City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics

Conclusion

Conclusion Neoliberal globalization has had profound effects on local spaces around the world. Rural and urban areas have been transformed by the easy flows of both capital and commodities, concentrating wealth in the hands of those who have the most control over the direction of these flows. But for those with the least control, it has meant a decline in their standards of living. Global inequality is therefore on the rise, with billions living on the margins of subsistence. While middle classes have emerged in some developing areas, they still are relatively small and vulnerable to broad economic and political forces largely beyond their control. Overall, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, with the middle class caught in an increasingly uncertain middle ground. In the face of this dynamic, governments have often scaled back services to the most vulnerable in the belief that this will improve their competitiveness. But this structural adjustment has only accelerated the problems of inequality and social disruption by shifting resources from the poor and middle classes to the rich. The privatization of water and electricity, cutbacks in welfare social services, and higher fees for education and health care all have had disproportionately negative effects on the poorest in a society. While this process has created a growing underclass of people living on the margins of economic self-sufficiency, the rest of the society has been forced to invest more resources in security. This has been necessary to protect themselves from conventional crime and also from the disorderly signs of inequality in the form of beggars, homeless encampments and squatters, and the physical disorder of trash and graffiti. To deal with these problems, police forces have been enhanced, private security has been expanded, and a growing punitiveness toward the disenfranchised has emerged. We generally associate this dynamic with third-world nations whose 183 poverty is extreme and widespread and whose repressive apparatuses are in plain view. As Mike Davis pointed out, huge squatter camps bulldozed in the middle of the night have come to symbolize the inequality and repression characteristic of the effects of neoliberal globalization in much of the developing world.1 On a smaller scale, we can see these same forces at work in many parts of the developed world as well. The emergence of widespread homelessness in the United States and much of Europe, the growth of mass incarceration as a strategy of managing the unemployed and backlash movements targeting poor immigrants all are examples. Neoliberal globalization has also been a powerful engine of inequality and social disruption in New York City. With the decline of manufacturing and the falling pay of government-sector workers, the middle class has been put under tremendous strain. While the wealthiest New Yorkers sit at the center of a vast system manipulating the world’s wealth, millions of New Yorkers live in poverty, and hundreds of thousands do not have adequate shelter, nutrition, and health care. This globalized inequality undermined the stability of New York City’s social relations in the 1980s and 1990s, and the twin attacks of economic dislocation and government abandonment destroyed the fragile economic, social, and emotional stability of millions. The growth of homelessness, unemployment, deinstutionalization, and hopelessness gave rise to an army of the dispossessed wandering the city in search of a next meal, a next fix, a place of quiet or community. Subway stations and parks became homeless shelters, and homeless shelters became permanent fixtures of the city’s landscape. This widespread and chronic homelessness, crime, and disorder created the sense of a city out of control. People were confronted with a concrete decline in their ability to use the city’s public spaces, including, parks, sidewalks, and subways. Squeegee men, panhandlers, and homeless encampments created an obstacle course of fear and filth that had to be negotiated every day. Residents and business owners throughout the city felt that daily life and commerce in the city were becoming unmanageable. Their faith in government had been eroded during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s when government services were scaled back. Now many believed that the city government was not only eviscerated but unresponsive. Calls for imme184 | Conclusion diate assistance were met with pleas for tolerance while “long-term solutions ” were enacted by bureaucratic experts. Community concerns and offers of advice were ignored. The police, in particular, argued that they were unable to and...