On Demand
Giuliani’s Quality of Life Campaign
Thursday, July 24, 2008
In the 1990s, then-mayor Rudy Giuliani instituted his zero-tolerance campaign in New York City – to very mixed reviews! Alex S. Vitale, the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics, says that even before Giuliani's crackdown, City Hall was more likely to use tax dollars to subsidize the wealthy than aid the poor.
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we should not be subsidizing rich or poor in this city, the middle class cannot afford it anymore. no more subsidized housing, tax breaks for corporations, etc, etc.
I Was born and raised in williamsburg bklyn and I am currently living in an sro in chelsea which is fairly decent for the past two years I cannot afford to the price of an appartment in this city without having 10 roomates so I choose to live in an sro.
I live in the Ft. Greene section of Brooklyn and am frankly dismayed by the building boom in downtown Brooklyn by Rattner and other developers who seem to want to build nothing smaller than 30 story condominiums. When they're done, downtown Brooklyn will be a canyon where the traffic and overcrowding issues already legion will only become more so and the smaller (and affordable) apartment buildings that give Brooklyn so much of its character will be a memory.
As you speak, many buildings are empty and awaiting demolition. June 2008 set a record for building permits issued. Can anything be done to slow this down? As an artist I see it visually, less variety of people, businesses and buildings, its starting to look like Houston, Texas. The preservationists seem useless.
When I first moved into Manhattan, I lived in an SRO apartment on the Upper West Side. It was the most diverse collection of people I ever lived with -- Columbia University graduate students, waiters, housekeepers. It was a good place to live. And I paid $12 a week -- at a time when you could get a low-paid job for $70 a week.
Destroying the SROs destroyed low-income housing in New York City, and, as Vitale says, we don't have anything to replace it.
The reason the city votes for Republican mayors is the hope that the tax rates in this city would come down or at least stop constantly increasing... Between the separate punitive income tax, real estate taxes, corporate taxes, etc, one has to wonder where all the money goes. that is my biggest disappointment with Bloomberg, he has been unable to get control of spending and unions.
i notice your book is published by NYU, i believe they are responsible for a lot of negatives in the Village area. shortage of housing, monstrous buildings and the general Mardi Gras atmosphere in the Bleecker St area.
This guy doesn't want to give Dinkins credit, but the $ for more police was under Dinkins, as was most of the funding for community based housing inititative
Leonard Lopate stated that there are no longer any homeless people in cardboard boxes on the sidewalks of New York City. However, there are still homeless people on our sidewalks today -- but they're in old sleeping bags or under old blankets. Thanks to Alex Vitale for acknowledging this fact a few minutes after Leonard's misstatement.
What about the teens selling chocolate bars in the Financial District. When you tell them no, they follow you for a block and keep on asking for money instead. Is that aggressive panhandling?
Dinkins put police officers on the beat in neighbourhood streets. They disappeared under Giulliani, only to reappear within the second Bloomberg administration. Also under Dinkins, recycling bins were placed in certain subway stations and have not been seen since.
I'd like to hear your guest comment on the fact that much of the so-called "affordable housing" being offered by the Bloomberg administration (both rental and condos), has very high income minimums, and maximum up to as much as approx. $185,000. It would seem that people in that income bracket should hardly qualify for taxpayer subsidized housing.
Thank you.
Why is everyone so gentle on Bloomberg? Look at what this city is becoming under his reign. An ugly rich person's city with no character and little sense of our living history: neighborhoods are being gutted just as our buildings are.
The rich/wealthy have figured out that living in the city is the trend for a variety of reasons and thus have they decided to create the city into a virtual gated community by economic displacment, utilizing the police as their personal security guards and garnering tax money for the development of their housing, as the author as stated. NYC politicians are bought and paid for by the real estate industry, just as our national politicians are bought and paid for by lobbyist from corporations like the defence industry. It's a bummer.
I'm sorry to hear Bloomberg's administration hasn't been any more effective in reducing homelessness. I remember in his 1st term, an event on housing held by an activist group said he was actually meeting with them & listening to them. Guess that doesn't necessarily translate into actually getting anything done about it.
I also don't remember middle-class New Yorkers feeling threatened by panhandlers so much as the Giuliani administration's pushing the image of *all* panhandlers as aggressive.
there is plenty of money in the city and the state for running infrastructure, its just a matter or reducing the ever increasing layers of government employees who are becoming an a larger and larger burden to the tsx payers of the state, siphoning money away from more important things. the tax payers in this state are already at the breaking point.
re: 14
Yes. When did the NYPD become the private security force for banks and stores like Target?
tillman,
I can't speak to what Bloomberg is doing TO New York, but as an ex-New Yorker, I'm amazed by what he is doing FOR New York, and for the example he is setting for the rest of the country. The projects for alternative energy, reduction of CO2 emissions, tree-planting, the public health initiatives... this guy is in many ways visionary for introducing common sense.
But I wouldn't claim to know much more about him because I no longer live there. But I think a lot of his projects are really important. Whether they will work or not is not just up to Bloomberg, in the same way that if we can ever implement sane global warming-preventive health policies across the rest of the country, it will remain up to the American people to take up the challenge.
I wanted to respond to some of the great comments and questions posted.
To tilman:
One way to slow down the gentrification process as well as commercial real estate bubbles is for the city to stop subsidizing market rate and luxury housing. There are millionaires in this city living in luxury apartments who pay no property taxes for 20 years. The city should use its limited resources to insure that there is decent housing for those at the bottom of the economy and who have special needs.
To Steven and Jen:
The tax burden for middle class New Yorkers is neither punitive nor especially high by international standards. Having said that, they could be lower and we could have improved services if the city (and State and Federal gov) quit cutting taxes to the very wealthy and shifting that burden on to the middle classes through increased taxes and user fees such as transit fare increases.
To Jack:
If people threaten you verbally or physically or interfere with your movement then it's illegal and the police could be asked to take action.
Alex Vitale
www.cityofdisorder.com
Continued
To Avivah:
Numerous studies have shown that police walking a beat make people feel safer but have almost no effect in reducing crime. In NYC police beats are generally used to respond to short term emergent crime patterns rather than being regular and long term.
The MTA has strenuously resisted recycling for years. Recently, they have undertaken a pilot program at a few select stations.
NYPD officers working as security at stores is the result of a fairly recent policy that allows them to moonlight on their own time as private security guards.
To Jamey Gambrell:
Much of what the city calls affordable housing, going back to the Koch administration, is not affordable to people who earn minimum wage or are on public assistance. Most of it isn't even affordable to families with median incomes unless they have extensive cash savings. The private housing development market is unable to fill this gap so the city needs to fill the gap.
Alex S. Vitale
www.cityofdisorder.com
This thread is closed.
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