Precarious Urbanism: Covid-19 and the Undoing of the American City
New York street scene, May 2020 (courtesy of the Author)
In this thought-provoking original essay New York city resident - and current University of Oxford MSc (Sustainable Urban Development) student - Josef Goodman explores governance and the American city through the prism of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic, a menace to public health and the global economy, has overwhelmed America’s cities. The mayor of America’s most populous metropolitan area, Bill de Blasio, has repeatedly called on President Donald Trump to assist his hometown, criticizing POTUS’ silence on Twitter: “President Trump, what’s going on? Cat got your tongue?” (Connor, 2020). In the absence of substantial support – compared with around $58 billion allocated to the airline industry, New York received $1.4 billion from the $2 trillion stimulus package – de Blasio has routinely exclaimed, “Where the hell is the federal government?” (Connor, 2020). Shortly after announcing $2 billion in municipal cuts, de Blasio likened the White House’s reticence to President Gerald Ford’s dismissal of the city’s financial fortunes in the 1970s, evoking the iconic Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead” (Helmore, 2020). Fifty years since its last fiscal apocalypse, New York City, despite its global economic prominence and cultural cachet, is suffering from an acute and humbling case of deja vu.
The epidemic has laid bare the shaky sands upon which all cities in America sit. The present crisis has exposed the fatal limitations of municipal health and financial systems; equally distressing, it has magnified the flaws in the political-economic contract between the federal government and local government in the United States. The pandemic has revealed how cities are cruelly and largely left to their own resources, talents, and fortunes to sink or swim. Las Vegas epitomized urban impotence when it painted rectangles on an asphalt parking lot to remind homeless residents to sleep six feet apart (Times Editorial Board, 2020). It could do no better for its most vulnerable citizens. This precarity predates the pandemic. For fifty years, America has countenanced urbanism on the edge of the abyss.
Despite present conditions which mock the confidence Rahm Emanuel conjures in his recent book, ‘The Nation City,’ the former mayor of Chicago was not wrong when he noted, “the old federal/local partnership has for all practical purposes ceased to exist” (Emanuel, 2020). Partnership. The word evokes a bygone era, an obsolete model of urban governance, forged in the radical furnace of the New Deal era. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration placed cities firmly at the center of its progressive and national agenda. On the federal government’s dime, mayors and municipal bureaucrats radically recast the urban landscape, constructing high-rises and highways, parks and pools.
As Mason Williams observed in City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York, the Roosevelt administration ushered in an age of “cooperative federalism” (Williams, 2013). The burst of public capital investment birthed a “municipal government which would otherwise have been impossible” (Williams, 2013). As one key New Dealer bureaucrat prophesized in 1937, “New York’s relations with Washington will be even closer than New York’s relations with Albany. I don’t know whether this will be a good or a bad [thing]; but I know that it will be so” (Williams, 2013).
Writing several decades later, during the twilight years of cooperative federalism, the sociologist Ray Pahl weighed the merits and shortcomings of the prevailing political model of “urban managerialism” (Pahl, 1970). Influenced by the German thinker Max Weber’s equivalence of bureaucracy with power (Leonard, 1982), Pahl’s collection of essays, Whose City?, described a robust network of ‘urban managers’ – housing officers, planners, social workers and decision-making bureaucrats – which allocated federally-funded resources, the most valuable of which was housing (Merrifield, 2014). Pahl impugned these so-called ‘social gatekeepers’ for failing to improve substantially the conditions of the poor and for possibility perpetuating their plight (Pahl, 1974).
Recent scholarship corroborates the sentiment. Lizabeth Cohen’s biography on Edward Logue, the mid-century “wizard redeveloper” of New Haven, Boston, and New York (Ehrenhalt, 2019), recounts valiant, albeit floundering efforts at urban renewal (Cohen, 2019). Logue funneled millions of federal dollars into multiple notable projects, most conspicuously into downtown New Haven, which he essentially redesigned as a suburban shopping mall. Embracing the since disgraced planning practices of the 1950s, the monotonous, boxy fortress incorporated no residential uses to bolster the retail and commercial components. To this day, the monotonous and dreary superblock discourages pedestrian curiosity and vibrant street life.
New York street scene, May 2020 (courtesy of the Author)
The federal urban renewal programs in New Haven inspired the Yale political scientist Robert Dahl to study their impacts on democracy. The declining industrial community was an ideal case study: per capita, New Haven received more federal dollars than any other American city (Bell & Stanley, 2012). In Who Governs?, Dahl concluded that while some people, such as Logue and the then mayor Richard Lee, archetypical urban managers, exercised more power than others, he did not discern a single homogeneous ruling elite (Dahl, 1961). Rather, he remarked upon the broad dispersal of power, which he labeled ‘pluralist democracy’ (Cohen, 2019). Dahl paid particular attention to the complexity and variability manifest in the Citizens Action Commission (CAC), the bipartisan body of six hundred people, formed to engage with the redevelopment agenda. In Dahl’s New Haven, federal dollars had democratized the political process.
Pahl recognized the pluralism imbedded in the urban managerial system and, despite its flaws, did not advocate its overthrow. Pahl credited urban managerialism for operating under the mechanics of Keynesian and the ethics of redistributive justice (Peck & Whiteside, 2016). He tempered his criticism and cautioned against the scapegoating of social gatekeepers, echoing a colleague who maintained, “criticism of local managers of the Caretaking Establishment… may lead to an uncritical accommodation to the national elite and to the society’s master institutions” (Pahl, 1974). Censure of social gatekeepers would only advantage capital’s growing dominance of the city (Pahl, 1974). Pahl warned that attacks leveled at urban management was “misdirected,” equivalent to “workers stoning the house of the chief personnel managers when their industry faces widespread redundancies through the collapse of world markets” (Pahl, 1975). If the then ascendant neoliberal city were an innately and inescapably unequal society, managers and gatekeepers could ameliorate the unequal allocation of resources (Forrest & Wissink, 2017).
As Wendell Pritchett encapsulates, the federal government’s elevated interest in urban affairs “was paralleled by a corresponding decline, among both the public and the politicians representing them, of faith in professionally managed solutions to urban problems” (Pritchett, 2008). Pahl had forewarned the erosion of the urban managerial model, which Dahl had admired; by the 1980s, urban Marxist scholar David Harvey had certified its erasure and its eclipse by its successor, ‘entrepreneurial’ urbanism (Harvey, 1989).
The advent of civic boosterism, a brand of politics which promotes inter-city economic competition (Harvey, 1989), was the chemical byproduct of a combustion of post-industrial social, economic, and political shocks referred to as the ‘urban crisis.’ The reduction in federal urban investment, the shrinkage of the local tax base due to suburbanization and deindustrialization, and the growing ideological appeal of neoconservatism colluded to weaken urban political and economic leverage and wherewithal (Harvey, 1989).
To sustain budgets and services, municipalities were compelled to adopt more business-oriented practices (Peck & Whiteside, 2016). Language morphed, masquerading deteriorating fiscal and physical conditions (Harvey, 1989). Cities became “active agents,” rather than mere things or spaces (Harvey, 1989). Increasingly, inter-city competition stressed “zero-sum dynamics,” “diminishing returns,” “first-mover advantages,” “winners” and “losers” (Peck & Whiteside, 2016). “Asset creation, valuation and securitization” facilitated global investment in “urban revitalization” (Pike et al., 2019). Hard-pressed cities came to articulate “growth” narratives, presenting potential investors with a “pipeline” of projects and robust “deal flow” (Weber, 2010).
As Harvey argued, the devolution of urban finances from federal to local government occasioned the financialization of the city and transformed urban infrastructure, once the pride of federal work programs, from a public good into an alternative asset class for financial actors (Pike et al., 2019). The expansion of private equity capital dedicated to infrastructure is telling. As of 2020, such funds have raised a total of $212 billion – double the size of funds committed five years ago (Dizard, 2020).
Fund and transaction volumes mount, despite cautionary tales, such as Chicago’s sale of its parking system to a Morgan Stanley-backed consortium in 2008. Cash-strapped during the trough of the Great Recession, Mayor Richard Daley sold the revenue rights of 36,000 parking meters for $1.2 billion (Levin, 2008). The mayor was heavily criticized for coercing the city council to approve the misguided deal. While Daley deployed the proceeds to fill shortfalls in successive annual budgets (Preston, 2010), the transaction has harmed the city’s long-term fiscal prospects. It remains a political hot potato, an albatross weighing heavily on the city’s coffers and conscience (Mohler, 2018). The consortium has doubled the system’s rates, while billing the city millions to compensate for loss revenues due to road construction and street festivals (Mohler, 2018). For the next 65 years, the transaction will likely increase the cost of critical infrastructure repairs and investments (Mohler, 2018). Meanwhile, the private consortium is anticipated to recoup its initial investment by 2021 (Mohler, 2018). Every dollar of net revenue thereafter, for the next half a century, represents pure profit.
The privatization of affordable housing has mirrored the financialization of infrastructure (Read & Sanderford, 2017). As the federal government has shifted from housing producer to market regulator and rule maker (Read & Sanderford, 2017), city leaders and agencies possess fewer resources to maintain public housing stock and are increasingly reliant upon the private sector. In 2018, de Blasio announced plans to privatize 62,000 apartments within the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) portfolio, the largest urban public housing stock in the US (Alexa, 2020). In February 2020, NYCHA sold nearly 6,000 units to a syndicate of private developers for $1.5 billion (Small, 2020). The deal was consummated under the auspices of the federal government’s Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program. Under RAD, housing stock is transferred to private owners and managers. The federal Section 8 program pays tenant rents, while the private operator covers outlays for expenses, repairs, and capital investments (Small, 2020). By shifting the burden of maintaining housing from the municipality to the private sector and federal government, RAD inverts and subverts the cooperative federalist model.
Neo-Marxist theory compounds the cynicism. According to its logic, urban infrastructure and housing are fundamental to the circuit of capital (Pike et al., 2019). Competition between capitalists generates over-accumulation in the primary circuit of capital, the manufacturing sector, reducing prices, diminishing profitability, and escalating unemployment and societal discontent (Pike et al., 2019). To circumvent these constraints, capital escapes, via a proverbial release valve, to the secondary circuit, the built environment (Harvey, 1978). “As the pressure builds,” Harvey writes, “either the accumulation process grinds to a halt or new investment opportunities are found as capital flows down various channels into the secondary and tertiary circuits” (Harvey, 1978). In sharp contrast to Dahl, for Harvey and other historical materialists, the answer to the question “Whose City?” was clear: it is the city of capital.
Macro trends and critical theory have conferred new profundity to President Lyndon Johnson’s quip – “Things could be worse. I could be a mayor” (Schragger, 2006). More so now than ever, city politics are politics by straitjacket (Peterson, 1981; Schragger, 2006). While cities in the United States are chiefly responsible for the health, safety, and welfare needs of the populace, state and federal officials determine when and under what circumstances to intervene (Schragger, 2006). Resource-rich localities can generally function, but as observed in Chicago and New York, the discrepancy between means and ends are chronic and endemic. Unlike nation-states, cities cannot control their borders; they cannot print money, implement countercyclical spending, or pursue other macroeconomic manipulations of the economy. They are vulnerable to state and national tax, redistribution, immigration, land use, labor, and industrial polices (Schragger, 2006).
New York street scene, May 2020 (courtesy of the Author)
Ultimately, a city’s manipulation of land becomes its principal vehicle to attract business. As Paul Peterson posits, urban politics is above all the politics of land use (Peterson, 1981). Land policy is also the grease which perpetuates neoliberalism’s hold on American urbanism, while exacerbating its regressive tax implications. As real estate developers lobby for increased government involvement to reduce private-sector risk, municipal resources are often redistributed from low-income households towards business elites (Saegert & et al., 2009).
The redevelopment of Hudson Yards in Manhattan represents one conspicuous vindication of social worker Floyd Hunter’s research in Atlanta, Georgia, which determined that power was largely dominated by a small number of business leaders (Hunter, 1953; Clark, 1967). The sum of tax breaks and other government assistance for Hudson Yards exceeds $6 billion (Haag, 2019). New York City invested an additional $2.4 billion to extend the subway system to the new mega-development and has allocated a further $1.2 billion towards its park and public recreation spaces (Haag, 2019). When revenue from the development could not service its bonds, the New York City Council funded $359 million in interest payments (Haag, 2019).
It remains to be seen whether these public investments deliver dividends for municipal finances. In any case, the redistribution of public finances towards business elites favors the opinion that they control and benefit foremost from urban entrepreneurialism and neoliberalism. The answer to Pahl’s core questions – Who decides? and Who decides who decides? – seems definitive: follow the flow of capital.
The 20th century’s last major federal government experiment in public housing – the HOPE VI program – carries dual symbolism. The ongoing redevelopment and demolition of 250 housing projects and 210,000 housing units (Hanlon, 2012) marks a consequential shift in the role of the federal government, from active producer of the urban built environment to regulator (Read & Sanderford, 2017). The federal government has ceded its former status to the private sector, which has eagerly filled the power vacuum. HOPE VI also represents an admission of failure. Despite the vast federal sums expended to produce public housing, due to a host of factors exogenous and endogenous to the buildings themselves, these housing projects regularly failed to uplift and better their communities (Goetz, 2013).
Critique of the contemporary paradigm must weigh current challenges against past errors. More profoundly, the decline in federal action correlates with a decline of idealism. As Edward Glenn Goetz notes in New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy, “the dismantling of public housing represents the repudiation of a New Deal policy orientation that saw merit in large-scale government social interventions, and that reflected faith that such interventions could produce positive outcomes” (Goetz, 2013).
This faith lies dormant. Prospects are dim that the CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion emergency relief package passed in March 2020, should hasten its rebirth. The law included $150 billion in direct aid to state and local governments (Mui & Sloan, 2020). Some politicians, however, have asserted that the extraordinary circumstances and the temporary aid do not warrant permanent or fundamental changes to the social contract (Times Editorial Board, 2020). As prominent activist Stacy Mitchell has lamented, “We are in an F.D.R. moment, and as far as I can see there’s no F.D.R” (Streitfeld, 2020). As society awaits the Covid-19 vaccine, it hungers for much more.
Josef Goodman is a housing developer based in New York City. As an undergraduate at Yale, he studied contrasting approaches to urban regeneration in Detroit and Leipzig. He is currently pursuing an MSc in in Sustainable Urban Development at the University of Oxford.
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