Zohran Mamdani wants to make New York great again
Born in 1991, Zohran Mamdani is far too young to have known the pre-crisis New York.
Some fifty years ago a young lawyer representing a bank dropped by the office of New York City’s assistant comptroller with a question no one had bothered to ask before, about the “tax anticipation” bonds the city was issuing to cover its debt. “What taxes do you anticipate receiving?” he asked. The uncomfortable answer was, in effect, not enough. Shortly thereafter the banks that had been happily competing for, and profiting from, each issue of new city debt failed to show up to bid for the next round.
So began the most vertiginous stretch of New York’s slide toward bankruptcy, as the story is told in “Drop Dead City”, a documentary coming to Amazon, Apple and Google Play in November. Part comedy of errors and part thriller, the story also unspools as tragedy. The film is an elegy to an idea of New York that faded with that crisis, and to an era that ended then of great optimism, as one city budget analyst puts it, “about the power of government to do all the things that need doing”.
Born in 1991, Zohran Mamdani is far too young to have known the pre-crisis New York. Yet its pull remains so strong that his campaign to be the next mayor is suffused with nostalgia for it. He rejects the bitter lessons city, state and national leaders still take from the fiscal crisis. His vision of government’s proper role in New Yorkers’ lives is, if anything, more vaulting than that of the pre-crisis years. As he declared at a rally in Queens on October 26th, “The era of government that deems an issue too small or a crisis too big must come to an end.” (It is the “too small”, paradoxically, that gives the measure of his ambition.)
One can understand the nostalgia. As the film tells its tale through archival footage and interviews, with people who share a city speaking in the accents of many nations, it conjures a less gilded, more middle-class New York with strong unions, affordable houses in Brooklyn and Queens, good schools and a higher-education system free to anyone. It was a much loved city, or at least it seems so in retrospect. “Everything that my family and I accomplished here I owe to the city of New York,” says Anthony Lofaso, a sanitation worker. “I mean it gave a bum like me an opportunity when there were no opportunities for people without education, without training—not even good looks.”
But the economic and political basis of that city’s social compact was unstable. At mid-century, the many urban factories, with their jobs for low-skilled workers, began closing or moving elsewhere. Then in the 60s middle-class white residents began packing up their tax dollars and driving away to the suburbs. When recession hit in the mid-70s, the city did not have the resources to redeem its promises. As it began laying off city workers, the government was soon struggling to fulfil basic functions. The compact unravelled. In clips excavated for the film, garbage piles up on sidewalks and spills into the streets; houses burn as arsonists lay siege to Brooklyn. “I hope to God that the damn city blows up,” Ken McFeely, the president of the police union, explodes to a television reporter.
By then bipartisan support for the old idea of New York had also collapsed. As governor of the state from 1959 to 1973, Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican, helped bring on the crisis through lavish commitments to health care, education and housing, along with breezy approval of the city’s inventive bonds. Rockefeller was vice-president when New York came calling at the White House for a bail-out, but by then his brand of north-eastern, liberal Republicanism had, sadly, exhausted itself.
President Gerald Ford, a moderate himself, was worried about a primary challenge from a radical conservative, Ronald Reagan. “Ford to City: Drop Dead”, the Daily News indelibly declared on October 30th 1975. Ford never said that, but he did commit to veto legislation to bail out the city. If he intended brinkmanship, it worked on him, too: the state legislature approved a tax increase, municipal unions ponied up for city bonds, and, as a city bankruptcy began to threaten the banks and the dollar, Ford came through with a federal line of credit.
The city also agreed to profound changes. “Even at best, if we succeed in getting this plan in place, the city will be a much lesser place,” Felix Rohatyn, who led the state agency created to address the crisis, is heard to lament, with admirable candour, in the film. “Poor people will suffer, since they are always the first to suffer.” New York began charging tuition for City University. It closed five public hospitals and by 1980 had cut one in four workers, according to “The Menace of Prosperity”, by Daniel Wortel-London.
Candidate of the past
Yet the economic and political basis of the new, lesser social compact New York embraced after the crisis has also proved unstable. Counting on increasing taxes paid by highly mobile corporations and wealthy people to finance a growing city budget for spotty services is a strategy that sows the seeds of its own destruction. But, beyond incremental proposals to speed up permits for new small businesses and private construction, Mr Mamdani is suggesting no new model to create jobs for striving residents or to pay for his many new initiatives, from “massively” investing in City University to providing day care for every child up to five to decreasing health-care costs “for everyone”.
Mr Mamdani has spoken of making city services more efficient, but any serious effort to do so would pit him against his union supporters. He says he will persuade the state government to put up taxes on residents who already pay among the highest state and local rates in the country. His joyous politicking, his youth and his optimism make him seem a candidate of the future. But as mayor he may offer New York only a tantalising, and ultimately self-defeating, trip to the past.
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Some fifty years ago a young lawyer representing a bank dropped by the office of New York City’s assistant comptroller with a question no one had bothered to ask before, about the “tax anticipation” bonds the city was issuing to cover its debt. “What taxes do you anticipate receiving?” he asked. The uncomfortable answer was, in effect, not enough. Shortly thereafter the banks that had been happily competing for, and profiting from, each issue of new city debt failed to show up to bid for the next round.
So began the most vertiginous stretch of New York’s slide toward bankruptcy, as the story is told in “Drop Dead City”, a documentary coming to Amazon, Apple and Google Play in November. Part comedy of errors and part thriller, the story also unspools as tragedy. The film is an elegy to an idea of New York that faded with that crisis, and to an era that ended then of great optimism, as one city budget analyst puts it, “about the power of government to do all the things that need doing”.
Born in 1991, Zohran Mamdani is far too young to have known the pre-crisis New York. Yet its pull remains so strong that his campaign to be the next mayor is suffused with nostalgia for it. He rejects the bitter lessons city, state and national leaders still take from the fiscal crisis. His vision of government’s proper role in New Yorkers’ lives is, if anything, more vaulting than that of the pre-crisis years. As he declared at a rally in Queens on October 26th, “The era of government that deems an issue too small or a crisis too big must come to an end.” (It is the “too small”, paradoxically, that gives the measure of his ambition.)
One can understand the nostalgia. As the film tells its tale through archival footage and interviews, with people who share a city speaking in the accents of many nations, it conjures a less gilded, more middle-class New York with strong unions, affordable houses in Brooklyn and Queens, good schools and a higher-education system free to anyone. It was a much loved city, or at least it seems so in retrospect. “Everything that my family and I accomplished here I owe to the city of New York,” says Anthony Lofaso, a sanitation worker. “I mean it gave a bum like me an opportunity when there were no opportunities for people without education, without training—not even good looks.”
But the economic and political basis of that city’s social compact was unstable. At mid-century, the many urban factories, with their jobs for low-skilled workers, began closing or moving elsewhere. Then in the 60s middle-class white residents began packing up their tax dollars and driving away to the suburbs. When recession hit in the mid-70s, the city did not have the resources to redeem its promises. As it began laying off city workers, the government was soon struggling to fulfil basic functions. The compact unravelled. In clips excavated for the film, garbage piles up on sidewalks and spills into the streets; houses burn as arsonists lay siege to Brooklyn. “I hope to God that the damn city blows up,” Ken McFeely, the president of the police union, explodes to a television reporter.
By then bipartisan support for the old idea of New York had also collapsed. As governor of the state from 1959 to 1973, Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican, helped bring on the crisis through lavish commitments to health care, education and housing, along with breezy approval of the city’s inventive bonds. Rockefeller was vice-president when New York came calling at the White House for a bail-out, but by then his brand of north-eastern, liberal Republicanism had, sadly, exhausted itself.
President Gerald Ford, a moderate himself, was worried about a primary challenge from a radical conservative, Ronald Reagan. “Ford to City: Drop Dead”, the Daily News indelibly declared on October 30th 1975. Ford never said that, but he did commit to veto legislation to bail out the city. If he intended brinkmanship, it worked on him, too: the state legislature approved a tax increase, municipal unions ponied up for city bonds, and, as a city bankruptcy began to threaten the banks and the dollar, Ford came through with a federal line of credit.
The city also agreed to profound changes. “Even at best, if we succeed in getting this plan in place, the city will be a much lesser place,” Felix Rohatyn, who led the state agency created to address the crisis, is heard to lament, with admirable candour, in the film. “Poor people will suffer, since they are always the first to suffer.” New York began charging tuition for City University. It closed five public hospitals and by 1980 had cut one in four workers, according to “The Menace of Prosperity”, by Daniel Wortel-London.
Candidate of the past
Yet the economic and political basis of the new, lesser social compact New York embraced after the crisis has also proved unstable. Counting on increasing taxes paid by highly mobile corporations and wealthy people to finance a growing city budget for spotty services is a strategy that sows the seeds of its own destruction. But, beyond incremental proposals to speed up permits for new small businesses and private construction, Mr Mamdani is suggesting no new model to create jobs for striving residents or to pay for his many new initiatives, from “massively” investing in City University to providing day care for every child up to five to decreasing health-care costs “for everyone”.
Mr Mamdani has spoken of making city services more efficient, but any serious effort to do so would pit him against his union supporters. He says he will persuade the state government to put up taxes on residents who already pay among the highest state and local rates in the country. His joyous politicking, his youth and his optimism make him seem a candidate of the future. But as mayor he may offer New York only a tantalising, and ultimately self-defeating, trip to the past.
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