City of Fortune: Inequality and the Making of Contemporary New York, by Mason B. Williams (Norton, 400 pp., $38.99)
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s most consistent opponent has never been a political rival. Rather, it’s a concept: “austerity.” In his anti-austerity philosophy, the mayor relies on a growing canon of academic reconsiderations of the city’s 1970s fiscal crisis and its aftermath. The most prominent of these treatises was Columbia history professor Kim Phillips-Fein’s 2017 Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. A new book by Williams College political science professor Mason B. Williams, City of Fortune: Inequality and the Making of Contemporary New York, ably complements Fear City, while sharing its core defect: the history is (mostly) right, but the thesis is not.
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As a candidate and as mayor, Mamdani has defined himself against what he and other democratic socialists see as modern New York’s original error, as laid out in Phillip-Fein’s book: responding to the 1970s fiscal crisis with sharp cutbacks in social spending as well as a reliance on the private sector, particularly the banking and real-estate sectors, to grow the economy. It was a mistaken approach, the narrative says, because it harmed lower-income residents. Mamdani would break from this history in governing “in working people’s interests, rather than at their expense,” as he put it in his January inaugural address.
Williams picks up where Phillips-Fein left off. City of Fortune spans New York’s recovery from, and revival after, the fiscal crisis, from the Ed Koch mayoralty of the late 1970s and 1980s through the end of the Bill de Blasio administration in 2021.
The argument is stark: New York’s post-1970s recovery—some fiscal discipline brought to bear on municipal spending coupled with an embrace of the high-paying, white-collar private sector to generate more tax revenues—“facilitated the political interventions that laid the groundwork for the city’s reconstruction on frankly inegalitarian terms,” Williams writes. “For poor and working-class New Yorkers, the resolution of the fiscal crisis via austerity . . . and a renewed growth politics oriented toward the expansion of the middle and professional classes only exacerbated the challenges of everyday life.” The answer to the puzzle of “how to live together when the terms that had been established were terms of inequality” has been “mass poverty” as well as persistent racial segregation in neighborhoods and schools.
Williams advances this argument through three lenses: crime, housing, and education. On crime, across five mayors, he observes, New York embraced the Broken Windows theory of policing, which holds that controlling disorder will prevent more serious crime, and consistently targeted “quality of life” offenses. This singular focus encompassed everything from Koch-era efforts to bust open-air drug and stolen-goods markets on the Lower East Side to Michael Bloomberg’s reliance on the “stop and frisk” practice and the continued enforcement against illegal street sales of untaxed cigarettes under the de Blasio administration.
The city pursued this strategy because it wanted to preserve its middle class and affluent tax base and couldn’t do so unless it made its public spaces livable again after the disorder and danger of the 1970s and 1980s. But the “burden” of this policing “fell overwhelmingly on communities of color,” Williams writes, via unwanted police attention as well as incarceration, as well as police shootings of unarmed civilians.
On education, Williams praises public school decentralization and the “small schools” movement that began, in the 1970s, to challenge an unresponsive Bureau of Education bureaucracy. An experimental school in East Harlem, as well as the city’s creation of magnet schools, gave city parents, including poorer ones, some control over their children’s education. Classrooms in such well-managed and competitive schools were full of engaged pupils.
But he laments the move within the school system toward more competition, particularly the charter school networks that emerged in the late 1990s and in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Charter systems like the Success Academy campuses enforce strict attendance and behavioral standards and follow basic reading and math curricula. But they “introduced a new division within communities of color, with homeless, low-achieving, special needs and English-learning students less likely to be represented in the most successful charters than in surrounding schools,” Williams writes. He further criticizes Bloomberg’s strategy of closing failing public schools to turn over their buildings to principals of start-up public schools, calling it disruptive to communities.
On housing, Williams targets New York State’s partial deregulation of the city’s rent-regulation laws starting in the 1990s. These Albany policies, which allowed owners of rent-regulated apartments to assess 20 percent rent increases on vacant units, and to deregulate such vacant units once they passed through a high-rent threshold—beginning, in 1993, at $2,000 a month—were responsible for mass displacement, Williams claims. Meantime, multiple mayors built insufficient new housing for the middle class as well as for poorer residents, instead focusing zoning and tax benefits on developers building market-rate units for affluent newcomers. “It all added up to . . . a man-made displacement of people from their homes more commonly associated with civil strife than with everyday life in one of the world’s richest cities,” he concludes.
If we indulge his wild exaggeration and crude conclusions, though, Williams tells an engaging story in the details. He does not focus on personalities. You get no deep portraits of Gotham’s tabloid characters, or expositions of seminal events—whether the Crown Heights riots or 9/11—or tales of downtown discos and artists.
That’s not a bad editorial choice. Readers looking for that have lots of other options, including Jonathan Mahler’s 2025 The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990, and Thomas Dyja’s 2021 New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation.
Williams’s remove from personalities allows him to give the reader something more subtle and valuable: an overview of the infrastructure of New York politics and policy. Prosecutor Rudy Giuliani won the mayoral election in 1993, for instance, not only on the force of his personality and the public’s discontent with crime and disorder but also because the state’s Republican leaders convinced him and Senator Al D’Amato to bury a feud. Otherwise, intraparty infighting would have held back the insurgent. A year later, New York State got its first Republican governor in two generations, George Pataki—not because Pataki possessed sparkling charisma but because D’Amato, carefully working with pollsters to check off a list of electable Republican traits in a Democratic state, chose him as the best fit.
Two decades later, the animosity between Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio wasn’t (just) the byproduct of clashing personalities. It also sprang from calibrated political calculations. De Blasio, pushing hard for tax increases in 2014 and campaigning for progressive candidates in 2015, was too early in anticipating the progressive, and, later, democratic socialist, political revolution that would come as a response to Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016. Meantime, Cuomo, holding out as a moderate until progressives swamped the state legislature in 2018, was too late.
Likewise, Williams finds forgotten policy details in the archives. Few students of modern New York likely remember, or ever knew, that partial deregulation of the city’s housing-rental market was once a bipartisan goal. Then-governor Mario Cuomo signed into law the modest deregulation of vacant units in the early 1990s, a law later expanded by Pataki. Similarly, school choice was once a more ecumenical endeavor than it is today: “national-level conservatives tended to come to the concept of school choice later than Great Society liberals and community control advocates,” Williams notes.
And though Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg often figure as cartoon villains of the city’s alleged over-policing, Williams scrupulously reminds us that the city’s two progressive modern mayors—David Dinkins and Bill de Blasio—remained largely faithful to Broken Windows-based preventative policing. Both men expanded the ranks of the NYPD. Even under de Blasio, changes came in degree and tactics, not in overall strategy. (The Manhattan Institute and City Journal figure in this history, as the font of Giuliani’s policy ideas on education and crime, and as a leader of various coalitions for school choice.)
Williams is too honest an academic to avoid acknowledging New York’s spectacular crime drops beginning in the early 1990s, “coinciding” with more effective policing, and to note that crime fell faster here than in the rest of the country. His argument that Giulaini’s policing revolution was mostly a better-funded extension of Koch and Dinkins strategies may be an attempt to undermine the mayor’s place in history as the impetus behind New York’s 1990s turnaround. But it is also a reminder that New Yorkers generally like order and safety on their streets, and mayors respond to that preference, if not always with equal success in results.
Similarly, on education, when de Blasio pledged to end the Bloomberg practice of closing failing schools, some such schools “performed so poorly that de Blasio . . . reversed course and closed them.” This move wasn’t so much a flipflop as a pragmatic nod to what works. And though Williams sees the 2019 rollback of rent deregulation, enacted by the newly progressive state legislature, as a victory for a new era, he also notes that the law, by constraining property owners’ income, “raised new questions about how the housing stock could be maintained.”
Unfortunately for Williams, if not for the reader, these well-sourced details undermine his broader argument. The fact that multiple mayors with different ideologies, governing during different eras, eventually settled on similar broad strategies—private housing investment, school choice, and effective policing—doesn’t indicate a catastrophic groupthink error that ignored a credible alternative. It suggests that these solutions were the only viable ones.
And Williams never identifies an alternative path. In strategy if not tactics, he never quite tells us what, exactly, any of these mayors were supposed to do differently. As he acknowledges, there is no pot of federal or state money to provide unlimited housing for poorer New York natives and newcomers. The NYPD has for decades policed small-scale crimes not because of some plot imposed from above, but in response to resident complaints. Polls show that most people like assertive policing of their neighborhoods. Finally, charter schools perform well, as he notes, and parents like school choice: even as public school enrollment drops, charter school enrollment remains robust.
On inequality and poverty, the fact that New York benefited from the financialization of the economy to replace manufacturing jobs, as well as the globalization of finance, is well known. Should the city have turned such money away in an attempt to cling to jobs that no longer existed? Wall Street denizens and other professional classes have consistently provided the funds for New York’s high spending—but should the city have raised taxes even further over these decades to fund even higher spending? As Williams notes, Dinkins did raise taxes—to pay for more police. Bloomberg, too, hiked taxes after 9/11. City and state taxes are already high, and spending is thus concurrently high. The city’s $88.7 billion in annual tax revenue far surpasses the $5 billion ($31 billion in today’s dollars) it took in annually in 1975, and the marginal growth has been in education spending as well as rising pension and benefit costs for public-sector workers. The share of the city budget for basic public services, including policing, has shrunk.
New York’s persistently high poverty rate owes partly to the city’s continual importation of new immigrants, who prefer the city’s opportunity to those available in their home countries. Public housing, which assesses low rent as a proportion of low income, further encourages intergenerational poverty. As for desegregation, there’s no evidence that New York City parents dream of sending their kids to schools with more white kids, or that the city’s new immigrants in Queens and the Bronx wish that more white people lived in their neighborhoods. And, even if they did, there aren’t enough white people to go around in New York City.
Williams is a careful researcher, but he makes some errors that reveal his status as an outsider. (Though he holds a Columbia degree, he teaches at Williams in Massachusetts.) He confuses the Metropolitan Transportation Authority with a non-existent Metropolitan Transit Authority, a rookie mistake. Serious crime on the subways in the 1970s and 1980s wasn’t “relatively uncommon;” more than a dozen people a year regularly died in mostly random incidents on the rails, a number the city later reduced to one or two per year.
City of Fortune ends before the Mamdani mayoralty begins. But Williams does note that the “new progressivism” heralded by Bronx-Queens Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other insurgents poses “the most profound challenge yet to the governing arrangements that had emerged in the aftermath of the fiscal crisis.”
Does it? Mamdani, despite his rhetoric, shows flickers of absorbing New York’s half-century of post-fiscal-crisis orthodoxy rather than repudiating it. He seems to realize that public safety comes before anything else: more than half a year into his mayoralty, he has yet to launch his “department of community safety” to move some policing responsibilities to civilians, and he has retained Jessica Tisch, a late Eric Adams-era appointee and a proponent of preventative policing, as police commissioner. On housing, Mamdani has yet to propose any mass-scale public building program; instead, like his predecessors, he is gingerly working to encourage private development. (The mayor remains markedly uninterested in education, as opposed to childcare.)
What Williams writes about de Blasio in one instance—the mayor “had yet to realize a clear alternative” to the status quo—could sum up the unanswered question at the heart of City of Fortune: What were they all supposed to do instead?