New York City: An Apple Of Contradiction
By Joseph Grosso
27 February, 2009
Countercurrents.org
From its very inception New York has always been a city of contradiction. In its early Dutch days, when it was named New Amsterdam it served as something of a beacon of tolerance when compared to surrounding New England, yet its Dutch history featured two bloody conflicts and fairly consistent shady dealings with the indigenous population. In the mid-18th century New York was one of the first cities to grant voting rights to African Americans who met property owning qualifications when just a few years before rumors of a widespread slave uprising, slaves made up about 20% of the city’s population, sparked a witch hunt and series of executions that compare with the more famous episodes in Salem. New York was the first capital of the independent U.S. despite the fact that it served as a loyalist stronghold during the War of Independence (New York was the city occupied longest by the British. New Yorkers celebrated ‘Evacuation Day’ for many years afterward) Far from being a liberal center of abolitionism, the civil war era featured a mostly slavery accommodating bourgeoisie at the start of the war and later the draft riots, the largest urban insurrection in American history.
It’s not hard to spot such ironies in the present day. New York is the city most associated with immigration and American dream mythology, yet it has a poverty rate about double the national average as well as a homeownership rate, long recognized as a pillar of the American dream, of only 33%, the lowest rate of all major American cities. It’s also as much as any city seen as a center of American liberalism even as it is the world’s financial and corporate center and hasn’t elected a Democrat mayor since 1988. In fact for the past decade New York has been held up as a vindication of conservative economics and law and order tactics, especially by its own largely conservative local media. The same local media has unanimously cheered the successful effort of current mayor Michael Bloomberg to get term limits, previously approved by two public referendums, rescinded to allow himself a third term on the pretext of an emergency financial situation. With his billionaire reserves available for campaign spending Bloomberg is poised for a third term as mayor of a city that seems gripped with bored resignation of its political process.
One way to see New York’s latest contradictions is through a nation wide prism that was summed up nicely by Alan Ehrenhalt in The New Republic in August 2008 in an essay titled Trading Places. Opening the essay with what he terms the ‘demographic inversion’ changing Chicago, Ehrenhalt writes:
In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes
that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact
more complicated and more profound than the process t hat term
suggests…Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional
European city…the poor and newcomers are living on the outskirts.
The people who live near the center—some of them black or
Hispanic but most of them white—are those who can afford to do so.
By this analysis large American cities, in the final stages of deindustrialization, featuring lower crime rates after the burning out of the crack epidemic and associated street violence of the late 1980s, and a new generation of young people weaned on ‘Friends’ and ‘Sex in the City’ episodes, have entered a new phase. Long gone are the gritty, blue collar urban centers, replaced by a chain store urban suburbia populated by young professionals. Even a quick tour through New York reveals the same trend. If the center of the city is considered Central Park or the financial center around Wall St., not only have these areas exploded with gentrification (the Wall St. area itself may soon be considered a residential area) but the historically working class neighborhoods that surround the center such as the Lower East Side (where Joes Riis wrote How the Other Half Lives in 1890), Harlem, Washington Heights, Williamsburg, Red Hook (the current site for MTV’s nonsensical ‘Real World’ series), and Long Island City have become ‘hip’ and ‘trendy’, another way of saying ‘whiter’, more expensive, less diverse, and certainly less working class. Meanwhile most of the city’s diversity lives in crowded neighborhoods further from the city’s center in Central Queens, the South Bronx, and East Brooklyn- though none of these areas have completely escaped the city’s overall gentrification. New York is now largely a city contrasted between yuppie artists and professionals and immigrants working somewhere in the service industry. Overcrowding and lack of affordable housing are taking a toll. According to the latest Housing and Vacancy survey nearly 30% of the city’s residents use more than half their income for rent.
With the drop in Wall Street revenue that accompanied the financial collapse the city faces severe budget cuts from both the state and local levels. As surveys reveal that to raising taxes on the richest residents is popular policy, predicatively the local media has been pounding the still strong public sector unions to forgo their already negotiated raises (between 3-4%) and agree to further pension reforms. To get an idea how much pensions have already been reformed since the 1970s consider that city workers hired back then receive 80% of their salaries upon retirement, a group known as Tier 1. Current workers hired are down to Tier 4 which only provides a pension less than 2% for every year worked- in other words 20 years of work will leave an employee with less than 40% of their salaries for a pension. Calls are now coming on a daily basis for a Tier 5. Hospitals, senior centers, schools, libraries, and the police force are all on the chopping block, reminisce nt of the formula that brought neoliberalism to the city in the first place.
On the surface, especially with a third Bloomberg term, it appears New York is cursed to continue the failed policies that have dominated the city for more than three decades. However in what may prove to be a final irony, there is a hopeful chance that New York’s latest Gilded Age may be ending, the victim of its own exorbitant gluttony. While avoiding the worst of the foreclosure crisis that has devastated Florida, Arizona, and California, New York is the epicenter for the financial and banking crisis (of course the city hasn’t been completely spared by the foreclosure epidemic, several areas in Eastern Queens and Central Brooklyn, largely black neighborhoods, have been hard hit). It’s unlikely that New York elites, many of whom are already acknowledging that the free wheeling days of Wall Street are over, will be able to resist the change in Zeitgeist that appears to be taking place nationally with polls showing wide support for Obama’s stimulus bill and when no less than Alan Greenspan has suggested the nationalization of major banks (although it’s fair to20question the spirit of intentions in his case). So far the city’s unions are holding strong against pension reform and raise givebacks and with card check hopefully on the way through Congress in the next year or two unions everywhere should be due for an expansion. Certainly political ideologies die hard and neoliberalism will linger and in the short term perhaps change will be barely negligible. Still it has become clear that the era of financial deregulation that made its way from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush has devoured itself. What better place for reform to begin than the city where it neoliberalism first began?
