Free The Streets Were Paved with Gold by Ken Auletta

reimbursement. To raise the sums, the city issued revenue anticipation notes (RAN’s). When processing and other delays ensued, however, the notes were rolled over, backing up from year to year. By 1975, according to Mayor Koch’s first budget message, the city had $2.6 billion in RAN’s outstanding against federal and state aid—only part of it the result of fabricated city claims.
    Mayors also lost political control. It was politically popular to remove education from “politics,” to set up independent agencies and authorities outside of direct mayoral control. Ironically, mayors gained too much power over their budgets (particularly the art of revenue estimating) as they lost control of their governments. By the early 1970’s, mayors were held responsible for but did not control public and higher education, health care, and transportation; the books of the powerful Port Authority were closed to City Hall review. Social progress led to aroused public expectations and a proliferation of government, community and neighborhood organizations—city, state and federal agencies, local planning boards, community action agencies, neighborhood health councils, PTA’s, church groups, civil rights groups, police precinct councils, senior citizens’ centers, ethnic societies. The growth of government spending and citizen involvement, as well as the influence of television and mass communications, liberated New Yorkers from the shackles of political party bosses. But there was a price paid for that freedom. Mayors lost the ability to discipline interest groups, to curb new spending demands, to make decisions stick. “Forty years ago a Tammany political boss could give an order to a mayor,” Daniel Bell and Virginia Held wrote in 1969.
    Today, no such simple action is possible. On each political issue—decentralization or community control, the mix of low income and middle income housing, the proportion of blacks in the city colleges, the location of a cross-Manhattan or cross-Brooklyn expressway, etc.—there are dozens of active, vocal, and conflicting organized opinions. The difficulty in governing New York—and many other cities as well—is not the “lack of voice” of individuals in city affairs, or the “eclipse of local community,” but the babel of voices and the multiplication of claimants in the widened political arena.
    Even if “the city had had prudent, statesmanlike financial management over the last decade or two,” David Stanley wrote in
Cities in Trouble
, “it still would have been in trouble—not so deep or so soon, but clearly in trouble.” Probably.
    But to blame historical or social and economic forces, everything and everybody, is to blame nobody. We run the risk of learning nothing from what happened to New York. That’s where the other school of thought comes in. In my view, New York is much more the victim of self-inflicted wounds than it likes to admit. After a searching analysis of the city’s economy and budget, the Mayor’s Temporary Commission on City Finances issued a June 1977 final report which debunked what its authors called the “captive-of-events” theory of the fiscal crisis: the belief that the city had “little or no control over the events leading to the fiscal crisis.” Such a theory was “popular,” according to the report, because “it tends to absolve local political leaders of responsibility for the fiscal crisis and buttresses the also-popular view that the solution to the City’s financial problems lies in increased Federal and State aid rather than local political reform. The ‘captive-of-events’ theory thus has political as well as theoretical underpinnings that provide a justification for previous City policies and a rationale for not changing them in the future.” Pretty strong stuff, particularly when you consider that those signing the report included former Mayor Wagner, Governor Rockefeller’s former Chief of Staff, Alton Marshall, former City