Today's Inequality & NYC's Post-1970s Recovery

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. You know, one of the central issues facing New York City today, and you certainly don't need me to tell you this, and a big reason Mayor Mamdani was elected, deepening economic inequality. Historian Mason Williams joins us now to discuss his new book about this called City of Fortune, which I think we can say largely blames the city's response to crises from the 1970s through the pandemic. Mason B. Williams, historian and associate professor at Williams College, he doesn't own it, just perhaps have the same name, says it's complicated. The very things that save New York from collapse are the things that built the deeply unequal city we live in now. His question running through four decades of city politics and policy is simple to ask and hard to answer. Who was the recovery, several recoveries, actually four?
The full title of the book is City of Fortune, Inequality and the Making of Contemporary New York.
Mason B. Williams joins me now to talk about it. He was last on with us, maybe three of you remember, to talk about his 2013 book, City of Ambition, which was about Fiorello LaGuardia and New York's New Deal at that time. Professor Williams, welcome back to WNYC.

**Mason Williams** (1:33)
Thank you so much for having me, Brian. I'm delighted to be here.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:36)
Why this book right now?

**Mason Williams** (1:40)
Well, it was some time in the making and it did grow out of that previous work on the New Deal. I've always been interested in the relationship between capitalism and democracy in American history. The fact that we are trying to live and thrive together amid a system that generates great wealth but also inequality, and what better place to study that than in New York.
The book about the New Deal that you mentioned was interested in how working people and progressive political leaders built a city in which working people could thrive.
When I was on, I was remembering just now talking about that book. It was about 95 degrees in the city and one of the things we mentioned was the public swimming pools that are still alive and doing well. Donnie just jumped into, I gather, a couple of weeks back to mark the opening of A Legacy of the New Deal. At the end of that book, I telescoped forward to the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, where public institutions like the many kinds, daycare centers cut back, even policing was cut back sharply in the 1970s, and there was this imposition of an era of austerity. The city in which I was writing that book about the New Deal was Bloomberg's New York, and this was manifestly no longer a city that was simply impoverished in the way it had been in the 1970s. Instead of those sharp cuts to the police, you had stop and frisk, the seemingly imperious Ray Kelly struck me at that time as almost a second coming of Robert Moses in some ways. You had a city that was opening new parks, but they weren't Orchard Beach in the working class Bronx. They were the High Line in Brooklyn Bridge Park, which were tied in with real estate development. So there was this public ambition again, but a very different sense of the public. And I wanted to make sense of how you got from that moment of crisis in the 1970s to recovery but persistent inequality in the early 21st century.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:38)
So it's not about the fact that there was fiscal austerity in response to the fiscal crisis, because maybe there was no choice.
The city by law has to balance its budget each year, and the crisis was real. It was how the city rebuilt that you say has wound up deepening the inequality, correct?

**Mason Williams** (4:02)
I think that's right.
The 70s response does matter quite a bit. I would make a couple of points about the fiscal crisis. One is that the budgetary crisis itself was only one symptom of a much larger crisis of city institutions, that predated the fiscal crisis of 75
There are protests against the school system, its inequalities and its segregation. The housing stock is starting to decline by the late 1960s. There are protests against policing, over policing and police violence, especially against Black and Latino New Yorkers in the 1960s. So in a certain sense, the story I'm telling is less one of a deepening inequality because there was plenty of inequality in New York in the mid-20th century also. There's a reason all those protest movements arise in the 50s and 60s. But coming out of the fiscal crisis, when the resources do begin to appear again locally with the Wall Street boom and related stuff in the 1980s, there are a series of choices that are made which essentially embed these old modes of inequality in new institutional forms.