This will make it easier to read. It's a good read too.
Culture & Ideas 1/14/02
BY JOHN LEO
He shook up Manhattan
Why was New York City in free fall a decade ago and believed to be ungovernable? "Because of ideas," Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in his farewell address. The city got itself tangled in "political philosophies and political creeds and ideologies." Very few politicians would point to stupid ideas as the cause of urban disintegration, but Giuliani was right to do so.
Consider where the city was a decade ago. Social breakdown had reached the point where tourists stayed away in droves. More than half of the adults living here, according to a New York Times poll, had plans to leave the city. An army of the "homeless," a euphemism for alcoholics, addicts,
and released mental patients, camped out on sidewalks and in parks. A second army, made up of do-good lawyers, fought to create the right to live, sleep, and defecate on city streets. Nobody seemed to litigate the right to a livable city or to parks free of human waste.
Disorder seemed to be everywhere. Turnstile jumping–getting into the subway without paying–became the city's favorite sport. Such subway scams cost the transit authority an estimated $60 million a year. (One of the early joys of the Giuliani administration was heading to the West Fourth Street subway station to watch cops round up a few hundred turnstile jumpers and bus them to a three-hour adventure at police headquarters.)
A million people were on welfare. Around 25 cabbies a year were murdered. The menace reached the most stable neighborhoods. Some 20 thugs savagely beat two Korean grocers at the end of our block in Greenwich Village. We had our own special "wilding" incident, too. A gang of teenage girls with baseball bats and assorted pieces of lumber burst out of the subway and ran down the block clubbing people at random.
So what were the bad ideas that brought about this disaster?
1. Disorder and low-level "victimless crimes" are not worth bothering with. As Giuliani said of the city, "we were too busy" to do anything about street prostitution, aggressive panhandling, graffiti, and low-level drug dealing on the street. But these behaviors signal a loss of social control, demoralizing residents and setting the stage for serious crime and neighborhood decline. This is what the "broken window" theory predicts, and a lot of evidence now shows it is true. It is probably impossible for non-New Yorkers to understand how deeply the anti-Giuliani establishment here resents any attempt to control disorder. Here's one example: The New York Times, which likes to disguise anti-Giuliani editorials as news stories, ran a Page 1 story in April 2000 mocking police for attempting to deal with the spread of heroin in a diverse area of Brooklyn. The article suggested local police were "mindlessly [imposing] the mores of Mayberry on what is a classic rough-and-tumble Brooklyn neighborhood."
2. The crime rate can't be brought down without dealing first with the root causes of poverty and hopelessness. Not much is left of this theory. The crime and murder rates have been cut by two thirds. Last year Chicago had more murders than New York City, with about one third the population. The fallback position of the anti-Giuliani people is that the drop would have occurred anyway because of the 1990s economic boom. But the city crime rate dropped 30 percent in Giuliani's first two years, before the boom hit. Nor did the boom seem to reduce crime in cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit. New York's dramatic gains account for as much as a quarter of the national decline in crime. Many other crime-cutting cities have seen crime rise in the past year. New York's rate is still falling.
3. Living on the street is a right to be defended, given the economic pressures that cause it. Not so, Giuliani insists. Homelessness is a sign that says "I have a very big problem and I need help." But to qualify for that help, "you have to be indoors, not out on the street."
4. Policies promoting middle-class values are just attempts by the comfortable to impose their way of life on the oppressed. "New York politics is mostly about striking caring poses," writes Fred Siegel, our best academic expert on New York and urban problems. "Liberals like former mayors John Lindsay and Mr. [David] Dinkins spoke endlessly of what the city owed the poor, but they delivered rising rates of crime and welfare. Mr. Giuliani spoke in the middle-class language of what the poor owe to the rest of society, and he delivered more peaceful neighborhoods and a rising standard of living." Minorities and the poor made some of the biggest gains under Giuliani. It shows you what those middle-class values can do. The truth is that Giuliani kept New York from going the way of Detroit. Whether the dead policies of the past will creep back in under the new mayor is anybody's guess.