During the second half of the twentieth century, ordinary New Yorkers faced a series of crises for which a negligent municipal government had insufficient plans to curtail. In an attempt to improve the conditions of their day-to-day lives, these urbanites scrambled to find solutions of their own making. Instead of advocating for government support, they looked for other partnerships, alternate sources of funding (namely private capital) and manpower (their own elbow grease). Their proclivity towards private partnerships and solutions was not a rejection of liberalism, rather, it was an ‘attempt to maintain the conditions that liberal governance had promised’ (p. 4). However, in their attempt to solve the compounding urban crises they faced, average New Yorkers ‘unintentionally helped to further the process of marketization’, resulting in the long-term consequences of a less equitable city and a more negligent government (p. 4).
This is the central argument of Benjamin Holtzman’s significant contribution to recent scholarship in urban and political history, The Long Crisis: New York and the Path to Neoliberalism. Holtzman is convincing and clear: neoliberalism did not originate from a top-down imposition of a new market-driven ideology by elite businessmen and politicians. It originated in surprising places: community associations cleaning up local parks, neighbourhood watch groups patrolling Brooklyn’s streets and efforts to remove homeless individuals from seeking refuge in the subway. The turn to neoliberalism, then, was not an ideology forged in boardrooms or legislatures. Instead, ‘experiments came first, ideology second’ (p. 5).
Holtzman orients his story around six case-studies, each taking the reader to a different public space in the city where New Yorkers experimented to solve problems plaguing their communities. Holtzman begins with the homesteading movement where residents occupied and renovated abandoned buildings to provide more affordable housing options, especially in low-income neighbourhoods. In chapter 2, Holtzman uncovers debates between landlords and tenants, city officials and real estate moguls, about rent regulations and converting apartment rentals into co-op properties. Chapter 3 offers a tour through public parks in the city’s five boroughs, where community efforts and private partnerships to revitalize the spaces ultimately resulted in a ‘two-tiered park system bifurcated by race and class’ (p. 240). We patrol the streets in chapter 4 with citizen watch groups and private security forces meant to augment the city’s police department to combat crime. Holtzman takes his most top-down approach in the final two chapters. In chapter 5, he looks at the implementation of two tax abatement and zoning policies utilized by government officials to spur development. In chapter 6, he recounts how city mayors adopted policies to remove unhoused persons from public space instead of confronting the structural issues fuelling the crisis. The takeaway of each case-study is strikingly similar: each experiment in community activism and public policy pushed New York closer to embracing privatized solutions and let municipal government off the hook.
One of Holtzman’s quieter but most novel contributions is his intervention in the scholarship of policing and mass incarceration. In chapter 4, Holtzman uncovers ‘the vastly expanding role of private actors in surveilling and policing public streets’, most notably through the rising popularity of citizen patrols in the 1970s and private guards in the 1980s (p. 136). While privately hired security reduced crime in some areas of the city, it also exacerbated the inequalities between neighbourhoods. Those neighbourhoods with resources to hire private security could ‘secure the barriers around their districts and push crime into less resourced neighborhoods already disproportionately burdened by crime’ (p. 165). As in Holtzman’s other case-studies, the shift toward privatization only further exacerbated race and class inequalities. Far from being a relic of the 1980s, private security forces continue to bolster New York’s police force, actually outnumbering police officers two to one (p. 238).
By focusing primarily on the stories of average New Yorkers, Holtzman forgoes the often jargon-heavy and sometimes dense prose of urban histories that prioritize top-down explanations of the many crises plaguing twentieth-century cities. Each chapter moves swiftly and includes an impressive number of ordinary New Yorkers and grassroots organizations advocating for a more livable city. Altogether, Holtzman tells a powerful and cohesive story about the origins of neoliberal solutions which resulted in devastating levels of economic inequality and questions about what role, if any, the government should play in remedying these issues.
The most important question we are left with after reading Holtzman’s work is when did the unintentional turn towards the market shift from these New Yorkers’ ‘experiments’ to the ‘ideology’ of neoliberal politics? In the conclusion, Holtzman hints at the presidency of Bill Clinton being a significant turning point, but there is more work to be done here. It is, perhaps, the guiding question for historians looking for the roots of neoliberalism in liberal politics and the Democrat party. Holtzman makes a significant contribution to this conversation, and most importantly, offers an exemplary model for future studies of liberalism, urban governance and urban reform.
