A City Of Industry
How Progressives Undid 20 Years of Public Safety
The NYC that we live in today is not just a cleaner, safer, and more expensive version of what it was back in 1990, but over the years it evolved into something no New Yorker could have ever imagined. This latest version of itself is what I call “a city of industry,” a whole new version of New York City and its economy that is no longer centered around just Wall Street and middle-class jobs but on all big businesses and the talent needed to support each respective industry.
When Hudson Yards opened in 2019, it felt like a new summit of prosperity had been reached. An even taller, shinier city where people mingled at night just a bit closer to the stars. As this newest version of New York unveiled itself, the cost of living rose accordingly. The average price of rent, food, and drinks went up, and in many ways, NYC became a playground for titans of industry and the workers who would help shape their new vision.
For those of us lucky enough to experience it, the benefits of living in a city of industry were the peak of urban living. World-class cocktail bars can be found in every neighborhood, picturesque coffee shops opened up on every other block, and luxury gyms with towels that smelled like fresh aloe became commonplace. Life was good, and beautiful women could wear headphones on the subway at 2 am without fear of being attacked. As so many of us have already forgotten, the normal number of women pushed in front of subways per year before 2019 used to be zero.
While public safety was not a serious issue for two generations of New Yorkers, it’s important to remember that NYC was not always so safe. In fact, before this golden era of public safety, the Lower East Side was known for being a place to score drugs, Dumbo was an area of abandoned factories where the mob often dumped dead bodies, and prostitution was the main attraction of Times Square (not the M&M store). NYC was plagued by rampant violent crime, the crack era, and mafia control, and had been headed in this horrible direction since the 1960s. That’s right, the quality of life got worse in NYC for 25 years straight, not better.
The closing of this chapter and the beginning of a safer and more prosperous era only began when Giuliani became mayor and implemented broken windows policing.
The two greatest achievements of broken windows policing were the reversal of a murder rate that had increased for 25 consecutive years and the stabilizing effect that newfound public safety had on our local economy. The murder rate was reduced from 2,200 per year to 767 during its first 3 years– a 60% decline. Not only did Giuliani prove that New York could in fact be a shining city of dreams but he also proved that effectively reducing crime was the only way to achieve it. The results were an unprecedented new standard on how to govern American cities that would be used as a model for other cities for years to come.
Another key element to the success of NYC was the introduction of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) which were organizations formed by local commercial real estate landlords in business districts. Resources were pooled together and money was spent on common sense goals such as cleaning up garbage in the street, providing security guards, fixing up the local public parks, and improving the optics of local retail stores so they looked more welcoming to potential tenants.
It may sound like a small thing but it did wonders to usher in a new era of thriving business districts. It began with the cleaning up of Bryant Park In 1995 (which was notoriously horrible throughout the 1980s) followed by 34th street and Times Square. This concept of improving the quality of life in our business districts contributed greatly to our economy in ways that most people under 30 can’t imagine. In fact, many of the Manhattan parks where people eat $18 caesar salads at lunchtime were actually controlled by drug dealers as recently as 1994.
The Bloomberg administration kept the ball rolling and continued many of the successful policies from the previous administration. BIDs continued to spread throughout the city, the economy continued to strengthen, and neighborhoods like Williamsburg which were once considered slums became ideal places to live for the first time.
The crack era and the urban disorder that came along with it were finally behind us. Guiliani’s experiment proved that public safety is the foundation for economic prosperity. Unfortunately for NYC, these beliefs were not held by the incoming and openly socialist administration.
De Blasio assumed office in 2014, Albany and city hall eventually became staffed with activists, and the day had finally arrived when progressives controlled every level of New York State’s government. As the economy was humming and not much needed to be fixed, our elected officials decided to focus their attention on the well-being of NY’s criminal population, elevating them to the status of a new protected class.
Progressives then went on to pass criminal justice reforms that disincentivized police from doing their jobs and undermined the very systems that made NYC so safe and successful. Their policy choices and lack of support for law and order eventually resulted in an unprecedented crime wave, sanctioned riots, and an overall sense of lawlessness that continues to plague NYC to this day.
De Blasio then began reversing some of the policies that all New Yorkers benefited from, starting with the decriminalization of quality-of-life crimes like doing drugs in public, loitering, and public urination. As time would soon reveal, arriving at the West 4th subway station only to be greeted by the smell of piss, weed, and people with severe mental illness is not a policy change that actually improved the lives of anyone. Choosing to no longer enforce QOL crimes was not the correcting of some social injustice, but a conscious decision to degrade the experience of public spaces for all New Yorkers.
NY State legislators then made the critical mistake of passing the bail reform bill with the intention of reducing pre-trial detention. While all 49 states in the union allow for a judge to consider dangerousness when a defendant poses a threat to the general public, New York remains the only state in the country that doesn’t.
The combination of judges not having a dangerousness standard or the ability to set cash bail proved to have a horrible impact on NYC. Since its passing, it seems like there’s a new story every week about a brutal murder where the attacker had 5-15 recent arrests they were not detained for, proving yet another innocent life could have been saved.
Giuliani and Bloomberg’s sound leadership made NYC a shining city of industry, raising the standards for urban living, prosperity, and public safety for all. Maybe that did mean that NYC had outgrown its ex-con population, but who’s to say that’s a bad thing? After all, it is criminals who detract from urban life, not contribute to it. Even the poster boy for bail reform was recently arrested for a shooting at Rockefeller Center, an area where things like this rarely happened before 2019.
Hemingway said things fall apart gradually, and then suddenly. In our case, it took only four years to go from the mayor deciding it was ok for people to piss in public to instructing the police to stand down while angry mobs looted our stores and burned cop cars in Union Square.
It took forever to clean up crime in NYC, but all it took to bring America’s greatest city to its knees was electing progressive activists and letting them tamper with the criminal justice system.
Jason, it's important for the "free all perps" crowd to know that theirs is not the only narrative.... nor is it the correct narrative. And recall, over the next few years, Rikers will close and we will go down 40% in jail beds from where we are NOW. What will the city look like then? This is the destruction of an urban civilization every bit as malevolent as the Visigoths sacking Rome. We have to keep fighting.
I served in the Bloomberg Administration right to the end. 12 months later, on the eve of Christmas eve, I walked to the 4,5,6 stop at Brooklyn bridge/City Hall through City Hall Park and looked at the Mayor's side of City Hall at 6PM. All the lights were on as they struggled to deal with the fact that they were at war with NYPD. It's a moment I won't forget. All I could think was, how did we get here in 12 short months. Well written Jason.