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

2. Defining the Quality-of-Life Paradigm

Defining the Quality-of-Life Paradigm In 1993 Rudolph Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City on a platform of improving the city’s quality of life. Citing a study by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, he claimed that the solution to the city’s disorder problem was to get tough on the minor incivilities dominating everyday life in the city.1 His targets included squeegee men, homeless encampments, and aggressive panhandlers. By 1998, quality of life had become the dominant theme of the Giuliani administration, and it was used to frame almost every important political issue from education reform to sanitation and, in the process, redefined the notion of livability in the city: Quality of life is a process, not a destination. It’s a way of living, not a goal. . . . Fundamentally, it means believing once again in our ability constantly to improve the City. . . . Quality of life is about focusing on the things that make a difference in the everyday life of all New Yorkers in order to restore this spirit of optimism. . . . If people don’t see improvements in their individual lives, if they have to put up with incivility and disrespect for their rights every day, they will remain basically pessimistic about the future of the City, even if overall crime is dramatically down. But if a sense of tangible improvement reaches millions of lives, and millions of people understand that the City cares about their annoyances and is working hard to protect their rights, then more and more people begin to feel the true optimism of the City, and the City is moving in the right direction. We begin to feel that together, we all have a stake in the City. This is what the idea of a civil society is all about.2 This broad use of the term quality of life, however, leaves the exact nature of the term and its usage unclear. Only a careful review of the 2 29 ideas underpinning its use and the practices associated with it will make its true nature apparent. Quality of life is, in essence, a new paradigm of urban social control . A paradigm should be understood as a set of practices and conceptualizations , in this case defining social policy as the control of social disorder in public urban spaces. This paradigm is a coherent way of thinking about a wide array of social problems, as it indicates both a social theory of the roots of social problems and the form that solutions to the problem should take. That is, it points to a set of concrete social practices to be carried out in specific places under specific conditions . “Quality of life” represents a desire by urban residents to be free from the dirt, disorder, and incivilities that were widespread in the 1980s and 1990s. At its best, it holds out this possibility for all urban residents. In practice, however, quality of life created a stark division between residents’ reasonable desires to be free of fear and harassment and the belief that the way to achieve this is by systematically removing anyone perceived to be a potential source of these problems. The primary victims of this process have been homeless people and other marginalized people living in public spaces. The Development of the Quality-of-Life Paradigm The social policies associated with traditional urban liberalism are quite different from the quality-of-life approach seen in the neoconservative administrations of Mayors Rudolph Giuliani, Frank Jordan (of San Francisco) , Bret Schundler (of Jersey City), and Richard Riordan (of Los Angeles). Their positions were to reject the central role of the state as a force for both social reform and planning and the culture of tolerance . Instead, they relied on market principles through the privatization of public spaces and services and an overall shrinkage of government. In addition to privatization, they supported, at least rhetorically, greater community and business control of the delivery of government services and of planning at the expense of expert planners. They also criticized the centralized and universal orientation of urban liberalism as elitist in regard to the immediate local needs of residents and businesses. They were unwilling to make long-term investments in social programs in the hope that they would reduce deviance, arguing instead for short-term 30 | Defining the Quality-of-Life Paradigm punitive measures to restore order. Finally, they...