Across the world, business closures and plummeting tax revenues in the wake of Covid-19 have weakened the already fragile finances of municipal governments and the struggling citizens and communities who rely upon their services. Historians largely assume that local fiscal fragility is a recent phenomenon stemming from national trends of economic decline and taxpayer flight since the postwar era.
Such interpretations, however, overlook an older and more insidious source of local fiscal crises: destructive forms of economic growth promoted by local governments themselves.
Since the late nineteenth century, public subsidies towards speculative real-estate developments have not only failed to pay their own way, but have consistently undermined the well-being of marginalized communities, underwritten economic stratification, and entrenched the for-profit sector’s power over democratic governance.
By uncovering the intellectual history and political consequences of public finance theories and economic development practices, my scholarship challenges destructive assumptions equating private-sector wealth with public-sector health while revealing more sustainable and equitable sources of community wealth-creation in our own time.
“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 even 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”
“The Menace of Prosperity deserves to join the classics of urbanism by Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and others...I learned something new, and found something new to think about, argue with, and reflect upon, on every single page. It is a great, great book.”
—Russell Arben Fox, professor of political science at Friends University