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

4. The Rise of Disorder

The Rise of Disorder The backlash against the socially marginal in New York began with the increased social disorder of the 1970s. Squeegee men, panhandlers , and people sleeping in public spaces came to be the most visible symptoms of an urban environment that many people felt was out of control. The roots of these problems, like the roots of the homeless problem itself, were economic, political, and cultural. The greater economic polarization of the late 1970s through the early 1990s contributed to the formation of an economic underclass that was drawn into prostitution, crime, and other forms of public disorder. Culturally, the social tolerance established by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s was abandoned as social disorders such as crime, prostitution, and graffiti increased. Politically, as the homeless problem emerged in the early and mid-1980s, urban liberalism lost public support as more and more neighborhoods and economic elites called for immediate punitive action to restore order. The paradigm of urban liberalism was no longer able to respond to either the economic or social changes under way. Urban liberalism’s core principles of social tolerance, the preference for social services over market reforms, and the model of expertdriven centralized planning both failed to ameliorate social problems and alienated many important political constituencies. Instead, what developed was a contradiction between the practices and conceptualizations of the urban liberal paradigm, and the actual experiences of people in these cities. One of the central roles of municipal government is the management of social problems, especially when they become so severe that they threaten the economy of the city, reduce the quality of life of large numbers of residents, or destabilize their neighborhoods. In the 1980s and 1990s, New York’s urban liberal politicians were confronted by just such a challenge: the rise of mass homelessness and a variety of other social and physical disorders such as prostitution and graffiti. This chapter 4 70 looks at some of the urban social problems confronting New York City and the strategies used by its urban liberal political leaders to address them. Urban liberals tended to view these social problems as symptoms of larger social forces at work and, as such, treated them as secondary concerns of the city government. In general, urban liberals responded to these problems in emergency terms that treated only the worst of the symptoms in response to community demands. In the process, they failed to develop long-term solutions, adequately involve the community in their problem-solving process, and called for social tolerance without effective concerted strategies for change. As chapters 5, 6, and 7 explain more fully, it was the inadequacy of these strategies that led to a broad community and business backlash against urban liberalism. Defining Disorder In the 1970s and 1980s, New York City faced a number of serious social problems. The fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s undermined a variety of public services and contributed to the decline in public infrastructure, the reduction in poor New Yorkers’ standard of living, and the sense that the city was on the brink of collapse. The crime rate began rising in the 1970s and took another bad turn in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These problems, combined with the private sector’s abandonment and disinvestment, created a sense of crisis in the city’s various neighborhoods. Few of New York’s residents were exposed to these problems directly . Even though many were victims of crime or were burned out of their buildings, the majority of New Yorkers experienced these things secondhand through the news and informal communication networks. What people did see everyday, however, was the growth of disorder. Dirt, vandalism, visible homelessness, panhandling, prostitution, and graffiti all were daily indignities to be managed by city residents. They were both the physical manifestation of the city’s problems and a symbol of its decline. Disorder, therefore, was at the center of people’s conception of the city’s health and the ability of government to get things moving in the right direction. This concept of disorder also had problematic qualities of its own. It was brought back into vogue by the proponents of the “broken windows ” theory, who argued that minor socially disruptive behavior in The Rise of Disorder | 71 public spaces could have profound negative consequences for neighborhood stability. Disorder is typically divided into social and physical categories , and in either...