The article “Making New York Smaller” by Roger Starr talks about how different ways to get New York out of the financial crisis in the 1970s. I hadn’t really read much about this before, and much of what was in the article wasn’t really anything I had read about either, so I found it very interesting and though provoking. Seeing that there was a financial crisis very recently, it’s interesting to think about if what he wrote still applies and his solution could still work today.
Starr says that New York can be divided into two cities that are responsible for producing New York’s wealth, the Economic and Political city. The Economic City is made up of the private and public enterprises that create goods or services people are willing to pay for. The Political City provides services for people such as criminal justice, elementary education, and fire protection. The Political City is partly funded by the Economic City by taxes and fees by vendors, but the Political City also produces wealth through the federal government. Starr’s distinction between the two cities and what they do is pretty interesting as I have never thought about or read about the city being separated in such a way, especially with the Political City because those services are things that I and probably most people don’t really think about since in this country, they are just services that city’s everywhere provide, as opposed to other countries where is might not be the case.
The two cities are intertwined, but from the article, it sounds like the Economic City is more important because it is the backbone. The Political City previously increased the local taxes on the Economic City when the cost of the services it provides increased, but in the 70s, it wasn’t possible with the Economic City not being able to provide enough jobs. Its like if the Economic City fails, the Political City would too, unless it gets enough money from the federal government, which doesn’t seem very likely. I think this can bee seen in other cities where the main industry and main source of wealth has fallen and the city can’t really survive, or at least in the same level it did before. The article mentions how New York’s exports lost their attraction and manufacturing shrunk to almost nothing, but I’m assuming that it wasn’t so bad because there are so many different industries and not just one large one with some smaller ones that most people are a part of.
The main argument in the article is the idea of planned shrinkage, which as Starr notes is not a popular idea. This is when there is a deliberate withdrawal of city services, to deal with decreasing tax revenue. This really just sounds unjust because the “normal” city services are what you expect in return for paying taxes. In addition, how would it be decided which neighborhoods would lose their services? How bad does a neighborhood have to be? Starr also says that the idea that the poor would be victims of the policy isn’t true, and the opposite is actually true. His reasoning for this just doesn’t make sense to me because he argues that the poor need the most government help, so it the government isn’t properly using its resources economically, it would hurt the poor the most, but wouldn’t just taking away government services including “normal” ones be worse since their neighborhoods wouldn’t get them at all?
Another thought I have is about after people do leave. The article says that consistent density through out the city is important. It’s better to have one full building than two half buildings. However, you could have many people leave from one neighborhood, and only some leave from another, but it’s not like you can just move those still in the mostly empty neighborhood to another. There could be the use of not providing city services but it might not necessarily work. I just don’t think planned shrinkage would be a good plan because it doesn’t hurt the people who need the most help and there are also so many different outcomes that could happen that aren’t easily dealt with.
