City of Fortune

About this item

A powerful history of New York's transformation from a city of middle-class aspiration to one of entrenched inequality. Postwar New York City famously expired in a 1970s tableau of burning Bronx tenements, subway graffiti, crushing debt, and the tabloid headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead." From its ashes the city reemerged to reach new heights, whether in stock averages or the gleaming pencil towers punctuating Midtown. But at ground level the city's basic institutions were cracking. The city was rebuilt on a foundation of deep inequality. This elegant history traces the making of contemporary New York over the half-century from the fiscal crisis of the 1970s to the Covid pandemic. The focus is on city life in three of its key dimensions: housing, schooling, and policing. With finance and real estate driving the city's growth, each of these areas became more exclusive, less democratic. Affordable housing grew scarce, with the homeless population