President Trump’s vow to rebuild America’s inner cities is sparking utopian wish lists and dreams of rivers of federal cash. But before he opens the floodgates, the president ought to use the modern history of his hometown as a blueprint for how to save a city.
Or, more accurately, how a city can save itself.
Three times in the last 40 years, New York was down and nearly out. And three times it got back up, mostly by pulling on its own bootstraps.
Washington and Albany helped, but city leaders, both public and private, did the heavy lifting. Without their enormous efforts and talent, New York would be like Detroit, Baltimore or Chicago.
Instead, it is the safest big city in America and an international mecca for tourists and investors. New York today, despite its problems, is the closest thing America has ever had to that shining city on the hill.
Getting here wasn’t easy or inevitable. The first of the city’s three near-death experiences came in the mid-1970s when it was technically insolvent and shut out of the credit markets. After President Gerald Ford rejected aid requests, as captured in the famous headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” New York had two choices: declare bankruptcy, or dig itself out of the hole it created.
Gov. Hugh Carey took charge, assembling experts to negotiate with bankers, restructuring city obligations and imposing unprecedented controls that took away the city’s budget autonomy.
Soon the feds chipped in with short-term loans and the municipal unions, which agreed to job cuts and wage freezes, used their pension funds to buy city bonds. There was progress, but the 1977 election proved pivotal.
Ed Koch won on a tough-love message and immediately began saying no to new spending and yes to cutting the fat. He also lifted New Yorkers’ spirits with his irrepressible happy-warrior schtick.
Koch and Carey, former congressmen, took their credibility to Washington, and this time the feds, convinced they were serious, issued guarantees for long-term debt.
Within three years, the city was able to borrow on its own again and, by 1983, Koch produced a budget surplus of $500 million.
It was a remarkable achievement, but in less than a decade, New York was teetering again. Crime, crack cocaine and corruption were the new villains, with Time magazine capturing the era with a report on “The Rotting of the Big Apple.”
In a repeat of the fiscal crisis, a surrender chorus declared Gotham ungovernable. Maybe it was for most, but not for Rudy Giuliani, who vowed to make New York safe again.
In 1993, the year Rudy was elected, there were 1,927 murders. By the end of his first term in 1997, the count stood at 767, and by the end of his second term, it was down to 649. The total continued to fall under his successors, and last year, New York had 330 murders, an astonishing 85 percent decline since its high in 1990.
Compare that with Chicago, which had 762 murders last year, despite having a population of 2.8 million, against New York’s 8.5 million. Baltimore, with a population of only 625,000, had 318 murders, giving it a far higher murder rate than even Chicago.
New York’s third brush with disaster was the horror of 9/11, but much of the reaction was familiar. Pundits began to write the city’s obituary, or at least to assume a period of steep decline.
Yet New Yorkers rallied again, this time under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Aided by federal rebuilding money, private insurance claims, and a public determined not to surrender to fear, the city not only recovered, it entered a golden age of public safety and prosperity.
Indeed, thanks to the wave of comebacks under Koch, Giuliani and Bloomberg, New York developed a resilient civic culture strong enough to absorb the incompetence of current Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Trump now has an opportunity to spread the New York experience across America. He could begin by assembling an urban task force of key players in those revivals to share their knowledge with cities trapped in death spirals of decline and disinvestment.
Ideally, copycat task forces would spring up in each city with the sole mission of applying New York’s lessons and working with the Trump administration and Congress to target federal help. While there are general patterns in failing cities — job loss, family breakdown, failing schools — the scourge of crime must be the starting point. Once violence declines, the turnaround can begin.
That’s how New York was saved. And with apologies to Frank Sinatra and “New York, New York,” remember, if you can do it here, you can do it anywhere.
On those rare days when you spot a just-the-facts story about President Trump in The New York Times, you hope the paper is turning over an honest leaf. Then along comes a story that proves hope is futile.
A front-page article last week declaring that “A Sinister Perception of Islam Steers the White House” was an opinion masquerading as news. Even worse, it was patently dishonest.
Thinking readers wouldn’t notice a sleight of hand, the piece cites several Trump quotes about “radical Islam” being a font of terrorism. It then accuses him of embracing a “deeply suspicious view of Islam.”
He did no such thing. By using the term “radical Islam,” Trump was implicitly and carefully drawing a distinction between jihadists who kill innocents in the name of Islam and peaceful Muslims.
By conflating the two, the Times raises false charges of Islamophobia and echoes Barack Obama’s refusal to acknowledge any link between terrorism and radical interpretations of the religion. The refusal is all the more ridiculous given that top Muslim leaders concede the link, including President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt.
Americans who aren’t blinded by political correctness also know better, and their knowledge erodes trust in the paper’s credibility. Assuming, of course, the Gray Lady has any trust left to lose.
The meltdown of the national Democratic Party is playing out in Albany in more orderly ways, but with the same result: The old guard is getting slaughtered.
Eight Dems with a more independent and centrist bent broke with the party’s far-left leadership to share power with state Senate Republicans. The band of breakaways is still growing, with others threatening to turn it into a stampede.
What are they waiting for? The hard-line Dems had their turn, so give bipartisan cooperation a chance.
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