban Planning, Columbia University, 1983. 28. See City of New York, Manhattan Community Board 3, "Minutes and Resolutions," January 24, 1978, and February 28,1978. 29. The dual identity of this movement—city as well as neighborhood—was reflected in the divergent postcampaign assessments by two perceptive contemporary observers. One, by Village Voice columnist Richard Goldstein, saw the campaign as the opening salvo of a citywide challenge to New York's downtown-oriented development strategy; the other, by political theorist Marshall Berman, focused on the bitter divisions between neighborhood factions that emerged at local community board meetings. Compare Richard Goldstein, "Why Artists' Housing Went Down," Village Voice, February 22,1983,41, and Marshall Berman, "A Struggle to the Death i Which Both Sides Are Right," Village Voice, July 12, 1983, 10-17. 30. Interview by author with Frances Goldin, chairperson of the Lower East Side Joint Planning Council, New York, June 10, 1991. On the early history of Cooper Square and the Joint Planning Council, see Schwartz, "Tenant Power in the Liberal City, 1943-1971"; and Gendrot and Turner, "Ethnicity and Class." 31. On the 1982 Lower East Side march, see Steve Bongiorno, "2,000 March to Protest Speculation on Lower East Side," Villager, May 27,1982, 4. 32. Quoted in Jim Sleeper, "This Neighborhood Is Not For Sale," City Limits, June/July 1984, 16. 33. On the original JPC Plan, see Lower East Side Joint Planning Council, This Land Is Ours: A Strategy for the Preservation and Development of Affordable Housing on the Lower East Side (New York, March 1984), unpublished, in author's document collection; see also Sleeper, "This Neighborhood Is Not For Sale." 34. Formed in 1959, Met Council emerged from the early postwar labor movement (Jane Benedict, its cofounder and longtime leader, was a former union organizer and activist with New York's American Labor Party) as well as from the fight against Robert Moses and urban renewal. The East Side Tenants Council, which eventually became known simply as the Lower East Side branch of Met Council, was set up in
216 • Notes to Chapter 4 the 1950s by Esther Rand (another Met Council founder and a member of the Communist Party), who established a storefront drop-in center where tenants could gain advice (and sometimes a strongly worded letter to their landlord) on getting repairs. By the 1970s, Met Council, which had focused primarily on tenant advocacy in support of New York City's rent control laws, instituted a neighborhood branch system to develop for itself a deeper, grassroots organizational base. See Schwartz, "Tenant Power in the Liberal City." 35. On the evolution of New York City's complex rent-regulation system, see W. Dennis Keating, "Rent Regulation in New York City: A Protracted Saga," in Rent Control: Regulation and the Rental Housing Market, ed. W. Dennis Keating, Michael B. Teitz, and Andrejs Skaburskis (New Brunswick, N.J.: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, 1998), 151-68. 36. See Peter K. Hawley, Housing in the Public Domain: The Only Solution (New York: Metropolitan Council on Housing, 1978). 37. This author worked as a volunteer tenant organizer with Met Council's East Side branch from 1983 to 1988; certain information on the branch's activities, including rent strikes, is drawn from my files and from personal recollection. 38. During its peak years of activity in the Lower East Side (1982-86), Met Council came into ongoing contact (either through building visits or individual counseling at the branch office) with roughly fifty buildings and five hundred residents per year. 39. The landlord's name was Paul Stallings, owner or part owner of at least fifteen rental buildings in the Lower East Side. For a discussion of the Met Council campaign against Stallings, see Gail Rolon, "Lower East Side Tenants Win Big in Housing Court," Tenant, May 1984,1. 40. Malve von Hassell, Homesteading in New York City, 1978-1993: The Divide. Heart of Loisaida (Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 1996). 41. See Klokiw, "Beyond the Co-op"; see also Ronald Lawson, "Tenant Responses to the Urban Housing Crisis, 1970-1984," in Lawson, Tenant Movement in New York City. Adopt-a-Building's name was left over from an earlier incarnation that encouraged middle-class church congregations to "adopt" undermaintained buildings in slum areas. 42. For LESAC and RAIN, see von Hassell, Homesteading in New York City. 43. "Lower East Side Real Estate Profile," Real Estate Newsletter, Manhattan edition, November 4,1985,1. 44. City of New York, Manhattan Community Board 3, "Minutes and Resolutions," May 21,1985: "Proposal for Development of Buildings and Lots in Community Board #3 District." 45. City of New York, Board of Estimate, Calendar 4: 78, October 10,1985; City of New York, Board of Estimate, Disposition Sheets, Calendar no. 26, October 10, 1985. See also Brian Patrick O'Donoghue, "LES Cross Subsidy Picks Up Speed," City Limits, December 1985, 26-27; and Ethan Schwartz, "City Starts Cross-Subsidy Sale of East Village Parcels," NewYork Times, November 10,1985, sec. 8, 7. 46. City of New York, Manhattan Community Board 3, "Memorandum of Understanding" (an agreement between Manhattan Community Board 3 and the City of New York's Department of Housing Preservation and Development), September 30,1987.
Notes to Chapter 4 • 217 47. City of New York, Manhattan Community Board 3, "Minutes and Resolutions," December 20,1988, and June 12,1989. 48. Interview by author with Martha Danziger, district manager of Manhattan Community District 3, June 4,1991. See also City of New York, Manhattan Community Board 3, "Minutes and Resolutions," May 14,1990, June 19,1990, and September 25, 1990; for an explanation of this second phase, see Manhattan Community Board 3, "The Enterprise Foundation Vacant Building Rehabilitation Program" and "The LISC Vacant Building Rehabilitation Program" (1990), in author's files. 49. Interview by author with Sarah Lambert, executive director of the People's Mutual Housing Association, New York, June 5,1991. 50. See "Stop Evictions Now, Says Met Council Committee," Tenant, January 1984,1; "Join Met Council's Fight against Homelessness," press release, Metropolitan Council on Housing, May 1984 (author's files). In Brooklyn, the organization ACORN successfully used a similar tactic, but as part of a more sophisticated and sustained campaign. See Eric L. Hirsch, "Protest Movements and Urban Theory," in Research in Urban Sociology, vol. 3, Urban Sociology in Transition, ed. Ray Hutchison (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1993). 51. Andrew van Kleunen, "The Squatters: A Chorus of Voices ... but Is Anyone Listening?" inAbu-Lughod, From Urban Village to East Village, 285-312. 52. See Martha Rosier, "Tompkins Square Park, East Village, Lower East Side, Manhattan, New York," in If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism, a project by Martha Rosier, ed. Brian Wallis (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), 208-16; and Castrucci and Coen, Your House Is Mine. 53. In addition to Mele, Selling the Lower East Side, 262-80, see a number of contributions to Abu-Lughod, From Urban Village to East Village. For an ethnograph ic study of the park, see Andrew O. Mattson and Stephen R. Duncombe, "Public Space, Private Place: The Contested Terrain of Tompkins Sq. Park," Berkeley Journal ofSociology 37 (1992): 129-61. 54. See van Kleunen, "Squatters," in Abu-Lughod, From Urban Village to East Village, 285. 55. See the public discussion transcribed as "Planning: Power, Politics, People," in Wallis, If You Lived Here, 237-69. 56. Smith, The New Urban Frontier, 12. 57. Mele, Selling the Lower East Side, 268-80; Janet Abu-Lughod, "The Battle for Tompkins Square Park," in Abu-Lughod, From Urban Village to East Village, 251. 58. Dorine Greshof and John Dale, "The Residents in Tompkins Square Park," inAbu-Lughod, From Urban Village to East Village, 267-84. 59. Kifner, "Worlds Collide in Tompkins Sq. Park." 60. Greshof and Dale, "Residents in Tompkins Square Park," 280. 61. For a similar analysis of what seems to have been a parallel set of events in San Francisco, see Randy Shaw, "Don't Respond, Strategize," in The Activist's Handbook: A Primer for the 1990s and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 14-26. 62. See Sarah Ferguson, "Bucking for Realtors," Village Voice, September 14, 1993,14. 63. See Bruce Lambert, "Whose Homes? The Trials of Pueblo Nuevo," New York
218 • Notes to Chapter 4 Times, February 13, 1994, city section, 6; Steven Wishnia, "Locking Horns," City Limits, February 1994,4; and "Letters," City Limits, April 1994, 27-28. 64. The councilmember subsequently used his influence to close down longtime rival Pueblo Nuevo. See "Pagan Sacrifices Pueblo Nuevo," City Limits, October 1996,4. 65. Andrew Jacobs, "The Wild, Wild Lower East Side," New York Times, March 3, 1996, city section, 1; see also Steven Vincent, "Politics vs. Conscience," New York Times, May 22,1994, city section, 15. 66. The struggles of the RAIN homesteaders—who worked on very deteriorated buildings, were not well supported politically or financially, and probably composed the highest concentrations of poor and minority households involved in Lower East Side homesteading efforts—were compounded by internal disorganization and conflict, which in turn exacerbated the low completion rate of building rehabilitation and reduced members' participation in broader community issues. Part of this seems to have been a predictable consequence of the decentralized structure of homesteading: Participants' strong commitments to their individual buildings led them to take a fairly narrow view of community building. Regardless, the result was that even completed buildings were unlikely to remain affordable housing over the long term. See von Hassell, Homesteading in New York City, as well as John Krinsky and Sarah Hovde, Balancing Acts: The Experience of Mutual Housing Associations and Community Land Trusts in Urban Neighborhoods (New York: Community Service Society of New York, 1996). 67. See Krinsky and Hovde, Balancing Acts. 68. Krinsky and Hovde (ibid.) suggest that, taken on their own terms, two Lower East Side groups—Cooper Square and the People's Mutual Housing Association (PMHA)—illuminate both the successes of community development and its enduring challenges. Although the community-development housing field is often criticized for its neglect of populations most in need, PMHA has provided successfully managed housing to a very low-income, racially mixed group of residents; by the same token, the sort of "community building" provided by PMHA has been, by Krinsky and Hovde's account, fairly minimal. Cooper Square's housing-provision efforts are also judged to be successful, and the organization has been able (after the problems mentioned earlier) to generate significant community participation; its population of residents, however, has been less economically disadvantaged and less diverse. It is also worth pointing out that AAFE has expanded its operations, picking up many Pueblo Nuevo buildings as well as new development projects. See the Fannie Mae Foundation Web site (http://www.fanniemaefoundation.org) for the reports "Asian Americans For Equality, Inc.: Organizational Track Record" and "Asian Ameri cans for Equality, Inc.: Program Update Report, November 1999." Note, however, that sunset provisions would continue to imperil the long-term affordability of many lower-income housing projects in the Lower East Side. 69. The petition was stayed and then rejected by a justice of the New York State Supreme Court. This judge later concluded that the city's building inspector, who testified in support of the administration's claim of imminent danger, "did not believe his own testimony" (i.e., had lied) and had tailored his conclusions to fit the city's desire to empty the buildings. See Kenny Schaeffer, "East 13th Street Home-
Notes to Chapter 4 • 219 steaders Decision Blasts City: Vacate Order Called a 'Pretext,'" Tenant, December 1995,1. 70. Shawn G. Kennedy, "Riot Police Remove 31 Squatters from Two East Village Buildings," New York Times, May 31,1995, Al. See also Sarah Ferguson, "You Can't Go Home Again," Village Voice, June 13, 1995; and, for a squatter perspective, see Chris Flash, "Squatters Fight Evictions by Paramilitary Pigs!!" posted (as of February 1999) atthe following Web site: http://MediaFilter.org/MFF/S36/s36.13evix.html. 71. David Stout, "The Tenement Battle Is Over, but Not the Fight," New York Times, July 6, 1995, B3; Thomas J. Lueck, "Police Evict Squatters from Three CityOwned Tenements in the East Village," NewYork Times, August 14,1996, B3. 72. LESCHD apparently went on to collect rents without paying taxes: by 2001 the buildings on East 13th Street were again listed as tax-foreclosed properties on the city's register. See City of NewYork, Department of Housing Preservation and Development, "Anti-Abandonment: In Rem Actions and Third Party Transfer to Responsible Private Owners," posted on the housing department's Web site: http://www.nyc.gov/ html/hpd/html/neighborhood-redev/third-party-ownership.html. I am grateful to Gill Kent for drawing my attention to this information. 73. See, for example, the studies in Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? ed. Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000). 74. Bennett, Neighborhood Politics, 16-17. See also Randy Stoecker and Anna Vakil, "States, Cultures, and Community Organizing: Two Tales of Two Neighborhoods," Journal of Urban Affairs 22 A (2000): 439-58. 75. For the Bronx, see, for instance, Jim Rooney, Organizing the South Bronx (Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 1995); for Brooklyn, see Hirsch, "Protest Movements and Urban Theory." 76. On San Francisco, see Robinson, "Gentrification and Grassroots Resistance," and Shaw, The Activist's Handbook; on Boston, see Peter Dreier and W. Dennis Keating, "The Limits of Localism: Progressive Housing Policies in Boston, 1984-1989," Urban Affairs Quarterly 26 (December 1990): 191-216; on Minneapolis, see Denise R. Nickel, "The Progressive City? Urban Redevelopment in Minneapolis," Urban Affairs Review 30.3 (January 1995): 355-77; on Chicago, see Pierre Clavel and Wim Wiewel, eds., Harold Washington and the Neighborhoods: Progressive City Government in Chicago, 1983-1987 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 77. This view is especially prominent in Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (NewYork: Basic Books, 1995). For a number of perspectives on communitarianism, see Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Daniel Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); and Amitai Etzioni, "The Responsive Community: A Communitarian Perspective," American Sociological Review 61.1 (February 1996): 1-11. For a critical approach to the implications of communitarian theory for community development practice, see William Sites, "Communitarian Theory and Community Development in the United States," Community Development Journal 33.1 (January 1998): 57-65. 78. For one such account, see Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar, Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood (Boston: South End Press, 1994). It is worth noting that even in the case of Boston's Dudley Street, described by Medoff
220 • Notes to Chapter 5 and Sklar, powers of eminent domain granted by the state were crucial to community success. For more typical constraints, see Robert Halpern, Rebuilding the Inner City: A History of Neighborhood Initiatives to Address Poverty in the United States (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1995). 79. Steven Wishnia, "Public-Housing 'Reforms' Fail after Tenant Outcry," Ten ant, November 1996, 1; Margarita Lopez, "Public-Housing Victory Shows Way for Rent-Laws Fight," Tenant, November 1996,7; Greg Sargent and Josh Benson, "Lazio's Second Front: Secretary Cuomo Battles His Old Foe," New York Observer, June 26, 2000, 1. 80. Steven Wishnia, "Tenant Activist Wins Upset in Council Primary," Tenant, October 1997, 5.
5. Beyond Primitive Globalization 1.1 should emphasize at the outset that the "subglobal" focus of most of the following discussion is not intended to dismiss the need for progressive action at the global or supranational level. The argument of this book has been concerned to carve out an analytically justifiable and strategically useful space for meaningful action by subglobal states, political actors, and community groups within a world characterized by increasing international integration. In doing so, it was not intended somehow to "refute" contentions that the current international political economy and its governance arrangements are unstable and unfair, nor to disavow the importance of transnational initiatives or movements to reform this system. Quite the contrary: the need for international governance reform has been argued convincingly by large numbers of scholars, and protest movements against globalization-fromabove—including the imposition of trade agreements without regard for social and environmental protections—have been exceedingly important in focusing attention on the profound shortcomings of neoliberal globalization. (See, for example, a number of the discussions in the following collections: David Held and Anthony McGrew, eds., The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debat [Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000]; Dean Baker, Gerald Epstein, and Robert Pollin, eds., Globalization and Progressive Economic Policy [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998]; and Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens, eds., Global Capitalism [New York: New Press, 2000]). Yet much critical globalist thinking still seeks to envision, naively in my view, a world "beyond" states or borders. Both analytically and strategically, the United States remains a primary case where there is much useful work to be done in understanding, pressuring, and reforming states in order to pursue more stable and just approaches to international integration. Indeed, because of the ways in which the unique U.S. role on the international stage is shaped by its own distinctive politics, I believe that efforts to reform neoliberal globalization within the United States ("from the inside out") are at least as important as efforts to do so in transnational arenas. 2. Forafuller discussion of the regime-theory literature, see chapter 2, note 11. 3. For further development of this point, see William Sites, "The Limits of Urban Regime Theory," in The Politics of Urban America: A Reader, 3d ed., ed. Den nis R. Judd and Paul Kantor (New York: Longman, 2002), 215-32. One can define progressivism in any number of ways, but there is a major difference between a regime that metes out subordinate or symbolic concessions to community groups and a
Notes to Chapter 5 • 221 government that builds public-sector capacity to regulate development and redistribute resources. See also Adolph Reed Jr., "The Black Urban Regime: Structural Origins and Constraints," 79-116, and "A Critique of Neoprogressivism in Theorizing about Local Development Policy: A Case from Atlanta," 163-78, in Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 4. This generalization may sound harsh, but it echoes judgments made by sympathetic experts on community-development housing, which probably remains the strongest and most effective example of state-community partnership in the United States. See, for example, Peter Dreier, "Comment," in Urban Problems and Community Development, ed. Ronald F. Ferguson and William T. Dickens (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 178-92. 5. For proponents of the "new political culture" argument, globalization offers extensive opportunities for invigorating citizen participation and local democracy. In this view, globalization, propelling in the Western democracies a new process of political modernization, leads to a "structural democratization" whereby "heterogeneous centers of subpolitics" become the loci for exchanges and cooperation among social and political agents in their decision making. See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, translated by Mark Ritter (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1992), 194; and Pierre Hamel, Henri Lustiger-Thaler, and Louis Maheu, "Is There a Role for Social Movements?" in Sociology for the Twenty-first Century: Continuities and Cutting Edges, ed. Janet L. Abu-Lughod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Terry Nichols Clark and Vincent Hoffman-Martinot, eds., The New Political Culture (Boulder, Colo.: WestviewPress, 1998). 6. For a survey of state and local affordable housing programs in the United States, see Michael A. Stegman, State and Local Affordable Housing Programs: A Rich Tapestry (Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 1999). 7. Alex Schwartz, "New York City and Subsidized Housing: Impacts and Lessons of the City's $5 Billion Capital Budget Housing Plan," Housing Policy Debate 10.4 (1999): 839-77. Schwartz's evaluation suggests the extent to which New York's housing program refuted neoliberal skepticism about the capacity of government to deliver a complex public good on a large scale. The program's major limitation was financial dependence on a municipal capital budget; duplication is difficult to envision in most other cities unless federal and state policies begin to support such initiatives. For discussion of a federal housing policy that could support ambitious local plans, see Peter Dreier, "The New Politics of Housing: How to Rebuild the Constituency for a Progressive Federal Housing Policy," Journal of the American Planning Association 63 (winter 1997): 5-27. 8. See Edward G. Goetz, "Type II Policy and Mandated Benefits in Economic Development," Urban Affairs Quarterly 26.2 (December 1990): 170-90; and Edward G. Goetz, "Promoting Low Income Housing through Innovations in Land Use Regulations," Journal of Urban Affairs 13.3 (1991): 337-51. 9. For a sense of how abruptly the local tide changed in a formerly "progressive" city (Minneapolis-Saint Paul), see Edward G. Goetz, "The Politics of Poverty Deconcentration and Housing Demolition," Journal of Urban Affairs 22.2 (2000): 157-73.
222 • Notes to Chapter 5 10. See Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, "Power Repertoires and Globalization," Politics and Society 28.3 (September 2000): 413-30. 11. See Isaac Martin, "Dawn of the Living Wage: The Diffusion of a Redistributive Municipal Policy," Urban Affairs Review 36.4 (March 2001): 470-96. For an economic analysis of the living wage, its impacts and variations, and its relationship to standard business-subsidy urban development policies, see Robert Pollin and Stephanie Luce, The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy (New York: New Press, 1998). Recent local efforts to expand the coverage of the living wage include extending requirements to tourist-related industries and indexing living-wage rates to housing costs. 12. For the argument that the living-wage campaign also integrates race, gender, and class concerns at the level of the city as a whole, see David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 117-30. 13. Kelly Candaele and Peter Dreier, "L.A.'s Progressive Mosaic: Beginning to Find Its Voice," Nation, August 21-28, 2000. 14. Anne B. Shlay, "Influencing the Agents of Urban Structure: Evaluating the Effects of Community Reinvestment Organizing on Bank Residential Lending Practices," Urban Affairs Review 35.2 (November 1999): 247-78. Shlay's comparative study suggests that although local mobilizing campaigns around CRA alone may no have altered lending patterns, widespread community-based mobilization provided the impetus for national action that did lead, in turn, to significant changes. For early case studies of local organizing efforts, see Gregory D. Squires, ed., From Redlining to Reinvestment: Community Responses to Urban Disinvestment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). 15. Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen, "Conclusion: A Changed Spatial Order," in Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? ed. Marcuse and van Kempen (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), 249-75. 16. Social housing buffers affordability problems and neighborhood transition. See Hugo Priemus, "Strengthening the Urban Housing Market: The Dutch Approach," Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 26 (1999): 297-312; and Susan S. Fainstein, "The Egalitarian City: The Restructuring of Amsterdam," International Planning Studies 2.3 (October 1997): 295-314. For a comparative analysis of housing policies in a number of European countries, see Hugo Priemus and Peter Boelhouwer, "Social Housing Finance in Europe: Trends and Opportunities," Urban Studies 36.4 (April 1999): 633-45. Certain European housing policies are clearly in transition, and the work cited here does not imply that Europe remains entirely free of neoliberalizing trends. Joe Painter has suggested that although neoliberalism is certainly a strategy favored by some parts of the European Commission and by some member governments (especially Britain), the "European Union is a political arena and provides a potential political and institutional space for the construction of an alternative to U.S.-style neoliberalism" ("Space, Territory and the European Project: Reflections on Agnew and Paasi," European Urban and Regional Studies 8.1 [January 2001]: 42-43). 17. See, for example, the discussion in Sako Musterd, Hugo Priemus, and Ronald van Kempen, "Towards Undivided Cities: The Potential of Economic Revitalisation and Housing Redifferentiation," Housing Studies 14.5 (September 1999): 573-84. 18. See, for instance, Roger Andersson, " 'Divided Cities' as a Policy-Based No-
Notes to Chapter 5 • 223 tion in Sweden," Housing Studies 14.5 (September 1999): 601-24. I do not wish to suggest that EU approaches uniformly adhere to such a process, merely that they seem to have greater potential to do so. For a highly critical analysis of many "local partnership" approaches to social exclusion, see Mike Geddes, "Tackling Social Exclusion in the European Union? The Limits to the New Orthodoxy of Local Partnership," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.4 (December 2000): 782-800. For a critical analysis that also sees potential for such programs to contribute to social learning and long-term benefit, see Rob Atkinson, "Combating Social Exclusion in Europe: The New Urban Policy Challenge," Urban Studies 37.5/6 (May 2000): 1037-55. 19. Patrick Simon, "The Mosaic Pattern: Cohabitation between Ethnic Groups in Belleville, Paris," in Minorities in European Cities: The Dynamics of Social Integration and Social Exclusion at the Neighbourhood Level, ed. Sophie Body-Gendrot and Marco Martiniello (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 100-115. See also Patrick Simon and Claude Tapia, Le Belleville des Juifs tunisiens (Paris: Editions Autrement, 1998), 162-67.1 am grateful to Adrienne Falcon for drawing my attention to this work. 20. For an analysis of the nation-state and urban regulation in Europe, including France, see Patrick Le Gales, "Regulations and Governance in European Cities," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22.3 (September 1998): 482-506. For a broader theoretical discussion, see Robert Boyer, "The Political in the Era of Globalization and Finance: Focus on Some Regulation School Research," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.2 (June 2000): 274-322. 21. Simon's central point is that even though France's national identity of citizenship, and the kinds of policies embodying it, are not predisposed toward flexible resolutions of conflicts between immigrant and native-born, certain kinds of ethnic "cohabitation" become possible at the community level. On France's historic tendency to undervalue localism, and a case study focusing on the pernicious consequences in one city, see Franchise Gaspard, A Small City in France: A Socialist Mayor Confronts Neofascism, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). 22. See, for example, the comparative study by Larry Bennett, Neighborhood Politics: Chicago and Sheffieldld-(New York: Garland, 1997). Despite the often significant differences between the English and American neighborhoods that Bennett studied, this point is one of the work's central conclusions. 23. Susan S. Fainstein, "Can We Make the Cities We Want?" in The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late-20th-Century City, ed. Robert A. Beauregard and Sophie Body-Gendrot (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1999), 249-72; Susan S. Fainstein, "New Directions in Planning Theory," Urban Affairs Review 35.4 (March 2000): 451-78; and Fainstein, "The Egalitarian City." 24. On Dutch housing policies, see Priemus, "Strengthening the Urban Housing Market," and Hugo Priemus, "Rent Subsidies in the USA and Housing Allowance in the Netherlands: Worlds Apart," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.3 (2000): 700-712. 25. Loi'c Wacquant, "Urban Marginality in the Coming Millennium," Urban Studies36.10 (September 1999): 1639-47. 26. Arend Lijphart, "Unequal Participation: Democracy's Unresolved Dilemma," American Political Science Review 91.1 (March 1997): 1-14; see also Frances Fox
224 • Notes to Chapter 5 Piven and Richard Cloward, Why Americans Still Don't Vote, and Why Politicians Want It That Way (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). 27. Robert Fisher and Eric Schragge, "Challenging Community Organizing: Facing the 21st Century," Journal of Community Practice 8.3 (2000): 1-19. 28. Jack Rothman, "Countering Fragmentation on the Left," Social Policy 30.4 (summer 2000): 42-46. 29. A recent work put the proportion of metropolitan residents who live in suburbs at two-thirds. See Manuel Pastor Jr., Peter Dreier, J. Eugene Grigsby III, and Marta Ldpez-Garza, Regions That Work: How Cities and Suburbs Can Grow Together (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 2. 30. Deyan Sudjic, The 100Mile City (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1992). See also Peter D. Linneman and Anita A. Summers, "Patterns and Processes of Employment and Population Decentralization in the United States," in Urban Change in the United States and Western Europe: Comparative Analysis and Policy, 2d ed., ed. Anita A. Summers, Paul C. Cheshire, and Lanfranco Senn (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 1999), 89-147. 31. Pastor et al., Regions That Work, 4-5. 32. Anthony Downs, "Some Realities about Sprawl and Urban Decline," Housing Policy Debate 10.4 (1999): 955-74. 33. Perhaps the strongest case for a social-equity or "fairness" regionalism remains that presented by Myron Orfield, Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997). 34. Among other historically oriented treatments, see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). For a condensed summary of U.S. policies, see David K. Hamilton, Governing Metropolitan Areas: Response to Growth and Change (New York: Gar land, 1999), 141-75. For cross-national comparative treatments of regional growth and policy, see Pietro S. Nivola, Laws of the Landscape: How Policies Shape Cities in Europe and America (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999); and Anthony Downs, "Contrasting Strategies for the Economic Development of Metropolitan Areas in the United States and Western Europe," in Summers, Cheshire, and Senn, Urban Change in the United States and Western Europe, 15-56. 35. Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-first Century (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 110. 36. See Gerald E. Frug, City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 26-53,134-35. 37. Kenneth T. Jackson, "Gentleman's Agreement: Discrimination in Metropoli tan America," in Reflections on Regionalism, ed. Bruce Katz (Washington, D.C.: Brook ings Institution Press, 2000), 185-217. 38. Peter Newman, "Changing Patterns of Regional Governance in the EU," Urban Studies 37.5/6 (May 2000): 895-908; see also Michael Keating, The New Regionalism in Western Europe: Territorial Restructuring and Political Change (Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar, 1998). 39. Christian Lefevre, "Metropolitan Government and Governance in Western Countries: A Critical Review, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22.1(1998): 9-25. 40. Paul Kantor, "Can Regionalism Save Poor Cities? Politics, Institutions, and Interests in Glasgow," Urban Affairs Review 35.6 (July 2000): 794-820.
Notes to Chapter 5 • 225 41. For the history of Twin Cities regionalism, see Orfield, Metropolitics. 42. Because several of the European regional entities already mentioned are closely controlled by strong national or provincial bodies, direct democratic control, though a long-term concern, would seem to be less urgent than in the United States. 43. This definition, which encompasses an area somewhat larger than the consolidated metropolitan statistical area (CMSA) used by the Census Bureau, is the one currently used by New York's Regional Plan Association. See Robert D. Yaro, "Growing and Governing Smart: A Case Study of the New York Region," in Reflections on Regionalism, ed. Bruce Katz (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 43-77; and Robert D. Yaro and Tony Hiss, A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area (Washington, D.C.: Regional Plan Association and Island Press, 1996). 44. lanet L. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 285-320. 45. Ibid., 420. 46. See Jameson W. Doig, Empire on the Hudson: Entrepreneurial Vision and Political Power at the Port of New York Authority (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); and Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker (New York: Vintage, 1974). 47. See, for example, Ronald Smothers, "Feud over How Port Authority Spends Money Creates an Impasse," New York Times, February 24, 2000. 48. Yaro and Hiss, A Region at Risk. 49. Most discussions of regional growth management sidestep the question of negative impacts on housing affordability. For a discussion of smart growth that gently concedes the dilemma, see Karen A. Danielsen, Robert E. Lang, and William Fulton, "Retracting Suburbia: Smart Growth and the Future of Housing," Housing Policy Debate 10.3 (1999): 513-40. In fairness, the RPA plan does contain a useful proposa for states to assume the cost of public primary and secondary education, a measure that could also reduce incentives for fiscal zoning. But in general the plan fails to address social-equity concerns or democratic mechanisms of accountability. 50. In this sense, it is useful to recall New York's city-building projects of the early twentieth century, which often linked the Manhattan business districts to emerging upper- and middle-class outlying areas while bypassing the working-class slums. See, for example, Richard Harris, "Industry and Residence: The Decentralization of New York City, 1900-1940," Journal of Historical Geography 19.2 (1993): 169-90; and Owen D. Gutfreund, "The Path of Prosperity: New York City's East River Drive, 1922-1990," Journal of Urban History 21.2 (January 1995): 147-83. 51. For a stimulating discussion of shared interests, see Frug, City Making, 143-64; see also W. Sites, "City and Region," Social Service Review 74.4 (2000): 654-67. 52. See, for example, William B. Fulton, Jennifer Rich, Manuel Pastor, and Peter Dreier, Sprawl Hits the Wall: Confronting the Realities of Metropolitan Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Southern California Studies Center, University of Southern California; Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, 2001); see also Cameron Y.Yee and Julie Quiroz-Martinez, There Goes the Neighborhood: A Regional Analysis ofGentrification and Community Stability in the San Francisco Bay Area (San Francisco: Urban Habitat Program, 1999); and Pastor et al., Regions ThatWork. 53. For further discussion of the political prospects of regionalism, see Margaret Weir, "Coalition Building for Regionalism," in Katz, Reflections on Regionalism, 127-53.
226 • Notes to Chapter 5 54. Melvin L. Burstein and Arthur J. Rolnick, "Congress Should End the Economic War for Sports and Other Businesses," Region 10.2 (June 1996): 35. 55. For a broad set of federal policy proposals, see Bruce Katz, "Enough of the Small Stuff Howard a New Urban Agenda," Brookings Review 18.3 (summer 2000): 7-11. 56. Downs, "Some Realities about Sprawl and Urban Decline," 964, cites several studies by Robert Burchell that support the 20 percent figure. On state-level policy alternatives, see Hamilton, Governing Metropolitan Areas, 166-70; Pastor et al., Regions That Work; and Fulton et al., Sprawl Hits the Wall. 57. For discussion of these terms, see G0sta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds ofWelfare Capitalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); see, more recently, G0sta Esping-Andersen, "Interview on Postindustrialism and the Future of the Welfare State," Work, Employment and Society 14.4 (December 2000): 757-69. 58. The following discussion of Pierson's work is drawn primarily from Paul Pierson, "The New Politics of the Welfare State," World Politics 48.2 (January 1996): 143-79; Paul Pierson, "Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics," American Political Science Review 94.2 (June 2000): 251-67; and Paul Pierson, "Three Worlds of Welfare State Research," Comparative Political Studies 33.6/7 (August/September 2000): 791-821. See also Paul Pierson, "Post-Industrial Pressures on the Mature Welfare States," in The New Politics of the Welfare State, ed. Paul Pierson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 80-104. 59. For recent comparative research on welfare-state and labor-market regimes, see the following: Stein Kuhnle, "The Scandinavian Welfare State in the 1990s: Challenged but Viable," West European Politics 23.2 (April 2000): 209-28; Bruno Palier, " 'Defrosting' the French Welfare State," West European Politics 23.2 (April 2000): 113-36; Kathleen Thelen and Ikuo Kume, "The Effects of Globalization on Labor Revisited: Lessons from Germany and Japan," Politics and Society 27 A (December 1999): 477-505; Philip Manow and Eric Seils, "The Employment Crisis of the German Welfare State," West European Politics 23.2 (April 2000): 137-60; Stewart Wood, "Labour Market Regimes under Threat? Sources of Continuity in Germany, Britain, and Sweden," in Pierson, The New Politics of the Welfare State, 368-409; Anton Hemerijck and Jelle Visser, "Change and Immobility: Three Decades of Policy Adjustment in the Netherlands and Belgium," West European Politics 23.2 (April 2000): 229-56; and Stephan Leibfried, "National Welfare States, European Integration and Globalization: A Perspective for the Next Century," Social Policy and Administration 34.1 (March 2000): 44-63. 60. Martin Rhodes, "Desperately Seeking a Solution: Social Democracy, Thatcherism and the 'Third Way' in British Welfare," West European Politics 23.2 (April 2000): 161-86; Andrew Glyn and Stewart Wood, "Economic Policy under New Labour: How Social Democratic Is the Blair Government?" Political Quarterly 72.1 (January-March 2001): 50-66; and John Myles and Jill Quadagno, "Envisioning a Third Way: The Welfare State in the Twenty-first Century," Contemporary Sociology 29.1 (January 2000): 156-67. 61. For a similar argument, see Fiona Ross, "Interests and Choice in the 'Not Quite So New' Politics ofWelfare," Western European Politics 23.2 (April 2000): 11-34. 62. For a discussion of the kinds of expanded national policies that might be possible within the existing constraints of the international economy, see Benjamin I. Page, James R. Simmons, and Scott Grier, "What Government Can Do about Poverty
Notes to Postscript • 227 and Inequality: Global Constraints," paper prepared for American Political Science Association meetings, August 31-September 3, 2000. 63. See, among a number of studies, Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: New Press, 1998); and Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, eds., Transnationalism from Below (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999). 64. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). 65. Sidney Tarrow, "Contentious Politics in Western Europe and the United States," Institute for European Studies Working Paper, 00.4, Cornell University, November 2000,29. For a similar perspective, see Marcos Ancelovici, "Organizing against Globalization: The Case of ATTAC in France," Politics and Society 30.3 (September 2002): 427-63. 66.1. M. Destler, "U.S. Trade Governance in the New Global Economy," Brookings Trade Forum, 1999, ed. Susan M. Collins and Robert Z. Lawrence (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 141-66. 67. Peter Evans, "Fighting Marginalization with Transnational Networks: Counter-Hegemonic Globalization," Contemporary Sociology 29.1 (January 2000): 230-41.
Postscript 1. Group of 35, Preparing for the Future: A Commercial Development Plan for New York City, Final Report (New York, June 2001). The group was led by Senator Charles Schumer and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. 2. David Harvey, "Cracks in the Edifice of the Empire State," in After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City, ed. Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin (New York: Routledge, 2002), 61. 3. Despite questions about the full legality of the governor's initial actions and appointments surrounding LMDC, Pataki claimed authority for these steps based on his leading role in the bistate Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, owner of the trade-center site; the governor also exerted considerable influence over the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operated the subway lines beneath the site. In practical terms, the moment at which the LMDC appointments were made (at a time when Giuliani was a lame-duck mayor and the incoming mayor had yet to be inaugurated) also tended to enhance the influence of the governor. 4. Peter Marcuse, "What Kind of Planning after September 11? The Market, the Stakeholders, Consensus—or . . . ?" in Sorkin and Zukin, After the World Trade Center, 153-61. 5. See Eric Darton, Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York's World Trade Center (New York: Basic Books, 1999). It is worth noting that early plans envisioned the World Trade Center project (along with an expanded financial district) at an East River site, near the southern tip of the Lower East Side; see Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York (New York: Verso, 1993), 135. See also Michael Tomasky, "The World Trade Center: Before, During and After," New York Review of Books, March 28, 2002, 17-20. 6. Herbert Muschamp, "An Agency's Ideology Is Unsuited to Its Task," New York Times, July 17, 2002, A18.
228 • Notes to Postscript 7. Janet Abu-Lughod discusses this balance-of-payments issue briefly in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 519 n. 6. 8. Leslie Kaufman, "Millions for Homeless for Nights in Office," New York Times, national edition, September 20, 2002, A26; and Robert Neuwirth, "Squatters' Rites," City Limits, September/October 2002. 9. Labor Community Advocacy Network to Rebuild New York, Policy Statement, April 24,2002. 10. "LMDC and Port Authority Extend Public Outreach Campaign to All Five Boroughs and New Jersey," Lower Manhattan Development Corporation press release, August 15, 2002. 11. For a map showing corporate relocation, see "What Happened to the World Trade Center's Tenants?" New York Times, September 11, 2002, 25. 12. For an early discussion, see Charles V Bagli, "West Side Plan Involves Olympics, Jets and Transit Line," New York Times, national edition, May 1, 2002, C17. As it happened, New York would become the United States Olympic Committee's designated nominee for the 2012 Summer Games; see Richard Sandomir and Charles V Bagli, "New York City Is U.S. Nominee for '12 Games," New York Times, national edition, November 3, 2002, Al. 13. "Learning from Experience: A Primer on Tax Increment Financing," Independent Budget Office (New York, September 2002). Large TIP projects, inherently risky, may also require costly public financing schemes to secure the bonds. See Rachel Weber, "Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment," Antipode 34.1 (June 2002): 519-40. 14. For an accessible discussion of proposals for more balanced economic development, see Mike Wallace, A New Deal for New York (New York: Bell and Weiland, 2002).
Select Bibliography
Abu-Lughod, Janet L. NewYork, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. , ed. From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York's Lower East Side. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983. Andersson, Roger. " 'Divided Cities' as a Policy-Based Notion in Sweden." Housing Studies 14.5 (September 1999): 601-24. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. , ed. Globalization. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. New York: Verso, 1994. . "Globalization and the Rise of East Asia: Lessons from the Past, Prospects for the Future." International Sociology 13.1 (March 1998): 59-77. Badcock, Blair. "Building upon the Foundations of Gentrification: Inner-City Housing Development in Australia in the 1990s." Urban Geography 16.1 (1995): 70-90. Bailey, Nick, and Douglas Robertson. "Housing Renewal, Urban Policy and Gentrification." Urban Studies34A (1997): 561-78. Baker, Dean, Gerald Epstein, and Robert Pollin, eds. Globalization and Progressive Economic Policy. NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Barrow, Clyde W. Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. Beauregard, Robert A. Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993. . "Theorizing the Global-Local Connection." In World Cities in a World-System, edited by Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor, 232-48. NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1995. . "City Planning and the Postwar Regime in Philadelphia." In Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Urban Politics in a Global Economy, edited by Mickey Lauria, 171-88. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997. 229
230 • Select Bibliography Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Translated by Mark Ritter. NewburyPark, Calif.: Sage, 1992. Bennett, Larry. Neighborhood Politics: Chicago and Sheffield. New York: Garland, 1997. . "Do We Really Wish to Live in a Communitarian City? Communitarian Thinking and the Redevelopment of Chicago's Cabrini-Green Public Housing Complex." Journal of Urban Affairs 20.2 (1998): 99-116. Blackmar, Elizabeth. Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989. Block, Fred. Revising State Theory: Essays in Politics and Post-Industrialism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987. Boyer, Robert. "The Convergence Hypothesis Revisited: Globalization but Still the Century of Nations?" In National Diversity and Global Capitalism, edited by Suzanne Berger and Ronald Dore, 29-59. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. . "State and Market: A New Engagement for the Twenty-First Century?" In States against Markets: The Limits of Globalization, edited by Robert Boyer and Daniel Drache, 89-114. New York: Routledge, 1996. . "The Political in the Era of Globalization and Finance: Focus on Some Regulation School Research." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.2 (June 2000): 274-322. Boyer, Robert, and Daniel Drache, eds. States against Markets: The Limits of Globalization. New York: Routledge, 1996. Brenner, Neil, and Nik Theodore. "Cities and the Geographies of'Actually Existing Neoliberalism.'" In Spaces ofNeoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in Western Europe and North America, edited by Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Brodkin, Evelyn Z. "Inside the Welfare Contract: Discretion and Accountability in State Welfare Administration." Social Service Review 71.1 (March 1997): 1-33. Burawoy, Michael, Joseph A. Blum, Sheba George, ZsuZsa Gille, Teresa Gowan, Lynne Haney, Maren Klawiter, Steven H. Lopez, Sean O Riain, and Millie Thayer. Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Buttenwieser, Ann L. "Shelter for What and for Whom? On the Route toward Vladeck Houses, 1930-1940." Journal of Urban History 12.4 (August 1986): 391-413. Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Vintage, 1974. Castells, Manuel. The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. . The Rise of the Network Society. Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996. . The Power of Identity. Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997. . End of Millennium. Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998. Danielson, Michael N. The Politics of Exclusion. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. Day, Jared N. Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890-1943. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Destler, I. M. "U.S. Trade Governance in the New Global Economy." In Brookings
Select Bibliography • 231 Trade Forum 1999, edited by Susan M. Collins and Robert Z. Lawrence, 141-66. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999. Downs, Anthony. "Some Realities about Sprawl and Urban Decline." Housing Policy Debate 10.4 (1999): 955-74. Dreier, Peter. "The New Politics of Housing: How to Rebuild the Constituency for a Progressive Federal Housing Policy." Journal of the American Planning Association 63 (winter 1997): 5-27. Dreier, Peter, and W. Dennis Keating. "The Limits of Localism: Progressive Housing Policies in Boston, 1984-1989." Urban Affairs Quarterly 26.2 (December 1990): 191-216. Dreier, Peter, John Mollenkopf, andTodd Swanstrom. Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. Elkin, Stephen. City and Regime in the American Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Esping-Andersen, G0sta. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. . "After the Golden Age? Welfare State Dilemmas in a Global Economy." In Welfare States in Transition: National Adaptations in Global Economies, ed. Gosta Esping-Andersen, 1-31. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996. Evans, Peter. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. . "Fighting Marginalization with Transnational Networks: Counter-Hegemonic Globalization." Contemporary Sociology 29.1 (January 2000): 230-41. Evans, Peter B., Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds. Bringing the State Back In. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Fainstein, Susan S. "The Egalitarian City: The Restructuring of Amsterdam." International Planning Studies 2.3 (October 1997): 295-314. . "Can We Make the Cities We Want?" In The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late-20th-Century City, edited by Robert A. Beauregard and Sophie Body-Gendrot, 249-72. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1999. . The City Builders: Property Development in New York and London, 1980-2000, 2d rev. ed. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. Fainstein, Susan S., and Clifford Hirst. "Urban Social Movements." In Theories of Urban Politics, edited by David Judge, Gerry Stoker, and Harold Wolman, 181-204. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995. Featherstone, Mike. "Localism, Globalism and Cultural Identity." In Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, edited by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, 46-77. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Feigenbaum, Harvey, Jeffrey Henig, and Chris Hamnett. Shrinking the State: The Political Underpinnings of Privatization. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Fisher, Robert. Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America, updated edition. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994. Fisher, Robert, and Eric Schragge. "Challenging Community Organizing: Facing the 21st Century." Journal of Community Practice 8.3 (2000): 1-19. Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
232 • Select Bibliography Friedmann, John. "The World City Hypothesis." Development and Change 17.1 (1986): 69-83. . "Where We Stand: A Decade of World City Research." In World Cities in a World-System, edited by Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor, 21-47. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Frug, Gerald E. City Making: Building Communities without BuildingWalls. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Fuchs, Ester R. Mayors and Money: Fiscal Policy in New York and Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Gelb, Joyce, and Michal Lyons. "A Tale of Two Cities: Housing Policy and Gentrification in London and New York." Journal of Urban Affairs 15.4 (1993): 345-66. Gendrot, Sophie, and Joan Turner. "Ethnicity and Class: Politics on Manhattan's Lower East Side." Ethnic Groups 5.1-2 (July 1983): 79-108. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990. . A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, 2d ed. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995. Glyn, Andrew, and Stewart Wood. "Economic Policy under New Labour: How Social Democratic Is the Blair Government?" Political Quarterly 72.1 (January-March 2001): 50-66. Goetz, Edward G. "Type II Policy and Mandated Benefits in Economic Development." Urban Affairs Quarterly 26.2 (December 1990): 170-90. . "Promoting Low Income Housing through Innovations in Land Use Regulations." Journal of Urban Affairs 13.3 (1991): 337-51. . "The Politics of Poverty Deconcentration and Housing Demolition." Journal of Urban Affairs 22.2 (2000): 157-73. Granovetter, Mark. "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness." American Journal of Sociology 91.3 (November 1985): 481-510. Grasso, Richard A. "The Best Is Yet to Come: Globalization, America, and the New York Stock Exchange." Vital Speeches of the Day 63.7 (January 15,1997): 216. Grebler, Leo. Housing Market Behavior in a Declining Area: Long- Term Changes in Inventory and Utilization of'Housing on New York's Lower East Side. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952. Greene, Judith A. "Zero Tolerance: A Case Study of Police Policies and Practices in New York City." Crime and Delinquency 45.2 (April 1999): 171-87. Gutfreund, Owen D. "The Path of Prosperity: New York City's East River Drive, 1922-1990." Journal of Urban History 21.2 (January 1995): 147-83. Hall, John A., and G. John Ikenberry. The State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Hall, Stuart. "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity." In Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, edited by Anthony D. King, 19-39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Hamel, Pierre, Henri Lustiger-Thaler, and Louis Maheu. "Is There a Role for Social Movements?" In Sociology for the Twenty-first Century: Continuities and Cutting Edges, edited by Janet L. Abu-Lughod, 165-80. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Select Bibliography • 233 Harris, Richard. "Industry and Residence: The Decentralization of New York City, 1900-1940." Journal of Historical Geography 19.2 (1993): 169-90. Harvey, David. The Condition ofPostmodernity.An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989. . "Globalization in Question." Rethinking Marxism 8.4 (winter 1995): 1-17. . Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Hay, Colin. Re-Stating Social and Political Change. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995. . "Anticipating Accommodations, Accommodating Anticipations: The Appeasement of Capital in the 'Modernization' of the British Labour Party, 1987-1992." Politics and Society 25.2 (June 1997): 234-56. . The Political Economy of New Labour: Labouring under False Pretences? New York: Manchester University Press, 1999. Hayek, F. A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. Held, David, and Anthony McGrew, eds. The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate. Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. Hemerijck, Anton, and Jelle Visser. "Change and Immobility: Three Decades of Policy Adjustment in the Netherlands and Belgium." West European Politics 23.2 (April 2000): 229-56. Hirst, Paul, and Grahame Thompson. Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. Holton, R. J. The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. Howard, Christopher. The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Jackson, Anthony. A Place Called Home: A History of Low-Cost Housing in Manhattan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976. Jackson, Kenneth. "The Capital of Capitalism: The New York Metropolitan Region, 1890-1940." In Metropolis 1890-1940, edited by Anthony Sutcliffe, 319-54. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. . Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Jameson, Fredric, and Masao Miyoshi, eds. The Cultures of Globalization. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Jessop, Bob. "Towards a Schumpeterian Workfare State? Preliminary Remarks on Post-Fordist Political Economy." Studies in Political Economy 40 (spring 1993): 7-39. . "Capitalism and Its Future: Remarks on Regulation, Government and Governance." Review of International Political Economy 4.3 (autumn 1997): 561-81. . "The Entrepreneurial City: Re-Imaging Localities, Redesigning Economic Governance, or Restructuring Capital?" In Transforming Cities: Contested Governance and New Spatial Divisions, edited by Nick Jewson and Susanne MacGregor, 28-41. New York: Routledge, 1997. . "The Crisis of the National Spatio-Temporal Fix and the Tendential Ecological Dominance of Globalizing Capitalism." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.2 (June 2000): 323-60. Judd, Dennis R., and Susan S. Fainstein, eds. The Tourist City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
234 • Select Bibliography Judge, David, Gerry Stoker, and Harold Wolman, eds. Theories of Urban Politics. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995. Kantor, Paul. "Can Regionalism Save Poor Cities? Politics, Institutions, and Interests in Glasgow." Urban Affairs Review 35.6 (July 2000): 794-820. Katz, Bruce, ed. Reflections on Regionalism. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000. Katznelson, Ira. City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States. New York: Pantheon, 1981. . "Rethinking the Silences of Social and Economic Policy." Political Science Quarterly 101.2 (1986): 307-25. . Marxism and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Kincaid, John. "De Facto Devolution and Urban Defunding: The Priority of Persons over Places." Journal of Urban Affairs 21.2 (1999): 135-67. Knox, Paul L., and Peter J. Taylor, eds. World Cities in a World-System. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Kuhnle, Stein. "The Scandinavian Welfare State in the 1990s: Challenged but Viable." West European Politics 23.2 (April 2000): 209-28. Lawson, Ronald, ed., with the assistance of Mark Naison. The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904-1984. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Le Gales, Patrick. "Regulations and Governance in European Cities." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22.3 (September 1998): 482-506. Lees, Loretta. "Gentrification in London and New York: An Atlantic Gap?" Housing Studies9.2 (1994): 199-217. Lefevre, Christian. "Metropolitan Government and Governance in Western Countries: A Critical Review." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22.1 (1998): 9-25. Leibfried, Stephan. "National Welfare States, European Integration and Globalization: A Perspective for the Next Century." Social Policy and Administration 34.1 (March 2000): 44-63. Leo, Christopher. "City Politics in an Era of Globalization." In Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Urban Politics in a Global Economy, edited by Mickey Lauria, 77-98. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997. Lichten, Eric. Class, Power and Austerity: The New York City Fiscal Crisis. South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1986. Lin, Jan. Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Logan, John R. "Still a Global City: The Racial and Ethnic Segmentation of New York." In Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? edited by Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen, 158-85. Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. Luger, Stan. Corporate Power, American Democracy, and the Automobile Industry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lyons, Donald, and Scott Salmon. "World Cities, Multinational Corporations, and Urban Hierarchy: The Case of the United States." In World Cities in a WorldSystem, edited by Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor, 98-114. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Maffi, Mario. Gateway to the Promised Land: Ethnic Cultures in New York's Lower East Side. New York: New York University Press, 1995.
Select Bibliography • 235 Manow, Philip, and Eric Seils. "The Employment Crisis of the German Welfare State." West European Politics 23.2 (April 2000): 137-60. Marcuse, Peter. "The Beginnings of Public Housing in New York." Journal of Urban History 12.4 (August 1986): 350-90. . "Space and Race in the Post-Fordist City: The Outcast Ghetto and Advanced Homelessness in the United States Today." In Urban Poverty and the Underclass: A Reader, edited by Enzo Mingione, 176-216. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996. Marcuse, Peter, and Ronald van Kempen, eds. Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. Markusen, Ann, and Vicky Gwiasda. "Multipolarity and the Layering of Functions in World Cities: New York City's Struggle to Stay on Top." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 18.2 (June 1994): 167-93. Martin, Isaac. "Dawn of the Living Wage: The Diffusion of a Redistributive Municipal Policy." Urban Affairs Review 36.4 (March 2001): 470-96. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage, 1977. . "The Communist Manifesto." In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited David McLellan, 221-47. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Massey, Doreen. "Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place." In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, edited by Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and LisaTickner, 59-69. New York: Routledge, 1993. Mayer, Margit. "Urban Movements and Urban Theory in the Late-20th-Century City." In The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late-20th-Century City, edited by Robert A. Beauregard and Sophie Body-Gendrot, 209-38. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1999. Mele, Christopher. Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Mollenkopf, John H. The Contested City. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. Mollenkopf, John Hull. A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York City Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. Mollenkopf, John H., and Manuel Castells, eds. Dual City: Restructuring New York. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991. Musterd, Sako, Hugo Priemus, and Ronald van Kempen. "Towards Undivided Cities: The Potential of Economic Revitalisation and Housing Redifferentiation." Housing Studies 14.5 (September 1999): 573-84. Myles, John, and Jill Quadagno. "Envisioning a Third Way: The Welfare State in the Twenty-first Century." Contemporary Sociology 29.1 (January 2000): 156-67. Newman, Peter. "Changing Patterns of Regional Governance in the EU." Urban Studies 37.5/6 (May 2000): 895-908. Nivola, Pietro S. Laws of the Landscape: How Policies Shape Cities in Europe and America. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999. Ohmae, Kenichi. The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy. New York: Harper Business, 1990. Orfield, Myron. Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997. Page, Max. The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
236 • Select Bibliography Painter, Joe. "Regulation, Regime, and Practice in the United States." In Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Urban Politics in a Global Economy, edited by Mickey Lauria, 122-43. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997. Palier, Bruno." 'Defrosting' the French Welfare State." West European Politics 23.2 (April 2000): 113-36. Pastor, Manuel, Jr., Peter Dreier, J. Eugene Grigsby III, and Marta Lopez-Garza. Regions That Work: How Cities and Suburbs Can Grow Together. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Peck, Jamie, and Adam Tickell. "Searching for a New Institutional Fix: The AfterFordist Crisis and the Global-Local Disorder." In Post-Fordism: A Reader, edited by Ash Amin, 280-315. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994. Pecorella, Robert F. Community Power in a Postreform City: Politics in New York City. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. Perelman, Michael. Classical Political Economy: Primitive Accumulation and the Social Division of Labor. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984. Peterson, Paul E. City Limits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Pierson, Paul. "The New Politics of the Welfare State." World Politics 48.2 (January 1996): 143-79. . "Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics." American Political Science Review94.2 (June 2000): 251-67. . "Three Worlds of Welfare State Research." Comparative Political Studies 33.6/7 (August/September 2000): 791-821. . "Post-Industrial Pressures on the Mature Welfare States." In The New Politics of the Welfare State, edited by Paul Pierson, 80-104. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard A. Cloward. Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. New York: Vintage, 1977. . Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, updated edition. New York: Vintage, 1993. . "Power Repertoires and Globalization." Politics and Society 28.3 (September 2000): 413-30. Plunz, Richard. A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Pollin, Robert, and Stephanie Luce. The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy. New York: New Press, 1998. Priemus, Hugo. "Strengthening the Urban Housing Market: The Dutch Approach." Environmentand Planning B: Planning and Design 26 (1999): 297-312. Priemus, Hugo, and Peter Boelhouwer. "Social Housing Finance in Europe: Trends and Opportunities." Urban Studies 36.4 (April 1999): 633-45. Przeworski, Adam. The State and the Economy under Capitalism. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990. Reich, Robert B. The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Reichl, Alexander J. Reconstructing Times Square: Politics and Culture in Urban Development. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999. Rhodes, Martin. "Desperately Seeking a Solution: Social Democracy, Thatcherism
Select Bibliography • 237 and the 'Third Way' in British Welfare." West European Politics 23.2 (April 2000): 161-86. Rieger, Elmar, and Stephan Leibfried. "Welfare State Limits to Globalization." Politics and Society 26.3 (September 1998): 363-90. Robertson, Roland, and Habib Haque Khondker. "Discourses of Globalization: Preliminary Considerations." International Sociology 13.1 (1998): 25-40. Robinson, William I. "Social Theory and Globalization: The Rise of a Transnational State." Theory and Society 30 (2001): 157-200. Ross, Fiona. "Interests and Choice in the 'Not Quite So New' Politics of Welfare." West European Politics 23.2 (April 2000): 11-34. Rothman, Jack. "Countering Fragmentation on the Left." Social Policy 30.4 (summer 2000): 42-46. Rubin, Herbert J. Renewing Hope within Neighborhoods of Despair: The CommunityBased Development Model. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. . "The Spatial Organization of Information Industries: Implications for the Role of the State." In Globalization: Critical Reflections, ed. James H. Mittelman, 33-52. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1996. . Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New York: New Press, 1998. Sayer, Andrew. "The 'New' Regional Geography and Problems of Narrative." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 7.3 (1989): 253-76. Schattschneider, E. E. The Semi-Sovereign People. New York: Hinsdale, 111.: Dryden Press, 1975. Schill, Michael H., ed. Housing and Community Development in New York City: Facing the Future. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Schwartz, Alex. "New York City and Subsidized Housing: Impacts and Lessons of the City's $5 Billion Capital Budget Housing Plan." Housing Policy Debate 10.4 (1999): 839-77. Schwartz, Harry, assisted by Peter Abeles. Planning for the Lower East Side. New York: Praeger, 1973. Schwartz, Joel. The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993. Shefter, Martin. Political Crisis/Fiscal Crisis: The Collapse and Revival of New York City. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Shlay, Anne B. "Influencing the Agents of Urban Structure: Evaluating the Effects of Community Reinvestment Organizing on Bank Residential Lending Practices." Urban Affairs Review 35.2 (November 1999): 247-78. Simon, Patrick. "The Mosaic Pattern: Cohabitation between Ethnic Groups in Belleville, Paris." In Minorities in European Cities: The Dynamics of Social Integration and Social Exclusion at the Neighbourhood Level, edited by Sophie Body-Gendrot and Marco Martiniello, 100-115. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. Skocpol, Theda. "Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research." In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, 3-37. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
238 • Select Bibliography . Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Smith, Michael Peter. City, State, and Market: The Political Economy of Urban Society. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988. . Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001. Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge, 1996. Smith, Neil, and Peter Williams, eds. Gentrification of the City. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986. Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassert ion of Space in Critical Social Theory. New York: Verso, 1989. Spencer, Joseph A. "Tenant Organization and Housing Reform in New York City: The Cirywide Tenants Council, 1936-1943." In Community Organization for Urban Social Change: A Historical Perspective, edited by Robert Fisher and Peter Romanofsky, 127-56. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Stoecker, Randy. "The CDC Model of Urban Redevelopment: A Critique and an Alternative." Journal of Urban Affairs 19.1 (1997): 1-22. Stone, Clarence N. "Urban Regimes and the Capacity to Govern: A Political Economy Approach." Journal of Urban Affairs 15.1 (1993): 1-28. Suttles, Gerald D. The Man-Made City: The Land-Use Confidence Game in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Taub, Richard, D. Garth Taylor, and Jan D. Dunham. Paths of Neighborhood Change: Race and Crime in Urban America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Thelen, Kathleen, and Ikuo Kume. "The Effects of Globalization on Labor Revisited: Lessons from Germany and Japan." Politics and Society 27 A (December 1999): 477-505. Thurow, Lester C. The Future of Capitalism. New York: Penguin, 1996. von Hassell, Malve. Homesteadingin New York City, 1978-1993: The Divided Heart of Loisaida. Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 1996. Wade, Robert. "Globalization and Its Limits: Reports of the Death of the National Economy Are Greatly Exaggerated." In National Diversity and Global Capitalism, edited by Suzanne Berger and Ronald Dore, 60-88. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. Waldinger, Roger. Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in Post-Industrial New York. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press, 1974. Walton, John. "Making the Theoretical Case." In What Is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry, edited by Charles C. Ragin and Howard S. Becker, 121-37. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. . Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Weir, Margaret, Ann Shola Orloff, andTheda Skocpol, eds. The Politics of Social Policy in the United States. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Select Bibliography • 239 Weiss, Linda. "Globalization and the Myth of the Powerless State." New Left Review 225 (September/October 1997): 3-27. . The Myth of the Powerless State. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. Wood, Stewart. "Labour Market Regimes under Threat? Sources of Continuity in Germany, Britain, and Sweden." In The New Politics of the Welfare State, edited by Paul Pierson, 368-409. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Yaro, Robert D., and Tony Hiss. A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area. Washington, D.C.: Regional Plan Association and Island Press, 1996. Zhou, Min. Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of'an Urban Enclave. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Zorbaugh, Harvey W. The Gold Coast and the Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929. Zukin, Sharon. Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. . The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995.
This page intentionally left blank
Index
Abeles, Peter, 69, 215n. 23 Abu-Lughod, Janet L., x, xiv-xv, 34, 155, 177n. 24, 185n. 46, 203n. 2, 212n. 8, 217n.57 accumulation, primitive. See primitive accumulation ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), 145, 217n.50 Adopt-a-Building, 117 African-Americans: as occupants of Tompkins Square Park, 123; as supporters of Mayor Dinkins, 50. See also Lower East Side: African-American residents in; racial minorities Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). See welfare Akard, Patrick!., 184n. 36, 193n. 33 Albany (New York), 38 Algarin, Miguel, 207n. 25 Althusser, Louis, 183n. 33 Amin, Ash, 185n. 46 Amsterdam, 66, 148-49 Ancelovici, Marcos, 227n. 65 Anderson, Benedict, 182n. 16 Anderson, Martin, 190n. 15 Andersson, Roger, 222n. 18 Andrew, Caroline, 185n. 51 antiglobalization movement, xxv, 138, 163, 220n. 1
Appadurai, Arjun, 21, 176n. 12, 178n. 2 Archer, Margaret S., 188n. 67 Aronowitz, Stanley, 182n. 17 Arrighi, Giovanni, 26-27, 187n. 59, 187n. 60 arson for profit, 77 Artists Home Ownership Proposal, 85, 111,113 Asian-Americans. See Lower East Side: Chinese-American residents in; racial minorities Asian -Americans For Equality (AAFE), 127, 218n. 68 Association of Neighborhood Housing Developers, 117 Atkinson, Rob, 223n. 18 Auletta, Ken, 19 In. 19 Bachelor, LynnW., 199n. 91 Badcock, Blair, 177n. 17, 203n. 3, 204n. 7 Bailey, Nick, 177n. 18 Bailey, Robert W., 19 In. 19 Bairoch, Paul, 181n. 8 Baker, Dean, 181n. 8, 220n. 1 Balibar, Etienne, 183n. 33 barrio, 73, 77-79, 80, 89-90, 94 Barrow, Clyde, 9-11, 182n. 22 Battery Park City, 41 Beame, Abraham, 40
241
242 • Index Beauregard, Robert A., 174n. 5, 176n. 16, 190n. 11, 190n. 15 Beck, Ulrich, 221n. 5 Bell, Daniel, 219n. 77 Belleville (Paris), 147 Bellush, Jewel, 194n. 46 Benedict, Jane, 215n. 34 Bennett, Larry, 59, 199n. 92, 213n. 11, 223n. 22 Bhagwati, Jagdish, 174n. 5 Blackmar, Elizabeth, 189n. 8, 205n. 13 Block, Fred, 10, 175n. 9, 184n. 37 Blockmans, Wim E, 184n. 34 "bloody legislation": in early modern capitalism, 13; in late-twentiethcentury capitalism, 3, 18 Bloomberg, Michael, 168-70 Bluestone, Barry, 198n. 84 Board of Estimate, 86, 88, 111 Boelhouwer, Peter, 222n. 16 bohemia, 73, 76-77, 80, 89-90, 93-94 Bologna, 154 Boltho, Andrea, 181n. 12 Boston, 43, 58, 133,152 Bourne, Larry S., 203n. 3 Boyer, Robert, xiii, 27, 179n. 3, 180n. 8 Braconi, Frank P., 201n. 100 Bratsis, Peter, 182n. 17 Bratt, Rachel G., 214n. 17 Bratton, William, 129 Brazil, 163 Brecher, Charles, 173n. 1, 176n. 15, 189n. 6 Brecher, Jeremy, 180n. 7 Brenner, Neil, 175n. 7 Bressi, Todd W., 204n. 4 Brewer, Anthony, 183n. 27 Britain, xiv, 7, 148, 160 Brodkin, Evelyn Z., 188n. 64 Bronx, 60, 133 Brooklyn, 50, 69, 133 Burawoy, Michael, 188n. 68 Burstein, Melvin L., 226n. 54 Bush, George H., 51 Bush, George W, 165, 167 Buttenwieser, Ann L., 205n. 14, 214n. 19
Calhoun, Craig, 105 Campbell, Scott, 185n. 49 Canada, 6 capital, 4, 10-11, 12, 16-17, 21, 26. See also corporations Capital (Marx), 12-14 capital budget (New York), 45, 48-49 capitalism: corporatist model, 6, 159; early modern, xii, 2, 12-15, 183n. 33, 183n. 34; East Asian, 16; and globalization, 5, 162; neoliberal model, xii, 7-8,20,26, 159-61 (see also neoliberal; neoliberalism) ; social-democratic model, 6, 159; in the United States, 20, 36, 160-61; Western European, 16, 159-60 Caro, Robert A., 190n. 15, 225n. 46 Carpenter, Juliet, 177n. 17 Carter, Jimmy, 42 Castells, Manuel, xviii, 21, 26, 27, 101, 105, 177n. 19, 179n. 2, 186n. 57, 197n. 70, 213n. 15 Central Harlem, 53 Central Park, 54, 62 chaotic conception, 28, 188n. 66 Chicago, x, xiv, 43, 133 Chicago School, 79, 204n. 9 China, 79 Chinatown, xi, 79-80, 94, 208n. 29. See also Greater Chinatown Chinese-Americans. See Lower East Side: Chinese-American residents in; racial minorities Christadora, 83, 119 churches and housing activism, 110 Citibank, 83, 119, 156 cities: compared in Europe and United States, 24, 146-47; decline in postwar United States, 36-37, 185n. 49; in early modern capitalism, 15, 184n. 34; and globalization, xiv-xvi, 1, 20-21; and interlocal competition, xx, 22, 58, 64, 66; and the state in the United States, 20-24, 42, 66-68. See also global cities; New York (City); progressive city
Index • 243 citizens: and attachment to /detachment from the state, 18-19, 21, 161; and nonparticipation, 148-49, 161; and planning, 169, 171; rights and capacities of, xxv, 19, 161, 163 Citizens Budget Commission, 194n. 41 Citizens Housing and Planning Council, 194n.41 City Limits (Peterson), 68, 142 city- owned abandoned properties (New York), 45, 61, 64, 76-77, 194n. 43, 201n. 100. See also Division of Alternative Management Programs; Lower East Side: city-owned abandoned properties in; redemptions city planners: failure to value immigrant enclaves in 1970s, 80; responsibility for 1970s fiscal crisis, 39; role in 1980s development, 45 City Planning Commission (New York), 45-46, 209n. 53 city-regions, 153-54 Civic Alliance, 169 civil liberties, 18,60 Clark, David, 178n.2 Clark, Terry Nichols, 22 In. 5 class, 10, 13, 15, 182n. 24 Clinton, Bill, 57-58, 59, 66, 199n. 85 Cloward, Richard A., 184n. 38, 214n. 20, 222n. 10, 224n. 26 communitarianism, 26, 133 community: fragmentation of, 55, 131; imagined, 9; key site of political involvement and mobilization, 161; local or place-based, 1, 21, 105; working-class, 18, 36. See also communitarianism; community development vs. community resistance; community organizations (New York); community organizing; community participation; community partnership; Lower East Side: community board in; movements; movement strategies; neighborhood; neighborhood-based resistance; neighborhoodism; neighborhood
transition; New York (City): community-board system in community-board system. See New York (City): community-board system in Community Board 3. See Lower East Side: community board in community developers. See Lower East Side: community developers in; movement strategies: service provision; nongovernmental service providers Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), 43, 45, 85, 200n. 100 community development vs. community resistance, xvii, 102, 107. See also community partnership; movements: pragmatic vs. militant activism in; movement strategies: tensions between community mobilization. See community development vs. community resistance; movements; movement strategies community organizations (New York): advance city- wide housing proposal in 1986, 48; gain expanded city- wide role after 1986, 49; political relationship with Dinkins, 50, 52-53; political relationship with Giuliani, 61, 20 In. 100; political relationship with Koch, 45; seen as making excessive demands on municipal budgets in 1970s, 39. See also interest groups: community-based; movement strategies; nongovernmental service providers community organizing: history of, 102, 108; labor and, xxv, 145. See also Lower East Side: housing activism; movement strategies community participation: enhanced by globalization, 21, 143; fails to oppose eviction of squatters, 130; and nonvoting, 149; promoted by New York's community-board system, 106;
244 • Index suffers in mutual housing associations, 128, 218n. 68; symbolic, 23 community partnership: as alternative to class- and race-divided politics, 138, 143; as good-faith effort to support community-based service provision, 143; limits of, 143, 221n. 4, 223n. 18; as response to gentrification, 72. Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), 146, 222n. 14 Connecticut, 55, 153, 155 Contract with America, 58 Cooper Square, 107 Cooper Square Community Development Committee, 111-13, 118, 128, 218n. 68 corporations, 4, 10, 18, 23, 65, 105. See also capital Costello, Tim, 180n. 7 Cox, Kevin R., 194n. 40 Cox, Robert W., 180n. 7 crime, 55-56, 60, 91. See also government policies: criminal justice and incarceration; Lower East Side: policing in; New York (City): policing in Cross, D.,203n. 118 cross- subsidy programs, 86-88, 120, 148 Grotty, Paul, 87 Crusoe, Robinson, 13 culture, 4, 6, 21,93-94 Cumings, Bruce, 187n. 60 Dahl, Robert A., 184n. 38 Dale, John, 2 17n. 58 Danielsen, Karen A., 225n. 49 Danielson, Michael, 22 Danziger, Martha, 217n. 48 Darton, Eric, 227n. 5 Davis, John Emmeus, 214n. 18 Day, JaredN., 214n. 19 DeFilippis, James, 204n. 6 DeGiovanni, Frank E, 195n. 49, 208n. 33 Deitrick, Sabina, 185n. 49 Democratic Party, 42, 166, 168 Department of City Planning (New York),45,209n.53
Department of Housing and Urban Development (United States), 43, 57, 58, 199n. 86 Destler, I. M., 187n. 60, 227n. 66 developers. See Lower East Side: community developers in; Lower East Side: property owners; Lower East Side: real-estate developers in; nongovernmental service providers; realestate developers developmentalism, 1, 6-7, 26, 182n. 14. See also state: developmental Dinkins, David, xxii, 50-53, 55-56, 88 Dirlik,Arif, 185n.47 discourses: of globalization (see globalism); of revitalization, 46-47; of state restructuring, 28 Disney, 59 Disney World, 31 displacement. See gentrification: and displacement; Lower East Side: displacement in Division of Alternative Management Programs (DAMP), 45, 49, 117, 194n. 43, 195n. 56, 201n. 100 Doctoroff, Daniel, 170 Doig, Jameson W., 225n. 46 Domhoff, G.William, 182n. 22 Downs, Anthony, 152, 193n. 37, 224n. 34 Downtown (Manhattan). See Lower Manhattan Dreier, Peter, 193n. 33, 194n. 38, 219n. 76, 221n. 4, 221n. 7, 224n. 29, 224n. 35, 225n. 52 Drennan, Matthew, 197n. 70 dual-city visions of urban revival. See planned shrinkage; triage Duany, Andres, 203n. 3 DuBrul,Paul, 19 In. 19 Duncan, Betsy, 204n. 6 Duncombe, Stephen R., 217n. 53 Dunham, Jan D., 205n. 9 earned-income tax credit, 199n. 85 East Asia: economic crisis in, 19, 182n. 14; as emergent hegemon, 26-27; as evidence of state agency,
Index • 245 xiii; as member of the "triad," 16; as source of investment in New York real estate, 80, 197n. 68 East Brooklyn, 53 East Harlem, 69 East Village, 76-77, 79-80, 82-83, 89, 93-94, 109 ecological change. See Lower East Side: multiple ecological processes in; neighborhood transition economic inequality: metropolitan solutions to, 138; in New York, 32, 50, 53, 55, 64, 66, 197n. 69, 202n. Ill, 203n. 1 18; in the United States, 3, 17, 23, 37, 53, 66, 139, 160, 180n. 5, 203n. Ill Educational Alliance, 107 Ehrlich, Bruce, 194n. 38 Elkin, Stephen, 176n. 16, 190n. 11 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 219n. 77 embeddedness: explains national patterns of development, 6, 25; explains necessity of public action in neighborhood change, 98. See also state: dis-embedding role Emergency Financial Control Board. See Financial Control Board Empire State Development Corporation (New York State), 59, 167 employment. See unemployment/ employment trends England, 6, 13 Enron, 171 Enterprise Foundation, 127 Epstein, Gerald, 181n. 8, 220n. 1 Esping-Andersen, G0sta, 159, 184n. 42 Etzioni, Amitai, 219n. 77 European Union (EU), 4, 9, 24, 146, 153 Evans Peter, 163, 181n. 12 factor-price equalization, 179n. 4 Pagan, Jeffrey, 200n. 95 Fainstein, Norman I., 184n. 40, 192n. 23, 192n. 31, 194n. 41, 194n. 44 Fainstein, Susan S., x, 34, 148—49, 176n. 16, 177n. 19, 179n. 3, 184n. 40,
190n. 10, 192n. 23, 192n. 31, 193n. 38, 194n. 41, 194n. 44, 203n. 118, 213n. ll,223n.23 Fairfield County (Connecticut), 153 Featherstone, Mike, 178n. 2 federal aid to U.S. cities, 42, 43, 51, 57, 63, 197n. 69. See also national/local politics; national or national/local urban regime federalism. See national/local politics; national or national/local urban regime; state: decentralization or devolution of Feigenbaum, Harvey, 178n. 26 Ferman, Barbara, 193n. 38 Ferrer, Fernando, 168 feudalism, 2, 13-15 Financial Control Board, 38, 40, 52 financial markets: and globalization, 3, 4, 11, 12, 18, 187n. 59; and New York's fiscal crisis of the 1970s, 37-38; and New York's housing and land markets, 32, 49, 53. See also Wall Street fiscal crisis: in 1970s New York, 37-41, 106, 191n. 18, 191n. 19; in 1990s New York, 52, 91-92 fiscal strain: in Europe, 37, 149, 160, 191n. 16; in New York, 191n. 23; in the United States, 19, 37, 160, 191n. 17 Fisher, Robert, 212n. 7, 224n. 27 Fitch, Robert, 173n. 1, 227n. 5 Flynn, Raymond, 43 Ford, Gerald, 38 Fordism, 18, 27, 187n. 61 42 la Program, 40-41, 76 France: microeconomic policy in, 6; national debates over globalization, 5; national/local politics in, 147-48; regionalism in, 153-54 Freeman, Richard B., 181n. 12 Friedlander, Miriam, 85, 127 Friedman, Milton, 175n. 7 Friedman, Thomas, 174n. 5 Friedmann, John, 32, 174n. 5, 178n. 2, 189n. 5 Frug, Gerald E., 213n. 12, 224n. 36, 225n. 51
246 • Index Fuchs, Ester R., 173n. 1, 176n. 16, 191n. 17, 191n.23,205n. 18 Fujita, Kuniko, 178n. 25, 186n. 56 Fulton, William, 225n. 49, 225n. 52 Gale, Dennis E., 176n. 17, 203n. 4 Gaspard, Francoise, 223n. 21 Geddes, Mike, 223n. 18 Gelb, Joyce, 177n. 18 Gendrot, Sophie, 205n. 16, 214n. 19 Genevro, Rosalie, 205n. 15 Genoa, xxv gentrification: artists' role in, 85; as community-based revitalization process, 82, 98-99; as complex set of neighborhood transitions influenced by local policies, 73, 81, 97, 99; and displacement, 70, 113 (see also Lower East Side: displacement in); earlystage, 76, 77, 81; as economic logic, xvii, 71, 74, 91; explained by globalization, 32, 70, 74, 97; and hypergentrification, xxiii, 82, 148; laterstage, 89; and local policies (see local policies and gentrification); multiple ecologies involved in, 72-73, 75, 99; onset and origins of, 73-74, 81; political-economy approaches to, 70-72, 204n. 7; as public action, 72-73, 82, 97-99; public debate over, 70, 97; radical critique of, 123-24, 212n. 1; as reinvestment, 70, 81, 89, 98, 210n. 59; as remapping of economic and racial segregation, 70; and "renewal" stereotype, 70; as resettlement, 70, 81, 89, 98, 21 On. 59; and state role, 71-72, 97, 99; urbanecological perspectives on, 70-72, 204n. 9. See also community development vs. community resistance; Lower East Side; movement strategies; neighborhood transition; realestate developers Germany, 6, 9 Giddens, Anthony, 8, 174n. 5, 179n. 4, 182n. 15, 220n. 1 Gingrich, Newt, 58, 59
Gittell, Ross, 20 In. 100 Giuliani, Rudolph, xxii, 31, 33, 51-52, 55-56, 59, 61-62, 65, 165-167, 170, 198n. 75 Glasgow, 154 Gliedman, Anthony, 87 global cities, x, xviii, 20-21, 32, 105, 165, 174n. 5. See also New York (City): as global city Global City, The (Sassen), x Global Crossing, 171 globalism: as an approach to globalization, xii, xx, 3-6, 12, 25, 138, 179n. 4; challenges to, xv, 1, 6, 12, 26, 159, 183n. 26; as an interpretation of New York's transformation, 36; positive vs. critical versions of, 4, 12, 174n. 5, 183n. 26. globalist approaches or discourses. See globalism globalization: and attachments to place, xviii, 105; from below, xiv, 162; as cause of New York's late-twentiethcentury transformation, 32, 53-54, 63-64, 66; as chaotic conception, 28; and cities, 1, 146, 165 (see also global cities); as convergence, 1, 5-7, 20, 159, 179n. 4; and cross-national differentiation, xiii, xix, 1, 2, 6, 28; and distinction between transnational and internationalized economy, 6; distinguished from capitalism, 5, 25; ethnographic approaches to, 188n. 68; as fragmentation, 21, 131; and global cities (see global cities); and global civil society, 4, 163; and global/local linkages, xviii, 1, 2, 19, 20-21; and global/national linkages, 3, 15, 19; and information flows, 9, 186n. 57; as international economic integration, 1, 3, 5-6, 17, 65, 162, 179n. 4; and localization, xiv, 21, 105; local resistance to, xviii, 21; nationstate responses to, 6, 16-20, 25, 159-60; neoliberal, xix, xxi, xxii, xxv, 8, 11, 29, 35, 67, 134, 137, 140, 163; primitive (see primitive globaliza-
Index • 247 tion); and regionalization, 21; and state, xiii-xiv, 4-9, 15-29; theories of, 3-8; as transitional, contingent process, xix, 3, 8, 23-24, 28; undermines social movements, xvii-xviii, 101-2, 105, 177n. 19. See also immigrants; movements; New York (City): as global city; state Glyn, Andrew, 190, 226n. 60 Goetz, Edward G., 144, 22 In. 9 Goldin, Frances, 88, 111 Goldsmith, Michael, 185n. 51 Goldsmith, Victor, 200n. 96 GOLES (Good Old Lower East Side), 115, 122 Gottdiener, Mark, 204n. 7 governance: corporate, 6, 171-72; global or supranational, 4, 9, 16, 19, 138, 142, 162-64, 180n. 6, 220n. 1; and government, 23-24, 27-28; neighborhood, 121-22; regional (see regionalism); urban, 20, 22-24, 138, 142-43 (see also national or national/local urban regime) government. See government policies; state government policies: anti-union, 16; criminal justice and incarceration, 9, 18, 22, 58, 199n. 87 (see also Lower East Side: policing in; New York [City]: policing in); deregulation of business, 16, 22, 27; economic development, 3, 18, 23, 57-58, 92-93; education and training, 64; government spending, 3, 39-40, 44, 51, 58 (see also triage); housing (see housing plans; housing programs; public housing; Section 8 housing assistance); immigration, 79-80; implementation of, 28, 120; industrial, 6; microeconomic, 6; privatization, xxv, 9, 16, 54, 106, 198n. 75 (see also public housing: privatization or demolition of); regulatory, 144; Social Security, 18, 166, 172; social welfare, 9, 16 (see also welfare state); spatially oriented, 146-47; subsidization of business, 43, 52, 56, 58-59, 61, 66,
106, 145, 222n. 11; and suburbanization, 153-55, 157-58; tax incentives or subsidies, 40-41, 42-43, 44, 55, 56, 61, 170; tax retrenchment, 16, 22, 42, 52, 64; unemployment, 42, 43; welfare (see welfare). See also federal aid to U.S. cities; local policies and gentriflcation; national/local politics; national or national/local urban regime; progressive city; regionalism; state Granovetter, Mark, 18 In. 12 Grasso, Richard A., 11, 13 Gratz, Roberta Brandes, 204n. 4 Gray, John, 183n. 26 Greater Chinatown, 79-80, 89-90, 94, 109. See also Chinatown Green, Mark, 168 Greene, Judith A., 200n. 95, 200n. 96 Greenspan, Alan, 198n. 84 Greenwich Village, 76 Greshof, Dorine, 217n. 58 Grigsby, J. Eugene, III, 224n. 29 Group of 35, 166, 170 Gutfreund, Owen D., 189n. 8, 225n. 50 Gwiasda, Vicky, 185n. 45, 198n. 73 Gyourko, Joseph, 202n. 114 Hackworth, Jason, 212n. 81 Hall, John A., 182n. 16 Hall, Peter, 185n. 49 Hall, Stuart, 175n. 12, 178n. 2 Halpern, Robert, 220n. 78 Hamel, Pierre, 186n. 51, 22 In. 5 Hamilton, David K., 224n. 34 Hammack, David C., 189n. 8 Hammel, Daniel J., 212n. 81 Hamnett, Chris, 178n. 26, 203n. 118 Harding, Alan, 186n. 54 Harris, Richard, 225n. 50 Harrison, Bennett, 180n. 5, 198n. 84 Hart-CellerAct(1965),79 Hartman, Chester, 203n. 3 Harvey, David, 174n. 5, 178n. 1, 180n. 5, 180n. 6, 204n. 7, 222n. 12, 227n. 2 Hawley, Peter K., 216n. 36 Hay, Colin, xiv, 17, 182n. 16
248 • Index Hayek, Friedrich, 175n. 7 Held, David, 179n. 4, 180n. 7, 220n. 1 Helmsley, Harry, 113 Hemerijck, Anton, 226n. 60 Henig, Jeffrey, 178n. 26 Henry Street Settlement, 107 Hill, Richard Child, 178n. 25, 186n. 56 Hirsch, Arnold R., 185n. 49 Hirsch, Eric L., 217n. 50 Hirst, Clifford, 177n. 19, 213n. 11 Hirst, Paul, 174n. 5, 181n. 8 Hispanics: as occupants of Tompkins Square Park, 123; as supporters of Mayor Dinkins, 50. See also Loisaida; Lower East Side: Dominican residents in; Lower East Side: Puerto Rican residents in; racial minorities Hiss, Tony, 225n. 43 historical materialism, 11, 183n. 33 Hoffman-Martinot, Vincent, 221n. 5 Hohenberg, Paul M., 184n. 34 Hollander, Kurt, 207n. 25 Holton, R. J., 15 homelessness, 48, 50, 51, 55-56, 60, 61, 72, 122-24, 149. See also homesteaders; squatters homesteaders, 89, 111, 116-17, 122, 134, 218n. 66. See also squatters Hong Kong, 79 Horton, Raymond D., 173n. 1, 189n. 6 housing: community-based, 45, 64, 87-88, 120-21, 127-28; market-rate, 48; self-help rehabilitation, 194n. 43. See also Division of Alternative Management Programs housing abandonment: in 1960s New York, 36; in 1970s and early- 1980s New York, 45, 77; in early- 1990s New York, 53, 91; in late- 1990s New York, 61. See also neighborhood abandonment and decline housing costs, 64-65, 72, 77, 94, 145, 202n. 114,225n.49 housing crisis, 48, 61. See also homelessness; housing abandonment; housing costs
housing plan (Lower East Side). See Lower East Side: housing plan for housing plans (New York): proposals in 2001, 65, 144; Ten-Year Housing Plan, 48-49, 51, 57, 61, 65, 86, 143-44, 197n. 66, 221n. 7 housing programs: in the Netherlands, 148-49; in New York (see Division of Alternative Management Programs; housing: community-based; housing plans); in the United States (see Community Development Block Grant; public housing; Section 8 housing assistance) Hovde, Sarah, 128, 218n. 66 Howard, Christopher, 184n. 41 Hutton,Will,220n. 1 hypergentrification. See gentrification: and hypergentrification IAF (Industrial Areas Foundation), 145, 157 Ikenberry, G. John, 182n. 16 immigrant enclave, 73, 75, 79-80, 89-90, 94 immigrants: importance to New York economy, 65; increasing numbers in New York, 63; and new cross-border communities, 162; in Western European cities, 147-49. See also immigrant enclave; Loisaida; Lower East Side inclusionary zoning, 87, 113, 120 Industrial and Commercial Incentives Program (ICIP), 40, 50, 52, 196n. 64 in rem properties. See city-owned abandoned properties (New York); Lower East Side: city-owned abandoned properties in interest groups: business and conservative, 16, 17, 42, 49, 53, 160; community-based, 23, 49, 107; welfare-state, 159. See also realestate developers International Monetary Fund (IMF), 4 invasion and succession. See gentrifica-
Index • 249 tion; immigrant enclave; neighborhood transition Jackson, Anthony, 205n. 13 Jackson, Kenneth, 153, 185n. 49, 189n. 8, 224n. 34 Japan: adaptive behavior of, 7; national debates over globalization, 5; nationalistic developmentalism as defensive, 26; urban development in, 66 Javits Convention Center, 41, 170 Jessop, Bob, 27-28, 182n. 17 Jewish Daily Forward building, 90, 94 J-51 Program, 41, 50, 76, 82, 206n. 20 Johnson, Chalmers, 178n. 1 Joint Planning Council (JPC), 86, 87, 110-14,119-22,124,134 Joint Planning Council (JPC) Plan, 113-14, 116, 120-21, 215n. 33 Joselit, JennaWeissman, 214n. 19 Judd, Dennis R., 42, 193n. 32 Judge, David, 176n. 15 Kantor, Paul, 154 Kantrowitz, Nathan, 207n. 24 Katz, Bruce, 226n. 55 Katznelson, Ira, 15, 108, 184n. 38 Kaufman, Herbert, 176n. 15 Keating, Larry, 213n. 11 Keating, W. Dennis, 194n. 38, 216n. 35, 219n. 76 Kemp, Jack, 51 Kennedy Airport, 170 Keynesianism, 4, 6, 18, 27, 162 Khondker, Habib Haque, 183n. 26 Kim, June, 200n. 95 Kincaid, John, 199n. 87 King, Anthony D., 178n. 2 Klokiw, Wasyl, 215n. 27 Koch, Edward, xxii, 32, 33, 44-50, 85, 86, 111, 113, 144, 195n.47 Korea, 7 Koschinsky, Julia, 214n. 17 Krauskopf, James, 193n. 34 Krinsky, John, 128, 200n. 99, 218n. 66 Krumholz, Norman, 199n. 91
Kuhnle, Stein, 226n. 60 Kume, Ikuo, 181n. 12, 226n. 60 Kwong, Peter, 208n. 29 labor: flexible, 27, 60, 65; rights of, 18, 19, 145, 164 Labor Community Advocacy Network, 169 labor markets: and globalization, 4, 65, 160; in New York, 32, 65. See also unemployment/ employment trends; wages labor unions: and community organizations, 145; and fiscal crisis of 1970s, 39; and labor-law provisions, 18; political relationship with Dinkins, 50, 53; political relationship with Koch, 44; and regulation theory, 187n. 61 LaGuardia Airport, 170 Lambert, Sarah, 217n. 49 Lang, Robert E., 225n. 49 Latin America, 19 Lawson, Ronald, 193n. 32, 216n. 41 Lees, Loretta, 177n. 17, 212n. 81 Lees, Lynn Hollen, 184n. 34 Lefevre, Christian, 154 Le Gales, Patrick, 178n. 25, 179n. 3, 186n. 54, 223n. 20 Leibfried, Stephan, xiii, 226n. 60 Leo, Christopher Leo, 176n. 16, 185n. 50, 203n. 119 Levine, MarcV., 181n. 12 libertarianism, 26 Lichten, Eric, 19 In. 20 Lijphart, Arend, 223n. 26 Lin, Jan, x, 208n. 29 linkage policy, 47, 144 Linneman, Peter D., 224n. 30 Listokin, David, 192n. 29, 206n. 20 living wage, xxv, 145 local identities, 1, 21 localism: as explanation of changes in New York, 32-33, 49; political potential of, 21, 146; undervalued in France, 223n. 21 locality, 20
250 • Index localization. See globalization: and localization Local Law 45 ("quick- vesting" law), 45, 206n.21 local officials: as neutral brokers of neighborhood change, 71; as public entrepreneurs in interlocal competition, 44; relationship with real- estate developers, 46; responsibilities for fiscal crisis of 1970s, 37, 39; role in gentrification (see local policies and gentrification); seek to control urban populations, 23; susceptible to the influence of powerful social groups, 17 local policies and gentrification: accelerating neighborhood destabilization and displacement, 71, 81, 98-99; community partnerships to develop subsidized housing, 82, 87-89, 99, 143; demolition and site assembly, 82, 84; land-use controls, 71, 76, 99, 144; linkage, 47, 144; privatization of publicly owned properties, 82, 89, 95; as public action, xvii, 71, 75, 82, 92, 97, 98; redemptions (see redemptions); rent regulations (see rent regulations); social regulation of public space, 91-92; spending priorities, 71, 76; SRO (single-room occupancy) conversion law, 144; supporting resident stability, 71, 99; tax incentives and reinvestment subsidies, 71, 76, 82, 88; in Western Europe, 147-149; zoning regulations, 71, 87, 90, 99, 144. See also community partnership; housing plans (New York); inclusionary zoning; local state; Lower East Side: housing plan for local politics: as cause of New York's late-twentieth-century changes, 32-33; in United States, 23-24, 142-44. See also national/local politics; national or national /local urban regime local state: and failure to sustain stable governance in United States, 23-24; potential emergence of corporatist,
49, as replacement for nation-state in decline, xviii, 1, 21-22, 27-28; role in global/local linkages, xviii, 1, 21; shaped by nation-state in United States, xvi, xviii, 22-23, 142-45. See also local policies and gentrification Logan, John R., 203n. 118 Loisaida, 77-79, 89-90, 94-96, 109, 207n. 23 London, x, 34 Lopez, Margarita, 134 Lopez-Garza, Marta, 224n. 29 Los Angeles, x, xiv, xv, 58, 145, 150 Lower East Side: African-American residents in, 69, 96, 109, 123; artists in, 76, 85, 93, 111, 115; as center of broader movement, xxiii, 101, 111-19, 215n. 29; Chinese-American residents in, 69, 79-80, 90, 94-95, 109; Chinese immigrants in, 74, 79-80; city-owned abandoned properties in, 76-79, 81, 83-90, 95, 111-14, 116-17, 120, 121, 128, 206n. 21 (see also redemptions); community board (Manhattan Community Board 3) in, 85, 110, 113, 120, 126-28; community developers in, 88, 89, 92, 95, 121-22, 125-28; community identity of, 109-11, 115, 131, 214n. 23, 215n. 24, 215n. 25; community land trust in, 128; community mobilization in early twentieth century, 107; communitypartnership approach to latetwentieth-century revival, 87-89, 99; community resistance to gentrification in, 83-86, 88, 98, 101-4, 110-19, 122-26, 129-31; demographic change between 1980 and 2000 in, 78; displacement in, 83-84, 91, 96, 111, 114; Dominican residents in, 94, 109; envisioned as site of the World Trade Center, 227n. 5; European immigrants in, 69, 74, 79, 109; garment district in, 79, 90; gentrification in 1950s and 1960s, 206n. 19; gentrification in 1970s, xxii-xxiii, 75-81; gentrification in 1980s, xxii-xxiii, 82-85, 88-91; gen-
Index • 251 trification in 1990s, xxii-xxiii, 92-96; Grand Street developments in, 74, 88, 95; as home, 136; as home to poor, 69; housing activism in early 1980s, 109-19; housing activism in late 1980s, 119-25; housing activism in early and mid-1990s, 125-31; housing activism in late 1990s, 134-35; housing plan for, 86-89, 120-21, 129; housing prices and land values in, 69, 82-83, 89, 93, 95; as immigrant ghetto, 69, 74, 109; impacts of 1970s triage policies in, 75-81; investors in, 83, 89, 94, 110; Italian immigrants in, 74, 76, 109; Jewish immigrants in, 74, 76, 79, 109; large variety of community organizations involved in housing, 110, 215n. 25; middle-class residents in, 70, 74, 95, 212n. 80; movement-field in, 103-4, 110; multiple ecological processes in, xxiii, 75, 80-81, 89-91, 94-95; New Deal-era approaches to renewal in, 74; nineteenth-century tenement reform in, 74; numbers of lower- income residents in 1970s, 77-78; numbers of lower-income residents in 1990s, 70, 94, 203n. 2; policing in, 92-93, 122-24, 126, 128-31; Polish immigrants in, 76; political factionalism or fragmentation in, xxiii, 102, 123-25, 127-28, 132, 134; property owners as developers in, 83; property owners as slumlords in, 77, 207n. 25; property owners as speculators in, 83, 210n. 58; property owners as targets of tenant organizing in, 1 14-16; property owners in Greater Chinatown area of, 79, 95; public housing in, 74, 96, 107, 134; public housing residents as community actors in, 134-35; Puerto Rican residents in, 69, 74, 77-79, 94, 96, 109; real-estate developers in, 76-77, 79-80, 82-84, 86-87, 93-94, 110; redemptions in (see redemptions); rents in, 69, 83, 93, 94, 96, 114; slum- clearance approach in, 73, 74,
84, 89, 92; social diversity of community in, 102, 109-10, 123-24, 127, 132; subsidized housing in, 86-89, 95-97, 117, 127-28; Ukrainian immigrants in, 74, 76; urban renewal in, 74, 107; young urban professionals in, 69, 93, 94, 102; young, white in-movers in, 74, 76, 90, 110. See also East Village; gentrification; Greater Chinatown; Loisaida; movement strategies; redlining Lower East Side Catholic Area Conference (LESAC), 117 Lower East Side Coalition Housing Development (LESCHD), 127, 130, 219n. 72 Lower East Side Joint Planning Council. See Joint Planning Council Lower Manhattan, 56, 80, 167-71 Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), 167-69 Luce, Stephanie, 222n. 11 Luger, Stan, 184n. 36 Lustiger-Thaler, Henri, 186n. 51, 213n. ll,221n.5 Lyons, Donald, 185n. 45, 197n. 71 Lyons, Michal, 177n. 18 Maffi, Mario, 207n. 23 Maheu, Louis, 186n. 51, 213n. 11, 221n.5 Manhattan, xvi, 32, 41, 47-50, 52-54, 59, 69, 74, 76, 78-79, 82-83, 93-94, 101, 110, 133, 166-67, 170. See also Lower Manhattan; Midtown; West Side Manhattan Bridge, 90 Manow, Philip, 226n. 60 Marcuse, Peter, 25, 146, 186n. 52, 186n. 56, 189n. 8, 192n. 28, 198n. 78, 205n. 15, 213n. 12, 213n. 16, 214n. 19, 227n. 4 Marglin, Stephen A., 190n. 13 markets, domestic vs. international, 5, 20 Markusen, Ann, 185n. 45, 185n. 49, 198n. 73 Martin, Isaac, 145
252 • Index Marx, Karl, xii, xiii, xix, 2, 5, 11-15, 25, 28, 180n. 8, 183n. 28, 183n. 33, 188n. 66 Marxian theory, 9-10, 182n. 24, 183n. 27 Massey, Doreen, 178n. 2 Mattson, Andrew O., 217n. 53 Mayer, Margit, 102, 177n. 19 McCain, John, 62 McGrew, Anthony, 179n. 4, 220n. 1 media, electronic: and globalization, 9, 60; and New York economy, 60, 63 Medicaid, 43 Medoff, Peter, 219n. 78 Mele, Christopher, 102, 103, 123, 204n. 7, 205n. 17 Melendez, Edwin, 207n. 24 Memorandum of Understanding, 87, 88. See also Lower East Side: housing plan for Metropolitan Council on Housing (Met Council), 114-16, 118, 122, 134 Metropolitan Transportation Authority, 227n. 3 Michetti, Felice, 51, 88 Midtown (Manhattan), 50, 56, 80, 82, 168, 170 Miliband, Ralph, 10 Minneapolis-Saint Paul, 133, 153, 154, 225n.41 Minnite, Lorraine, 195n. 49 modernization theory, 179n. 5 Moehring, Eugene P., 189n. 8 Mollenkopf, John H., 32-33, 173n. 1, 176n. 15, 185n. 49, 190n. 15, 192n. 29, 194n. 44, 197n. 70, 208n. 53, 224n. 35 Montgomery County (Maryland), 158 Morris, Charles R., 191n. 19 Moses, Robert, 43, 49, 155, 215n. 34 movements: antiglobalization, xxv, 138, 163, 220n. 1; in early-twentiethcentury Lower East Side, 107; encouraged by state decentralization to localize, 103, 106-7; fragmentation of, xvii, 107, 132; pragmatic vs. militant activism in, 107-8, 119, 125; relationship to modem state, 105-6, 134; social and urban, 105-6; undermined
by globalization, xvii-xviii, 101-2, 105, 177n. 19; urban, 106-7. See also movement strategies movement strategies: advocacy, 103, 107, 111-13, 162; coalition building, 112, 134, 145, 161; mobilization, 23, 107, 111-19, 121-23, 133-34, 145-46, 161; neighborhood-based vs. neighborhood-bound, xxiii, 103-4, 108, 121, 131-34; planning, 103, 107, 113-14, 118, 121, -protest and confrontation, 60, 103, 107, 111-13, 118, 122, 145; service provision, 103, 107, 121, 133, 143; tenant organizing, 103, 107, 114-16, 118, 122; tensions between, 107-8, 119, 121, 125, 132. See also community development vs. community resistance; community organizing; homesteaders; movements; rent strikes; squatters multilateral agreement on investment (MAI), 163, 187n. 60 Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), 38, 40, 52 Murray Hill, 76 Musterd, Sako, 222n. 17 mutual housing associations (MHAs), 120, 128 Myles, John, 185n. 43, 199n. 85, 226n. 60 Nathan, Richard P., 191n. 17 national identity: sharpened by globalization, 6, 9 national /local politics: in certain European countries, 146-49; and community organizing, 145-46, 150. See also federal aid to U.S. cities; New York (City): national/local politics national or national/local urban regime: defined, 34, 142-43, 190n. 11; emergence in late-1970s and early1980s United States, 41-44, 47; in late- 1980s United States, 51; in 1990s United States, 57-59, 64; in latetwentieth-century United States, 22-24, 62, 67-68, 142-45; in postwar United States, 36-37; in twenty-first-
Index • 253 century United States, 161. See also governance: urban; national/local politics; state nation-state: bypassed by globalization, 1, 4, 16, 21, 26; mediates international economic pressures, xv, 5, 16, 25; most powerful lever for reshaping U.S. engagement with globalization, xxv, 139, 161 ; rearticulates strategy of engagement with globalization, 6, 8, 16, 22, 27. See also state neighborhood: attachment to, 107-8, 128; as base of political power, 108, 125; as entryway for activism and springboard for mobilization, 133-34, 150; U.S. and European compared, 25. See also barrio; bohemia; immigrant enclave; neighborhoodism; neighborhood transition neighborhood abandonment and decline, 36, 39, 45, 47, 50, 53, 61, 75, 77-79, 89 neighborhood-based resistance: impact on local policies and gentrification, 72, 98-99. See also Lower East Side: community resistance to gentrification in; movement strategies: neighborhood-based vs. neighborhood-bound neighborhoodism, xxiv, 103, 104, 131 neighborhoods agenda, 108 neighborhood transition: cross-national comparison of, xxiv, 99, 147-48; multiple ecologies involved in, 72-73, 75, 79-80. See also gentrification; neighborhood abandonment and decline Nelson, KathrynR, 177n. 17 neoliberal: defined, 174n. 7; economic activity, 3, 18, 27, 52, 161; environment, 15; globalists, 163; globalization, xix, xxi, xxii, 8, 11, 28-29, 35, 67, 134, 137, 140, 163; global linkages, 2, 19, 25; model of capitalism, 7, 150, 163; national environment, 66, 154; New York, 36, 49; path or pattern of economic development, xii, xiv, 20, 34; policies, 91, 103, 141, 149; politics,
xi, xxi, 17, 34; states, xiii, 15, 16, 149; urban regime, 62, 140; visions of economic globalism, 158; welfare regimes, 159-60. See also neoliberalism neoliberalism: alternatives to, 146, 158; ascendancy of, 162; challenging, 163; defined, 174n. 7; as economic model, 7; in early-1980s New York, 51, 109; emphasis on unfettering markets, xiv; and global governance, 162-63; local alternatives to, 143; and national environment, 66; reconstructed, 67, 92; in the United States, 17, 26, 35, 47, 57; twenty-first-century, 162; urban, 47, 57. See also neoliberal neoliberalization, xxv Netherlands, the, 148 Netzer, Dick, 192n. 23 Newark (New Jersey), 153 New Deal, 42, 74, 182n. 24 Newfield, Jack, 191n. 19 New Haven (Connecticut), 155 New Jersey, 55, 153, 155, 167 Newman, Peter, 153 new political culture, 138, 143, 221n. 5 new politics, xxv, 138-39, 159-61 new regionalism, xxv, 151-55. See also regional development; regionalism New York (City): Bloomberg administration, 168-71; budget deficits in (see fiscal crisis; fiscal strain); budget surpluses in, 31, 48, 63-65, 188n. 2; community-board system in, 106, 110; compared to cities in Europe and Japan, 66, 147-49; compared to other U.S. cities, 43, 58, 65-67; Consolidation of 1898, 151; Dinkins administration, 50-53; early-twentieth-century city-building projects in, 225n. 50; economic dependence on Wall Street, 37, 49, 59, 63; economy of 1970s, 31, 36-37, 41, 63; economy of 1980s, early, 46-47, 63; economy of 1980s, late, and early 1990s, 49-50, 51-52, 53-54, 91; economy of 1990s, late, 31-32, 59-60, 63-64; economy of 2000s, early, 65, 167, 169; Giuliani
254 • Index administration, 55-57, 59-62, 65; as global city, xxi-xxii, 32, 33, 53-54, 63-64, 66-67, 165; government policies in (see government policies; local policies and gentrification); housing (see homelessness; housing abandonment; housing costs; housing crisis; housing plans; housing programs); Koch administration, 44-50; latetwentieth-century revival of, 62-66; and metropolitan region, 155-56, 167, 169; national/local politics of postwar period, 36-37, 43-44; national/ local politics of 1970s, 37-38, 41; national/local politics of 1980s, 34-35, 41-42, 43, 45, 47; national/ local politics of 1990s, 34-35, 51, 57-59, 61, 62, 64, 66-67; policing in, 56, 60, 91-92, 200n. 95, 200n. 96; population changes in, 31, 37, 63, 65; public image of, 31-32, 35, 39, 47, 62. See also Bronx; Brooklyn; Manhattan; Queens New York (State), 37, 38, 167-69 New York Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 54, 194n. 41 New York City Partnership, 54, 194n. 41 New York Daily News, 38 New York Stock Exchange, 11. See also financial markets; Wall Street New York Times, 168 New York Yankees, 60 Nickel, Denise R., 219n. 76 Nimby (not in my backyard), 23, 55, 67, 125 Nivola, Pietro S., 224n. 34 nongovernmental service providers, 22, 23, 51, 61, 1 10. See also Lower East Side: community developers in nonvoting, 149-50 North America, 16 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 4, 9, 57 Nuyorican Poets Cafe, 77 Ohmae, Kenichi, 174n. 5, 178n. 1 Olympic Games, 170
Orfield, Myron, 224n. 33 Orlando (Florida), 31 Orloff, Ann Shola, 182n. 19 Pacific Rim. See East Asia Pagan, Antonio, 127, 128 Page, Max, 205n. 13 Paget, Karen M., 199n. 89 Painter, Joe, 176n. 16, 188n. 65, 190n. 11, 222n. 16 Palier, Bruno, 226n. 60 Paris, 66, 147, 154 Pastor, Manuel, Jr., 152, 224n. 29, 225n. 52 Pataki, George, 167, 169, 227n. 3 Peck, Jamie, 186n. 54, 188n. 64 Pecorella, Robert, 173n. 1, 189n. 6, 213n. 16 Pennsylvania, 155 Pentagon, 165 People's Mutual Housing Association (PMHA),218n.68 Perelman, Michael, 183n. 27, 183n. 30 Peterson, Paul, 68, 142, 144 Petrella, Riccardo, 181n. 10 Pickman, James, 195n. 48 Pierson, Paul, 159-60, 177n. 25, 179n. 3, 193n. 35, 226n. 58 Pinero, Miguel, 207n. 25 Piore, Michael J., 180n. 5 Piven, Frances Fox, 184n. 38, 191n. 16, 214n. 20, 222n. 10, 223n. 26 place: in relation to spatial economy, 21, 101, 105 planned shrinkage, 39^0, 72, 75 Planning for the Lower East Side (Schwartz and Abeles), 69 Plotke, David, 184n. 36, 193n. 33 Plunz, Richard, 205n. 16 policies. See government policies policing. See government policies: criminal justice and incarceration; Lower East Side: policing in; New York (City): policing in political parties, 17, 184n. 38 politics: class, 22, 138; domestic or subglobal, 2, 16-17, 18, 137-38; and frag-
Index • 255 mentation, 3, 150; influence on globalization, 2, 24-25; racial 22, 138. See also local politics; national /local politics; national or national/local urban regime; nation-state; state Pollin, Robert, 181n. 8, 220n. 1, 222n. 11 Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, 155-56, 167-70 Portland (Oregon), 153, 158 post-Fordism, 28 poststatism, 154, 163 Poulantzas, Nicos, 10 poverty: metropolitan solutions to, 138, 152; in New York, 32, 50, 197n. 69; 203n. 118; in the United States, 19, 23,36,203n. 118, 160 preference accommodation, 17 Priemus, Hugo, 222n. 16, 222n. 17, 223n. 24 primitive accumulation, xii, xix, 2, 11-15,25, 174n. 6, 183n. 27 primitive globalization: closes window of opportunity for addressing welfare of cities, 158-59; creates new areas for urban contestation, 106; defined, 2, 15, 25-26; ensnares activists in politics of fragmentation, xxiv, 132, 141; limits to the concept, 28-29; moving beyond, 161; purpose of the concept, xiv, xix-xx, 26, 28-29; used to guide investigation of transformation of New York, xxiv, 29, 34, 140; used to situate the U.S. case within a comparative field, xxiv-xxv, 24-25; used to understand relation between city and neighborhood in Lower East Side, xxiii, 72-73, 97-98, 140 privatization. See government policies: privatization productivity, economic, 5, 186n. 57 progressive city, 43, 51, 138, 142-51, 220n.3,221n.9 Progressive Era, 74 Proposition 13, 42 Przeworski, Adam, 11, 182n. 21, 184n. 37 public action: as local governmental in-
fluence on neighborhood change, 71-72; as neo liberal approach to New York fiscal crisis of the 1970s, 40; U.S. failure to generate sustainable forms of, 24; as visible at the local level, 161. See also community partnership; government policies; local policies and gentrification public housing: conversion to rental and homeowner subsidies for market housing, 58; emergence of, 107; fiscal pressures on, 61; lower housing costs for residents in, 64; privatization or demolition of, 18, 22, 58, 61; reduced construction of, 43; residents as community actors, 134-35. See also Section 8 housing assistance public-private partnerships, 22, 43-44, 58, 60, 62, 168, 195n. 47. See also community partnership public services: expenditures on, 40, 55, 76 Pueblo Nuevo, 77, 127, 218n. 64, 218n.68 Puerto Ricans. See Hispanics; Loisaida; Lower East Side: Puerto Rican residents in; racial minorities Quadagno, Jill, 182n. 22, 199n. 85, 226n. 60 Queens, 50, 69 Quiroz-Martinez, Julie, 225n. 52 racial minorities: helped by the Community Reinvestment Act, 146; hurt by deindustrialization, 77; and movements for racial equality, 133; and regional initiatives, 152, 156; responsible for fiscal crisis of 1970s; as targets of policing, 50, 92, 200n. 95; in Western European cities, 145-49. See also African-Americans; Hispanics; Lower East Side: African-American residents in; Lower East Side: Chinese-American residents in; Lower East Side: Dominican residents in; Lower East Side: Puerto
256 • Index Rican residents in; racial segregation and racism racial segregation and racism, 50, 56, 70, 138, 146, 149. See also racial minorities; spatial patterns Rand, Esther, 2 16n. 34 Reagan, Ronald, 42 Reaganism, 42, 51 Real Estate Board of New York, 52, 194n.41 real- estate developers: as campaign contributors, 46, 50, 52, 111; as laterstage gentrifiers, 81, 111; as pressure group, 52; as speculators, 77, 81, 83, 111, 116; as supporters of accommodation to low-income housing needs, 87; tendency to overbuild, 39, 54, 56. See also Lower East Side: property owners; Lower East Side: real-estate developers in real-estate market, 53, 61, 63, 81 Real Great Society/ Charas, 77 redemptions, 76-77, 206-7n. 21 redlining, 77, 133 Reed, Adolph, Jr., 22 In. 3 regime, urban. See national or national/ local urban regime; urban regime theory regimes of accumulation: in Arrighi, 26-27; in Jessop, 27-28; in Regulation school, 187n. 61 regional development, 22, 43, 138, 151-52. See also regionalism regionalism: and New York, 153, 155-56; in the United States, xxv, 138, 151-54, 157-58; in Western Europe, 153-54 Regional Plan Association (RPA), 156, 169, 225n. 43, 225n. 49 Regulation school, 27-28, 187n. 61 Rehabilitation in Action to Improve Neighborhoods (RAIN), 117, 128, 218n.66 Reich, Robert B., 174n. 5, 178n. 1, 180n. 6 Reichl, Alexander!., 199n. 93 Reid, Laura, 204n. 6
rent regulations, 61-62, 64, 94, 114, 134, 144 rent strikes, 107, 114-15, 122 Republican Party, 51, 55, 56, 58, 134 residents: central- city interests of affluent, 23, 82; displacement of, 62; right to the city of lower- income, 145; separation from the state of, 18; suburban housing more affordable for middle -class, 65 Rhodes, Martin, 226n. 60 Rich, Jennifer, 225n. 52 RiisJacobA., 205n. 13 Rivera, Dennis, 197n. 67 Roberts, Benson E, 195n. 48 Robertson, Douglas, 177n. 18 Robertson, Roland, 183n. 26 Robinson, Tony, 213n. 11 Robinson, William I., 174n. 5, 178n. 1 Rogers, David, 213n. 16 Rohatyn, Felix, 40, 52, 191n. 20 Rolnick, Arthur J., 226n. 54 Rooney, Jim, 219n. 75 Roost, Frank, 213n. 10 Rosentraub, Mark S., 199n. 91 Rosier, Martha, 217n. 52 Ross, Fiona, 179n. 3, 226n. 61 Ross, Robert J. S., 180n. 5 Rothman, Jack, 150 Rubin, Herbert J., 213n. 17 Russia, 19, 26 Sabel, Charles, 180n. 5 Salamon, L. M., 214n. 17 Salmon, Scott, 185n. 45, 197n. 71 San Francisco, 58, 133, 217n. 61 Sassen, Saskia, x, 32, 53, 178n. 2, 180n. 7, 189n. 5, 213n. 10, 227n. 63 Savitch,H.V, 173n. 1 Sayer, Andrew, xiv, 28, 188n. 66 Sayre, Wallaces., 176n. 15 Scafidi, Benjamin P., 202n. 113 Scharff, Jagna Wojcicka, 203n. 2 Schattschneider, E. E., 184n. 38 Schill, Michael H., 202n. 113 Schor, Juliet B.,190n. 13
Index • 257 Schragge, Eric, 224n. 27 Schumpeterian workfare state, 27-28 Schwartz, Alex, 144, 195n. 55, 199n. 90, 22 In. 7 Schwartz, Harry, 69, 215n. 23 Schwartz, Joel, 185n. 49, 190n. 15, 205n. 16, 214n. 19 Scott, Allen ]., 185n.46 Scully, Vincent, 204n. 4 Seattle, xxv Section 8 housing assistance, 43, 58, 96, 199n. 90. See also public housing segregation. See racial segregation and racism; spatial patterns Seils, Eric, 226n. 60 self-help housing programs, 42, 43. See also Division of Alternative Management Programs; homesteaders; squatters September 11, 2001, xxi, 31, 35, 66, 144, 155, 163, 165-72 settlement houses, 107, 110 Sharpe, L.J., 191n. 16 Shaw, Randy, 217n. 61 Shefter, Martin, 173n. 1, 184n. 38, 189n. 6 Shlay, Anne B., 222n. 14 Siegel, Fred, 173n. 1 Silicon Valley, 152 Silver, Hilary, 18 In. 11 Simon, Patrick, 147, 223n. 19 Simon, William, 38 Singapore, 7 Sinnreich, Masha, 207n. 24 Sites, William, 188n. 66, 206n. 21, 219n. 77,220n.3 Sklair, Leslie, 174n. 1, 178n. 1 Sklar, Holly, 219n. 78 Skocpol, Theda, 10, 175n. 9, 182n. 20, 184n. 38 Smith, Adam, 12-13, 183n. 28 Smith, Anthony D., 181n. 11 Smith, Michael Peter, xv, 174n. 5, 179n. 3 Smith, Neil, 101, 103, 123, 177n. 17, 204n.6,205n. ll,208n.32
social cohesion, 24, 108, 148 social contract, 18, 38 social disorder, 19, 50, 91 social movements. See movements social regulation, 59-61, 91-92, 147-48 Social Security, 18, 166, 172 social workers, 107 SoHo, 76, 83 Soja, Edward W, 178n. 2 South Bronx, 42 South Street Seaport, 41 space of flows, 21, 101, 105 spatial patterns: cross-national differences related to government policies, 146-49, 153; in late- twentieth century New York, 48, 50, 55, 66, 76, 153, 155-56; in late-twentiethcentury U.S. cities, 23, 25, 70, 151-52; in postwar United States, 18, 22, 185n. 49. See also gentrification; Lower East Side: gentrification; neighborhood transition; racial segregation and racism; regional development Spencer, Joseph A., 214n. 19 sports franchises and stadiums, 58-60, 170 sprawl, 151-52 squatters, 89, 122-25, 126-27, 129-31, 149, 169,212nl.S«?fl/so homesteaders Stallings, Paul, 216n. 39 Stark, Martha E., 202n. 116 Starr, Roger, 39-40, 192n. 24, 194n. 41 state: as actor, xiii-xiv, 9-11, 183n. 33; agency in context of developmentalism, 6-8; agency in context of neoliberalism, 7-8, 16-17, 25; autonomy of, 10-1 1; bypassed by globalization, xii, 1, 4, 16; capacities of, 10, 11, 139, 182n. 24; capacities undermined by state itself, 17, 66; and cities (see cities); class basis of, 10; coercive role in early modern development, 13-14; coercive role in late-twentiethcentury development, 3, 9, 23-24, 37, 39, 56, 60, 62, 66, 77, 84, 92-93,
258 • Index 122-23, 125-26, 129-31, 172n. 7; conjuncture/disjuncture used to characterize its relations with economic actors, 9-11; constructive role in early modern development, 14; constructive role in late-twentiethcentury development, xiii, 6-7, 11, 19, 26-28, 66, 146-49, 182n. 24; corporatist or conservative, xiii, 4, 6, 159-60; decentralization or devolution of, 17, 20-23, 27-28, 42, 58, 106-7; defined in territorial, institutional, and ideological terms, 8-9; democratic accountability of, 19, 139, 149-50, 161; destructive role in early modern development, 12-15; destructive role in late-twentieth-century development, xiii, 2, 7, 11, 18-19, 23-24, 27-28; developmental, xiii, 1, 6-8, 15, 139, 178n. 1; dis-embedding role in early modern development, 12-15; disembedding role in late-twentiethcentury development, 2, 16, 18-19, 23-24, 37, 39, 56, 60, 62, 66, 98-99; as facilitator of globalization, xiii, 6-8, 16-18, 23-24; flexibility of, 17; fragmentation of, 2, 17, 20-23; as imagined community, 9; interdependence with society, xix, 7, 10, 16, 19, 182n. 24; Keynesian (seeKeynesianism); liberal, 159-60; local (see local policies and gentrification; local state); as manager of crisis, 182n. 24; national/ local relationship, 21-24; neoliberal, xiii, 15, 16, 149; officials as administrators, 10; porousness of, 2, 17-18; as power-container, 8; Schumpeterian workfare, 27-28; social-democratic, 4, 159-60; as structure, xiii, 9-11, 25; theories of, xiii, 8-11; as victim of globalization, xiii, 17, 19, 66; as welfare state (see welfare state). See also government policies; national /local politics; national or national /local urban regime; nation-state; New York (City): national/local politics state governments: facilitate suburban
expansion and fragmentation, 153; operate as interlocal competitors, 44, 55; pose obstacles to regionalism, 155. See also New York (State) statism, 26 Stegman, Michael A., 22 In. 6 Sternlieb, George, 192n. 29, 195n. 52, 206n. 20 Stiglitz, Joseph E.r 227n. 64 Stoecker, Randy, 213n. 17, 219n. 74 Stoker, Gerry, 176n. 16 Stone, Clarence N., 176n. 16, 190n. 11 strong globalism. See globalism Sudjic, Deyan, 152 Sugrue, Thomas J., 185n. 49 Sumka, Howard, 203n. 3 Summers, Anita A., 224n. 30 Suttles, Gerald D., 205n. 9, 213n. 10 Swanstrom, Todd, 42, 193n. 32, 214n. 17, 224n. 35 Sweezy, Paul, 177n. 22, 183n. 34 Tabb, William K., 181n. 11, 191n. 19 Taiwan, 7, 79 Tapia, Claude, 223n. 19 Tarrow, Sidney, 163 Taub, Richard, 205n. 9 tax-increment-financing (TIP) bonds, 170-71 Taylor, D. Garth, 205n. 9 Taylor, Peter J., 185n. 44 technological innovation, 4, 5, 21, 26, 63 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). See welfare tenant associations, 114-15, 122, 194n. 43 tenant rights, 43, 61, 114, 118 Ten-Year Housing Plan. See housing plans (New York): Ten-Year Housing Plan Theodore, Nik, 175n. 7 Thompson, Grahame, 174n. 5, 181n. 8 Thompson, J. Phillip, 20 In. 100 Thrift, Nigel, 185n. 46 Thurow, Lester C., 179n. 4, 180n. 6 Tickell, Adam, 186n. 54 Tilly, Charles, 184n. 34
Index • 259 Times Square, 31, 56, 59-60, 62, 167, 170
Title I (Housing Act of 1949), 36-37, 74 Tobier, Emanuel, 195n. 53 Tokyo, 66 Tompkins Square Park, 101, 102, 104, 122-25, 126 tourism and entertainment: as economic development, 58-59, 80, 92, 93-94, 170 Trachte, Kent C., 180n. 5 Tracy, Joseph, 202n. 114 trade, 3, 4, 7, 57, 163, 187n. 60 transition from feudalism to capitalism. See capitalism: early modern transnational advocacy networks, 162, 163
Trenton (New Jersey), 155 triad (East Asia, North America, Western Europe), 16 triage, 39-40, 45, 73, 75-81, 89 Trump, Donald, 87 Turetsky, Doug, 202n. 116 Turner, Joan, 205n. 16, 214n. 19 underclass, 109 unemployment/employment trends, 47, 53, 63-64, 77, 160 United Nations, 4 United States: antistatism in, 26; compared unfavorably to developmental states, 7; embraces globalization as convergence, 20; enlarges territorial influence, 9; government policies toward cities in, 22-24, 66-68 (see also cities; federal aid to U.S. cities; government policies; local policies and gentrification; national or national/ local urban regime); as hegemon, 27, 187n. 60; as major focus of state theory, 9; resisting widespread retrenchment, 160; in vicious downward spiral, xx, 19, 161; vicious downward spiral slowed, 19; wage structures in, 6, 19; as weak state, 10. See also neoliberalism; primitive globalization Upper East Side, 93
urban development, xvi-xvii, 21-24, 34, 45, 50, 53, 66-68, 137, 203n. 118 Urban Development Action Grants, 42 urban movements. See movements urban politics. See movements; national/ local politics; national or national/ local urban regime urban regime theory, xvi, 142, 190n. 11, 220n. 2. See also national/local politics; national or national/local urban regime urban renewal, xvii, 35-37, 43-44, 106, 185n. 49 Vakil, Anna, 219n. 74 van Kempen, Ronald, 25, 146, 222n. 17 van Kleunen, Andrew, 217n. 51 vertical case study, ix, xxi, 141 Vidal, Avis C., 199n. 90, 214n. 17 Visser, Jelle, 226n. 60 von Hassell, Malve, 116 Wacquant, Loi'c, 223n. 25 Wade, Robert, 5 wages, 18, 32, 57, 63, 65, 181n. 10 Waldinger, Roger, 208n. 29 Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 113 Wallace, Mike, 228n. 14 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 174n. 5 Wall Street: crisis of October 1987, 49, 88; growth in late 1990s, 59, 63, 66; leading role in Clinton economic strategy, 57, 66; New York economy's dependence on, 32, 63. See also financial markets Walton, John, 105, 184n. 39, 188n. 68 War on Poverty, 35 Washington, D.C., 38, 58, 123, 165 Washington, Harold, 43, 50 Wasserman, Suzanne, 205n. 14, 214n. 19 Weber, Rachel, 228n. 13 Weberian theory, 9-10, 15, 182n. 24 Weir, Margaret, 182n. 19, 225n. 53 Weiss, Linda, xiii, 6, 7, 178n. 1 welfare: abolition of entitlement status, 18, 22, 58; as political issue in 1993 mayoral campaign, 55; reductions in
260 • Index Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) eligibility, 43; Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), 58, 61; Work Experience Program (WEP), 60-61, 64 welfare state: compared crossnationally, xxiv, 24, 138, 159-60; in Continental Europe, xiii; expansion in New Deal and postwar United States, 18, 106, 182n. 24; Keynesian, 18, 27 (see also Keynesianism); in the Netherlands, 148-49; retrenchment in late twentieth-century United States, 19, 160-61. See also government policies; neoliberal; state West Side (Manhattan), 59-60, 170-71 White Plains (New York), 153 Wilson, David, 206n. 20 Wittberg, Patricia, 204n. 8 Wolfe, Alan, 2 19n. 77 Wood, Robert, 22 Wood, Stewart, 226n. 60, 226n. 61 Woolcock, Stephen, 181n. 12 workfare. See Schumpeterian workfare
state; welfare: Work Experience Program World Bank, 163 world cities. See global cities WorldCom, 171 world-systems theory, 179n. 5 World Trade Center, 155, 165, 167-68, 170 World Trade Organization, 4 Wyly, ElvinK., 212n. 81 Yaro, Robert D., 225n. 43 Yee, Cameron Y, 225n. 52 Young Lords, 77 Zevin, Robert, 180n. 5 Zhou, Min, 90, 208n. 29 Zimbalist, Andrew, 199n.91 Zimring, Franklin E., 200n. 95 zoning, 45. See also inclusionary zoning; local policies and gentrification Zorbaugh, Harvey W, 204n. 9 Zukin, Sharon, 173n. 1, 204n. 7
William Sites is associate professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.