The Streets Were Paved with Gold (39 page)

New York City is more unusual than its officials care to concede, and less unusual than the rest of the country enjoys believing. Nevertheless, because of the political shift of power away from older cities to the suburbs and the Sunbelt, because of the burgeoning taxpayer revolt against soaring taxes and spreading government bureaucracy, New York and other cities will likely be forced to become more self-reliant. At a time when the people of California and other states are demanding reduced state and local taxes, it defies common sense to believe they would support steeper federal taxes to help New York clean its streets or care for its poor. As long as
New York remains unusual, it will enjoy neither a substantive claim to common aid nor the political muscle to win special aid. As long as that is true, much of America will undoubtedly continue to act as “shocked” as Mrs. Johnson was when she surprised the good Doctor.

O
N THE SURFACE
, New York is suffering a fiscal crisis. Scratch the surface and you find a deeper economic crisis. Scratch further and you discover that the fiscal and economic crises symbolize a profound political crisis. What really failed in New York was democracy.
^*
By the mid-seventies, New York could no longer say what Wallace S. Sayre and Herbert Kaufman said in the final sentence of their 1959 classic,
Governing New York City:
“the City of New York can confidently ask: What other large American city is as democratically and as well governed?”

In New York, the natives proved incapable of self-government, and in 1975 the city was made a ward of the state. To advertise to investors that Mayor Beame now shared power, in June 1975 the state created the business-dominated Municipal Assistance Corporation to monitor Beame’s budget and hold hostage certain revenues to repay investors. When that scheme failed to restore investor confidence, three months later the state imposed the Emergency Financial Control Board to hold Abe Beame himself hostage. The
Board, composed of three nonelected businessmen (plus the governor, state comptroller, mayor and city comptroller), was granted sweeping “emergency” police powers. “The people we’ve been appealing to throughout this crisis,” Governor Carey’s Chief of Staff, David Burke, said at the time, “are not so much the voters as the investors.” When the Control Board also failed to restore investor confidence, the federal government was ceded a voice in the city’s governance. The unelected MAC representatives forced the transit fare to be raised 40 percent. The unelected business representatives on the Control Board vetoed city-negotiated contracts. Officials in Washington demanded the abolition of free tuition. Those in Albany compelled the Mayor to replace his closest aide, Deputy Mayor James Cavanagh, and others. Since 1975, the banks and the unions, whose investment in city paper is crucial, were granted a virtual veto power over elected city officials, reviewing their budgets and management. Ironically, democracy was abrogated in order to avoid the failure of democratic government—bankruptcy—where a nonelected judge tells elected officials what to do.

New York’s democracy collapsed because New York was, paradoxically, the victim of too much—and too little—democracy: a plethora of special-interest groups combined with short-sighted politicians and a self-centered electorate. The dilemma was anticipated by the Founding Fathers. In Federalist Paper No. 10, Publius—in this essay, James Madison—urged the Constitution’s ratification because, he said, the elaborate system of checks and balances would prevent any “faction” or special interest from dominating the common public interest. But Madison did not want to banish “factions.” Quite the contrary. He understood that they were as necessary to the functioning of a democracy as air to breathing. “The inference to which we are brought,” he wrote, “is that the
causes
of faction cannot be removed and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its
effects.
” The
effects
would be controlled by dividing power between the state and federal governments, between the executive, legislative and judicial branches, between a popularly elected House of Representatives and a more elitist Senate, between the right to vote and the Bill of Rights. America was to be both a democracy and a republic. And for a democratic republic to work, said Publius, elected officials need search for the broader public interest and not “sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”

In New York, the “factions” went unchecked. City Hall was
bombarded by what Douglas Yates of Yale has aptly called “street-fighting pluralism.” Groups vied to get theirs. The party organization demanded patronage. The banks angled to sell their services for interest-free deposits, underwriting fees and extortionate interest rates. The politically connected wanted their day-care center leases; the construction unions, their public works; the builders, their permits. The municipal unions, their lavish benefits. David Rockefeller, his World Trade Center. Tenants, their rent control and subsidized middle-income housing. Blacks, their own community control; Hispanics, their bilingual education. Government did not just protect; it rewarded. Interests inevitably clashed. The federal poverty program pushed for more community participation and local politicians for more control. Cops were pitted against community forces in opposition to a Civilian Review Board. As were teachers in opposition to local school boards. Often, there was “right” on both sides. Community school boards said they wanted the freedom to choose who would educate their children, and teachers said they wanted the protection of seniority and due process. The city administration wanted to further the cause of integration in middle-class Forest Hills, and local residents wanted to protect their community from high-rise, low-income public housing. Northside, Brooklyn, demanded the retention of a firehouse, while City Hall needed to cut the budget. Co-op City residents said they couldn’t afford escalating rents, and the state said it couldn’t afford the mortgage payments without them. Environmentalists insisted on sulfur-free coal, which Con Edison insisted would lead to higher consumer electricity bills.

There blossomed a multiplicity of organizations dedicated to a specific goal, a specific group, a specific neighborhood. Democratic reform clubs sprang up throughout the city, weakening the ability of the dominant Democratic party to discipline disparate voices. City Hall’s power to command was weakened by mushrooming state and federal aid—up from 21 percent of the city’s budget in 1961 to 42 percent in 1977, with the federal share jumping from 4.5 to 20.3 percent. Public authorities—the Port Authority, Triboro Bridge and Tunnel Authority, Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Independent Board of Education, and Health and Hospitals Corporation—assumed functions formerly controlled by City Hall. Municipal unions became partners in the city’s governance. Mayors were left with less control of their budgets and more demands for a piece of it. More poor people required more services.
Black power demands were followed by community and then ethnic group demands from poor Hispanics, Jews, and Italo-Americans. There surfaced community action centers, police precinct councils, neighborhood health centers, ethnic and racial groups, community planning boards, community task forces, social clubs, block associations.

While these separate voices grew, simultaneously the family, the church, the party, the government were losing their venerated status. The oversized city became a vast sea of hostile elements. The cop on the beat was now often a stranger, no longer living in the neighborhood. The white teacher and the black or Hispanic child couldn’t communicate. High-rises plowed through once-stable neighborhoods. Residents in the four boroughs felt Manhattan was favored by City Hall. Blacks shrieked racism; Jews, anti-Semitism. Ugly racial differences replaced milder class conflicts. Parents admonished their kids not to go out at night, not to talk to strangers.

The city atomized, and became more depersonalized. The large supermarket replaced the corner grocer and butcher. Government competed with the family as provider. But it wasn’t as if you could talk to the government. No more the party leader with the welcoming turkey or bag of coal for the new family on the block. There were too many officials, too many districts, too many names to remember. Government was a big, impersonal bureaucracy. Lots of forms and surly clerks. Strangers. It wasn’t as if government’s money was your money. You got what you could. That’s what everybody was doing. Weren’t those people on welfare doing it? Those rich people in rent-controlled housing? Those landlords with the special tax breaks? Those municipal workers and Mitchell-Lama residents and political big shots?

Size contributed to remoteness, as did television. Television brought the world into our living rooms, made the foreign familiar. Too familiar. Television was the impersonal city of the air. It helped desensitize us. Murder means less after you’ve watched a President’s head get blown off. Vietnam became a nightly war movie. Bull Connors’ vicious dogs snapping at civil rights workers were followed by regular clubbings, hosings, church bombings, shotgun murders. After a while, Vietnam and civil rights became a bore. Like last year’s
I Love Lucy
show. Television was supposed to entertain. It allowed people who already feared unsafe streets to retreat to their living rooms. They did not to have to go out and
meet people. They no longer sat on stoops and, in effect, policed the streets.

Television also changed politics. It permitted candidates and elected officials to speak directly to the people, to go over the heads of party and other intermediaries. But since television was expensive, candidates grew beholden not to local party bosses but to fatcat contributors, media magicians and unions with few community ties. These new bosses were rarely neighborhood-oriented. They demanded not fixed traffic lights but zoning changes, fees, leases or public works which often transformed neighborhoods. Union leaders insisted on more spending for less work. Television allowed citizens to communicate directly. Instead of visiting or writing party or local officials, citizens learned a much more effective means of being heard. They learned how to make “news.” Because the media, particularly television, often defined news as something that was new or entertaining, conflict was at a premium. Citizens came to understand that few paid attention to a civilized press conference or letter. The media paid attention when you “sat in” or dumped your garbage in front of City Hall, joined in a “stall-in” on the Grand Central Parkway, made loud threats. Citizens became actors, vying to make it on the 6:00 news. Actors became broadcasters, mindlessly vying to sharpen the conflict. Voters became fickle critics, determining the ratings.

And elected officials became trapped. Their first principle—political survival—often clashed with their good judgment. Responsiveness to constituents came to be viewed as more important than fiscal responsibility. City Hall was bombarded by demands from constituent groups, each crowding the time and attention of city officials. Mayors and their administration were constantly called upon to extinguish fires, leaving them little time to think, to plan, to exercise calm judgment. Unavoidably, policy makers’ present political needs clashed with the city’s long-term needs. Former city Housing Administrator Roger Starr, now a
Times
editorial writer, described one such clash: “I must plead guilty to having a sense of panic and to doing what I think all of us do in city government when we feel the ground slipping away beneath us—we do things we cannot afford, and we do them more desperately than ever.” So, Starr lamented, an earlier city and state administration approved construction of a vast middle-income housing complex, Co-op City in the Bronx, siphoning middle-income residents from the Bronx’s
still viable Grand Concourse. And Co-op City was built without due consideration for the need of a transportation system to serve the 65,000 people who would live there. The same short-term considerations were followed in sculpting city budgets. Rather than anger groups by slicing the budget or tempering its growth, City Hall tricked its budget or borrowed. Because it could freely do so, a sense of responsibility broke down. Normal budget and borrowing constraints did not apply. Today’s problems were ameliorated, interest groups appeased, by mortgaging the future. Besides, elected officials could rationalize, wasn’t it their responsibility to satisfy citizens? To maintain order? To do good things, didn’t they have to get reelected?

New York’s leaders failed Publius’ test. They worried more about the next election than the next generation. Too often, they ignored the common good, the broader public interest. But citizens also failed Publius’ test. They were selfish, demanding more for
ME.
Unlike the civil rights movement, which helped legitimize direct citizen action, the goal, too frequently, was not a more just society but a bigger piece of the pie. The larger community—the future, the “dream”—was often overlooked. A neighborhood, a great city, a nation, is not just a collection of competing special interests, all clashing and vying for favor. If there is no sense of community, no shared goals or ties that bind people together, then there is no neighborhood, no city, no nation. As in Salvador Dali’s poignant painting “Premonition of Civil War,” a body is pulled apart.

The delicate local system of checks and balances also broke apart. Specific demands for more spending by special-interest groups were not countered and checked by a constituency demanding fiscal restraint. As the city commenced to spend more taxpayer dollars on nonbasic services—municipal hospitals, welfare supplements, housing subsidies—demands for more of these services grew. A more dependent population, naturally, came to view nonbasic services as essential. The city’s budget began to tilt away from such basic services as police, fire, sanitation and public school education. Thus middle- and upper-income residents found the city less attractive. The very constituents who might have demanded fiscal restraint were fleeing to the suburbs. The city had too few homeowners—less than 25 percent—who meet mortgage payments and pay property taxes, and who might have made a connection between city spending and their taxes. The city had too many commuters, people who
worked but did not have roots here. Unlike many cities—Rochester, Pittsburgh, Atlanta—New York did not have a homogeneous business community to effectively protest new business taxes or city management policies. Small businessmen quietly went out of business. Larger firms protested with their feet. The multinational and headquarter companies had other reasons to be here. Besides, they dealt with presidents, not mayors and city council members. “Service demanders,” to quote Sayre and Kaufman, replaced “money providers.”