Jake Anbinder on the 1970s shift to local control

A Democratic retreat from the New Deal to parochialism

“Power to the Neighborhoods!”: NYC Growth Politics and the Origins of the Housing Crisis. Jacob Anbinder, Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, March 2024.

A recent paper by economic historian Jake Anbinder describing how around 1970, Democrats in the US retreated from growth and the New Deal to local control (“neighbourhoodism”) and parochial interests. His paper focuses on New York City and its community boards. Some well-known figures make an appearance: Norman Mailer, Ed Koch, Jane Jacobs, Mario Cuomo.

From the abstract:

Around 1970, an unprecedented movement emerged across major American cities calling for returning control of urban government to the neighborhood level. Although conservatives had long embraced “neighborhoodism,” a distinguishing feature of this political trend was its newfound appeal to Democrats who were disillusioned by the turbulent urban transformations of the first postwar decades. Using New York City as a case study, this white paper shows how this new “neighborhood liberalism” reordered the priorities that urban liberals expected of their elected officials and, in so doing, remade American cities to a degree that scholars are only beginning to understand.

On no issue was this influence clearer than that of urban growth. Whereas large-scale pro-growth projects had been at the heart of the mid-century liberal vision, the new generation of neighborhood liberals saw growth as an outdated obsession that had wreaked self-evident harms on vulnerable urban communities. Subsequently, New Yorkers enacted laws and implemented processes that slowed the pace of growth by requiring neighborhood input in the real estate development process.

Although the devolution of land-use policy brought stability to city life for a fortunate few, the restrictions on urban development that marked the era of neighborhood liberalism set the stage for the severe housing shortages that New York and similar cities would experience in the twenty-first century.

Pessimism and retreat

Norman Mailer, writing in 1967:

“How is one to speak of the illness of a city?” Mailer began. His beloved New York was, in his estimation, “not too far from death.” Pollution blotted out the sky and gridlock blocked the streets. Rents and crime were up. The municipal government’s finances were increasingly precarious. Subway service had gotten worse and the trains were dirtier.

Unlike Detroit or St. Louis, New York wasn’t hemorrhaging people—in fact, the city’s population had grown modestly over the course of the decade. But residents of New York—as in other American cities like it—seemed, for lack of a better word, more desperate. One-eighth of the city’s inhabitants relied on welfare payments, and many more sat just above the poverty line. Even among the better-off, there seemed to be a more fundamental decline in empathy and tolerance.

The retreat to parochial interests:

There was no issue on which neighborhood liberalism’s influence was clearer, however, than that of growth and development. Whereas support of large-scale urban development and redevelopment projects intended to keep cities desirable and competitive had been at the heart of the mid-century liberal vision, neighborhoodism instead offered a nostalgic assurance that a purer kind of progress could be realized through a patchwork of self-governing, small-scale polities, each charged with charting its own future. This new generation of neighborhood liberals saw growth as not only far from an unalloyed good but, in fact, an outdated obsession that had wreaked self-evident harms on vulnerable urban communities and was incongruent with the goals of their movement.

Some examples of opposition to development:

In neighborhoods where New Yorkers believed a board was insufficiently committed to anti-growth priorities, community groups began to draw attention to the board’s lack of concern and agitated for changes to its membership. As the charter commission was preparing its final recommendations, for example, a coalition of Brooklyn neighborhood associations presented it with a report detailing the ways in which Community Board 6 had been “an insult to the communities it is supposed to serve.”

Most of the groups’ complaints concerned the board’s lack of opposition to new development. In Park Slope, Community Board 6 had not conveyed homeowners’ displeasure at the opening of the area’s first McDonald’s franchise or the expansion of the Methodist Hospital. In Carroll Gardens, it had done nothing to stop the proposed relocation of the Fort Greene Meat Market to the neighborhood. In Red Hook, the board had supported the plan to create a new container port despite nearly universal opposition from locals. And across Brownstone Brooklyn, the board had failed to advocate for the creation of the historic districts that its white-collar homeowners so desired.

“The legacy of neighborhood liberalism”

As the supply of new housing diminished, people moved down the housing ladder (what we now call “gentrification”):

In February [1974], they noted, builders across the city had finished only 189 new homes, the lowest monthly total since the end of World War II. “You have to fight a year for the privilege of building on property you own,” complained Samuel LeFrak, one of the city’s most prominent developers and the man behind the massive middle-class apartment complex in Queens known as LeFrak City. The mayor’s housing administrator agreed, observing that the drop in supply meant that families making between $15,000 and $18,000 per year ($90,000 to $110,000 today) could no longer afford to live in the city’s newest buildings. Instead, they had started to outbid poorer families for the homes that already existed.

As New York City became more attractive, the housing shortage worsened:

By the late twentieth century, neighborhood anti-growthers had mastered both the ideological and legal aspects of the supply side of the growth equation. Controlling the demand side, however, proved another matter entirely. This discrepancy became especially apparent as the number of young urban professionals participating in a “return to the city,” which had started as a trickle in the late fifties and sixties, grew into a flood during the eighties.

In New York and other coastal capitals of the ascendant white-collar economy, there was a palpable sense of competition among residents old and new for an ever more restricted supply of homes. A banker or lawyer who could no longer afford a landmarked rowhouse on the Upper West Side, for example, might instead buy a Park Slope brownstone containing several units and convert the building to a single-family home. Across New York City, thousands of apartments were eliminated through this process. Park Slope renters, in turn, might skip across the park to Prospect Heights, where they would displace poorer residents to Crown Heights or Bedford-Stuyvesant. The unfortunate tenants who already lived in those neighborhoods were then left with no choice but to crowd in still-cheaper parts of the city, like East New York or Brownsville, or, perhaps, to leave for a different part of the country altogether.

In 1984, which Newsweek declared the “Year of the Yuppie,” a feature in New York Magazine reported on the “misery of the housing squeeze” in the city. The vacancy rate in Manhattan had dipped below 2 percent, forcing “normal adults over 30” to live with roommates for the first time in memory.

More

What happened in the 1970s? William Fischel on homevoters vs. the growth machine.

A couple videos from New York City:

• Michael Kaess. “Bronx Community Board 10 held an in-person meeting so people who bought their homes decades ago could come and scream, ‘We don’t need affordable housing.’”

• davenewworld_2. “These are lines to view vacant apartments in NYC. We're witnessing the collapse of the American dream in real time.”