The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981
University of Chicago Press, September 2025
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 politics are shaped by what he terms the “fiscal imagination” of policymakers, activists, advocates, and other figures. His survey of New York City during a period of explosive growth shows how residents went beyond the limits of redistributive liberalism to imagine how their communities could become economically viable without the largesse of the wealthy. Their strategies—which included cooperatives, public housing, land-value taxation, public utilities, and more—centered the needs and capabilities of ordinary residents as the basis for local economies that were both prosperous and just.
Overturning stale axioms about economic policy, The Menace of Prosperity shows that not all growth is productive for cities. Wortel-London’s ambitious history demonstrates the range of options we’ve abandoned and hints at the economic frameworks we could still realize—and the more democratic cities that might result.
Available July 2025.
Praise
"Daniel Wortel-London’s The Menace of Prosperity is a revelatory gut-punch of urban history—a book that dismantles century-old economic dogmas with the precision of a scholar and the urgency of a street protest." - As someone who’s witnessed New York’s skyline transform under the weight of luxury condos and corporate subsidies, I was electrified by Wortel-London’s excavation of forgotten alternatives: cooperative housing models, land-value taxes, and public utilities that once promised a more equitable city. The chapter “Homes Are More Important than Skyscrapers” (Part II) left me equal parts inspired and furious—how had these ideas been erased from mainstream policy discourse?
Wortel-London’s genius lies in framing economic policy as a battleground of “fiscal imagination” rather than inevitability. His archival sleuthing reveals how 19th-century labor activists and mid-century planners dared to question whether chasing wealthy residents truly benefited cities—a radical notion even today. [...]
By the conclusion, I felt armed with something rare in urban studies: hope. If these alternatives once flourished, they could again.
The Menace of Prosperity isn’t just urban history—it’s a manifesto for reclaiming cities from the 1%."
- Sarah Jensen
“Wortel-London offers a timely primer on the history of urban economic development, demonstrating how time and again the desire to grow New York City’s economy did more to widen inequality than to solve fiscal woes. The Menace of Prosperity challenges the orthodoxy that all growth is good and powerfully asserts that there were—and are—alternative approaches to the elite-driven urban development that has dominated US cities since the nineteenth century. A more just economic future depends on a reckoning with past failures, and Wortel-London has provided a carefully researched and compellingly written account that those who work in urban policy today would do well to consult.” -- Claire Dunning, author of “Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State”
“During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, New York City became the nation’s and then the world’s capital of capital. But to those who lived there, New York City remained just that—a city of working families who rode subways and buses, sent their kids to public schools, and struggled to pay the rent. As Wortel-London brilliantly shows in this compelling book, the work and welfare of New Yorkers and the public servants they elected was shaped and often dictated by the ideologies and interests of capital. From the C-suites of global financial institutions, the destiny of New York City was decided. Wortel-London’s timely book reminds us that the goods of ‘economic growth’ aren’t distributed evenly or fairly, and that by chasing it we cheat ourselves out of a better and more livable future for all.” -- Brian Phillips Murphy, author of “Building the Empire State: Political Economy in the Early Republic”
“The Menace of Prosperity is a shockingly provocative history of New York’s political economy, which targets the conventional wisdom of generations of politicians and scholars. No one escapes Wortel-London’s critique. He roasts conservatives who try to subsidize the rich, liberals who try to sustain the system with subsidies to the poor, and neoliberals, who try to do both. Whether or not you agree with Wortel-London, The Menace of Prosperity is a must-read for any scholar or policymaker invested in the city’s future.” -- Jonathan Soffer, author of “Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City”