The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981 (Historical Studies of Urban America)

Upends entrenched thinking about cities, demonstrating how urban economies are defined-or constrained-by the fiscal imagination of policymakers, activists, and residents. Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated belief: what’s good for the rich is good for cities.Convinced that local finances depend on attracting wealthy firms and residents, municipal governments lavish public subsidies on their behalf.Whatever form this strategy takes-tax-exempt apartments, corporate incentives, debt-financed mega projects-its rationale remains consistent and assumed to be true.But this wasn’t always the case. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, a wide range of activists, citizens, and intellectuals in New York City connected local fiscal crises to the greed and waste of the rich.These figures saw other routes to development, possibilities rooted in alternate ideas about what was fiscally viable. In The Menace of Prosperity, Daniel Wortel-London argues that urban economics and politi