Roger Starr’s “Making New York Smaller” discusses various methods of saving New York from the financial crisis of the 1970s. Beforehand, Starr explains how the city is fiscally divided into the Economic City and the Political City. I really liked this description of the city, for I’d never thought to separate it as such. As I understand it, these two entities must balance each other out. In essence, the revenue earned in the Economic City becomes the basis for the taxes collected from the Political City, so there’d be an issue if either of them fell behind. When it came to the financial crisis, the Economic City was lagging, so the Political City had to overcompensate to maintain the balance. This led me to question whether or not NYC could survive solely on the Political City. If the economy ever got so bad that there was basically no revenue, could we get by on federal funding? If this balanced system were to fail, do we have any sort of backup plan?
It is mentioned in the article that New York used to be a center for manufacturing and that it was suffering financially because it was no longer that. While the shift occurred for other reasons, something that caught my attention was that New Yorkers didn’t want to think of their city as a factory town. I personally never thought New York had that image to begin with and that it was always a tourist attraction, but it seems that tourism was not always what it is today. Apparently, tourism was low at the time that the article was written. I’m not sure if that’s a result of the financial crisis or if New York just didn’t have as much to offer as it does now. Still, I agree with the consensus that New York should be more than a factory town. Starr implied that the decline in manufacturing brought financial troubles, but I’m glad that nobody pushed for the return of factories. If that had happened, the NYC that I grew up in might have been monumentally different.
One of Starr’s main arguments was the concept of planned shrinkage. He believed that the city’s population would decline as the number of jobs declined and that the city government should plan accordingly. However, I don’t really see how he could anticipate such a drastic change in the population. Even with unemployment at an all-time high, there’s no guarantee that people would leave. If they did, it probably wouldn’t be until a few years later anyway. If it were me, I’d probably just muddle through it until the city found a way to get out of that rut. I wouldn’t want to uproot my entire life just because the economy was temporarily unstable. Who said the same thing wouldn’t happen in another place too? I don’t think Starr was being very realistic when it came to his contingency plan. He proposed federal assistance in this process, but I don’t think that’s plausible in such magnitudes.
There really wasn’t a specific way to plan for a smaller population either. If a significant number of people did move away, which places would still be considered alive? There wouldn’t be enough funding to support the entire city, so only certain places would receive maintenance while others became desolate. That alone sounds bad, but how would you get people to move into these designated areas? If an entire building is vacated with the exception of one resident, it wouldn’t be fair to make him/her move and there’d probably a lot of resistance too. Perhaps that area would have been a good place to maintain too, so it would be a waste to shut it down. How would any of this be decided?
Towards the end of the article, Starr almost refutes his entire plan by saying that the Department of City Planning could formulate multiple plans based on possible future populations. If they were to do that, there is really no point in banking on the hope that the population would decrease. It could fluctuate easily based on so many factors, so I think all of this planning would have been useless. Starr shouldn’t have been focusing on coming up with possible outcomes; he needed to find a way out of the financial crisis. That means devising a plan to implement right away, not hypothesize how to handle a situation that could basically go in any direction. All the time people spent criticizing his idea of planned shrinkage (and all the time Starr took to defend it) could have gone to a better and more productive cause, which would have been ending the crisis instead of figuring out how to deal with its supposed aftereffects.
