CITY OF FORTUNE

Political science professor Williams (City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York, 2013) focuses this new exploration of New York City’s modern development on three key areas that “embody the tensions…at the heart of political life in a democratic capitalist city”: housing, schools, and policing. Williams’ analysis of these issues inarguably bears out his points that the “unequal geography of opportunity aligned closely with the geography of race” and that the city’s issues stemmed from “the existence of concentrated, racialized deprivation.” The book begins with New York’s “interlocking crises of the 1970s.” Housing abandonment, untenable rent increases, and a dearth of new construction all contributed to the “destruction of the housing stock.” The issue of rent regulation especially “engendered remarkable political passion” from supporters and detractors alike. Citizens had dismal confidence in the NYPD’s ability to address street crime, and many public schools lacked the resources to educate students adequately, with a disparity in resources overwhelmingly falling along racial lines. The city’s recovery started near the end of the decade as it transformed into a “global city” marked by increased financialization, but as the author rightly shows, the benefits of this recovery overwhelmingly went to the middle and upper classes. The application of the “Broken Windows” theory under Mayor Rudy Giuliani transformed policing; New Yorkers of color were harassed and humiliated by aggressive stop-and-frisk policies in large numbers. The advent of charter schools in the city, the first of which opened in the fall of 1999 and which expanded under the mayoralty of Mike Bloomberg, added a new fraught dimension to the debate of school choice and inequality. Williams concludes with the early 2020s; even as New York remains an unparalleled city, its continued struggles with affordability, housing, and quality of life exemplify the book’s relevance.