The Privatized City from Below: Benjamin Holtzman’s The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism
Reviewed by Bench Ansfield
“Ford to City: Drop Dead” weighs in as one of the most legendary headlines in US history, and its notoriety likely owes to the apparent disjuncture between the New York City of the 1970s fiscal crisis and the supertall glass-scape of today.[1] These two urban archetypes, apparently worlds apart, are intimately linked, and few books have done more to shape how we conceptualize the dawning of a new metropolis than The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, by the late geographer Neil Smith. That landmark study did not begin with the usual signs of gentrification: a coffeeshop or a condo, a realtor or a rezoning. Opening instead with the 1988 police riot at Tompkins Square Park, Smith’s establishing shot was more John Ford than Nora Ephron, with “cavalry charges down East Village streets” that depicted in unblinking detail the real violence of a process often understood in bloodless terms.[2] The plunder on Avenue B was a mass eviction of over fifty houseless occupiers of the park, refugees of both the neighborhood’s recent gentrification and the protracted dismantling of New York City’s uniquely expansive social welfare state. For Smith, Tompkins Square Park was a turning point in the city’s battle over public space, housing affordability, and police violence, a struggle that has been raging ever since.
The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism
By Benjamin Holtzman
Oxford University Press, 2021
352 pages
Throughout the 1980s, that battle was increasingly embodied by the growing population of the city’s houseless, who burst onto the stage of urban politics in a way not seen since the Great Depression. The reasons for that seemingly abrupt development were complex and long in the making, and they are traced with precision and care by Benjamin Holtzman’s history of the intertwined crises of liberalism and the metropolis, The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism (Oxford 2021). Whereas Smith opens The New Urban Frontier with the policing of houselessness at Tompkins Square Park, Holtzman’s book concludes with it, building over five chapters before coming to a crescendo with the 1980s spike in houselessness. The action in that final chapter sits like an all-too-avoidable train wreck whose multi-causal derailing demands careful study. We are fortunate to have Holtzman holding the magnifying glass.
The Long Crisis builds upon prior studies by Kim Phillips-Fein, Miriam Greenberg, Jonathan Soffer, Robert Fitch, and Kim Moody, among others, that depict the New York City fiscal crisis of the 1970s as the crucible in which a new political, economic, and spatial order was mercilessly forged. Among these, Kim Phillips-Fein’s Fear City offers the most sweeping and synoptic treatment, and Holtzman, a student of Phillips-Fein, has crafted a text that manages to complement and reframe — rather than dodge or substantiate — this previous scholarship.
Holtzman’s key intervention is a methodological one. Whereas most of the existing literature narrates the city’s crisis years from the top-down, focusing especially on the elite architects of austerity within the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC) and the Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB), The Long Crisis is refreshingly free of acronymic cabals. It’s not that Holtzman aims to discredit the prevailing emphasis on the likes of MAC and the EFCB; he simply presents them as a given, refusing to rehash their well-chronicled misdeeds. Instead, he sets the spotlight on everyday New Yorkers as they were forced to navigate, interpellate, and enact the hollowing-out of the state between the mayoralties of John Lindsay in the 1960s through Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s. The premise of the book is this: as the city careened toward bankruptcy — propelled by white and capital flight, landlord abandonment, waning state and federal support, and an ascendant and racialized anti-welfare politics — it fell upon ordinary New Yorkers to decide how to respond to state retrenchment and neglect.
This shift in focus enables Holtzman to advance a startling thesis: marketization, the process through which functions previously executed by the state came to be performed by the private sector, was not unilaterally foisted on the city by corporate elites and free market idealogues. It was instead enacted haphazardly, and often under duress, by New Yorkers of all stripes who were coping with the shortfalls of the state. “The neoliberal turn,” he writes, “rather than simply being imposed by a narrow set of elites, took form through a process of popular marketization that involved a wide range of urbanites who transformed the political economy from the ground up.”[3] When the city slashed its parks department personnel by half between 1968 and 1978, for example, parkgoers and advocates developed market-oriented mechanisms for park funding and management more in an effort to compensate for the state’s dereliction than a crusade to replace it.
Writing against a body of literature that frames the rising tide of neoliberalism-via-marketization as a repudiation of the New Deal order, Holtzman argues that in New York, residents turned to the market in order to maintain the promises of the welfare state. At midcentury, after all, New York City was unmatched in its public infrastructure and leftist institutions, from housing to hospitals, transit to education. When these commitments began to fray in the late 1960s under the weight of public debt, economic crisis, racial revanchism, and reduced federal and state disbursements, New Yorkers turned to the market “principally not to reject liberalism but rather to attempt to maintain the conditions that liberal governance had promised.”[4]
Seeking to hang onto the city they knew, everyday New Yorkers spearheaded a host of neighborhood initiatives, stop-gap measures, and other experiments in urban governance. Only after these efforts were well-established, contends Holtzman, did their advocates begin to see the private market as a suitable, even preferable, alternative to the state. “For many New Yorkers experiments came first, ideology second.”[5] This is where The Long Crisis soars — in its granular mapping of the experimental, ad hoc, and contingent initiatives cooked up by an abandoned populace. Holtzman’s cartography of austerity stretches across six case studies, each of which concerns the city’s “livable environments,” broadly construed: the abandonment of housing for the city’s poor and working class, the shift in middle-class housing from rentals to coops and condos, the park system, the policing of public space, real estate-led development, and public houselessness.[6]
Nowhere is this approach more effective than in the study of housing. “What do you do,” asked the Renigades, a sweat equity group that formed in East Harlem in the early 1970s, “when the landlord… has abandoned your building and cannot be located to make repairs? What do you do when the City, which has the moral responsibility to assist tenants when landlords walk out, claims it cannot help??”[7] Their answer — “We can rebuild our community ourselves!!!” — was undeniably fierce, but it was also forgiving.[8] During the 1970s, homesteading organizations like the Renigades emerged in force as a vehicle for Black and Latinx tenants to take over ownership and management of buildings that had been abandoned by their landlords. The scale of landlord abandonment was almost inconceivable: more rental units were abandoned between 1966 and 1968 alone than through state-sponsored slum clearance in the previous two decades. Homesteading arose in this context as a direct challenge to landlord malfeasance, even as it performed an indirect absolution of state responsibility. As Holtzman explains, “In a way homesteaders and advocates encouraged but did not fully intend, homesteading became heralded for demonstrating the importance of private-citizen and sector-led paths toward urban rejuvenation.” Outside of the modest funding they eventually received, homesteaders refrained from making any full-throated demands upon the state for the provision of low-income housing. While its celebration of bootstraps ideals and self-determination made homesteading the darling of lawmakers on the left and right, its disengagement from the state left it vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the market.
By the end of the 1970s, homesteading gave way to initiatives designed to revive the housing market on terms set by the real estate industry, rather than tenants. The newly elected Mayor Ed Koch was beholden to the industry — real estate bankrolled his campaigns — and when he saw the potential for incipient gentrification to help solve the abandoned building problem, he turned away from community groups’ efforts to revitalize the city’s affordable housing stock. Through tax incentives, deregulation, and the creation of new programs, Koch built upon his predecessors John Lindsay and Abraham Beame in expanding housing policies that worked to increase property values and ultimately dampened tenants’ political power. These included policies that incentivized the conversion of commercial properties into housing (with the J-51 program) and rental buildings into cooperatives (with the expiration of regulations like the Dearie-Goodman law that required tenant approval for such conversions). Together these policies facilitated “a transformation in which real estate emerged from crisis and regained its place as the leading edge of the economy.”[9]
The triumph of real estate is felt across every chapter, including ones on parks and private street patrols, and it is worth thinking more about the primacy of real estate in the broader arc of marketization. What becomes clear from Holtzman’s account is that the turn to the market was something more specific than a privatization spree. It was a real estate coup carried out from above and below. Holtzman is careful not to assign too much agency to the industry itself, emphasizing that initiatives like coops owed their success largely to the support of tenants, especially those in the middle-class, whose material interests increasingly correlated with privatization. The enlistment of middle-class New Yorkers in the project of marketization was crucial to what was effectively a “counter-revolution of property,” and like W.E.B. Du Bois’s term for the forces arrayed against Reconstruction, this one had race as its structuring logic. While Holtzman attends to the ways racism figured into these developments — as in the centrality of anti-Black racism to the growing alarm over houselessness in the 1980s — there is much more work to be done on how race was also produced by them. Sticking with the example of the Renigades, one wonders how the discourses of Black homeownership parsed in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit were reified or reworked within the sweat equity movement. And even a cursory glimpse at the visual culture of the group, as in the photo above, raises questions about the native mascot and the imagined connections between indigeneity and homesteading.
As much as Holtzman’s study is defined by the overwhelming drive toward marketization, The Long Crisis is punctuated with stories of another possible city emerging from the wreckage of these years. Whether in the form of the People’s Development Corporation, a sweat equity outfit in the Bronx, or the Coalition for the Homeless’ advocacy for long-term housing over shelters, within these pages another New York City comes into view. The foreclosure of these possibilities by the steady turn toward the market is as tragic as it is instructive. The paradox of neighborhood-based politics in the age of austerity is that popular resistance to state retrenchment eventually became its alibi. By parsing these complexities, The Long Crisis, which refuses to put bounds on the temporal frame of “crisis,” offers a guidebook and a cautionary tale for those organizing today.
Bench Ansfield is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale University, as well as a Mellon/ACLS and Jefferson Scholars National Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year. Their dissertation, “Born in Flames: Arson, Racial Capitalism, and the Reinsuring of the Bronx in the Late Twentieth Century,” examines the wave of arson-for-profit that coursed through the Bronx and scores of other U.S. cities in the 1970s. They worked as a researcher on the documentary Decade of Fire (2019), and their work has appeared in the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, and Antipode. They wish to thank Salonee Bhaman and Nataliya Braginsky for their editorial feedback.
[1] “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” New York Daily News, October 30, 1975.
[2] Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier (New York: Routledge, 1996), 3.
[3] The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism, 4.
[4] Ibid. 236.
[5] Ibid., 3.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., 25.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 94.