Headed Back to the 1970s in Bed Stuy and Beyond?
“The economic crises of the early 1970s overwhelmed New York City,” writes James Doran in the British newspaper The Guardian. “The stock market crashed, oil prices plunged and unemployment soared.” Now that we’re rewriting that same scenario, will the same crime wave surge again? The article zeroes in on Bed-Stuy, the domain of Frank Serpico…
“The economic crises of the early 1970s overwhelmed New York City,” writes James Doran in the British newspaper The Guardian. “The stock market crashed, oil prices plunged and unemployment soared.” Now that we’re rewriting that same scenario, will the same crime wave surge again? The article zeroes in on Bed-Stuy, the domain of Frank Serpico who would be wowed and disoriented by the million-dollar brownstones of the neighborhood today. “Crime has dropped dramatically over 30 years and continues to show strong reductions,” in the area. But what will happen now that we’ve got a billion dollar budget gap and a 5,000-man reduction in the police department? “There were 455 murders in New York City in the year to 16 November compared with 429 in the same period last year, an increase of 6 per cent,” they write. “And this is just the beginning of New York’s woes. The slump is expected to take a big toll on a city which relies on the financial services sector for some 10 per cent of its overall tax revenue. Add to that the amount of money that is pumped into the economy by wealthy bankers and financial traders who until recently were buying mansions and luxury cars and eating at expensive restaurants with abandon, and it soon becomes obvious that New York City is bankrolled by Wall Street.” Commissioner Kelly told the City Council yesterday that it would be a real challenge to keep crime down. On the jump, a handy comparison of 1970 NYC and now.
New York Fears Return of Dark Days [The Guardian]
Photo by csamperezbedos.
1970s:
• Price of a subway ride – 30 cents in 1970 to 80 cents by 1979
• Price of a hot dog in Coney Island $1
• Top TV shows – All in the Family, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley
• Millions move out to the suburbs in the great urban flight
• Economy so bad that 3,000 are arrested for looting during a blackout
2008:
• Price of a subway ride $2
• Price of a hot dog at Nathan’s in Coney Island $3.20
• Top TV Shows – Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, Heroes
• Millions move back to old city neighborhoods left derelict for a generation
• Economy so bad that mayor Michael Bloomberg demands a third term.
My predictions are off today 🙁
Polemicist,
You’re drinking the Republican kool-aid.
NYCHA started and developed many large projects well before the 1960s.
Seems that middle income development was a product of the 60’s (MitchellLama).
polemicist:
A book you might like, on the topic of public housing and other issues like you were describing –
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Life-at-the-Bottom/Theodore-Dalrymple/e/9781566635059/?itm=6
Rob, Brooklyn would turn into Fishtown in the 80’s. Which means mostly what it would cause would be a lot of explosions from bad labs. But I am not seeing that happening.
Montrose
Are you seriously trying to blame the crime wave of the 1970s on returning vietnam vets?
And, last time I checked, the humble residents of NYCHA properties have pretty nice, spacious apartments with free air conditioning for the cheapest rent imaginable. The vast majority of the world’s citizens would love to live in such properties if they weren’t filled with social rejects.
They told us we had to build housing projects in the 1960s because black social dysfunction was the result of their poor living conditions and years of racism. We built the projects, and crime just got worse. It wasn’t just crime. Out of wedlock births, literacy, everything got worse.
Crime in the 1970s was the direct result of liberal social programs that destroyed black culture. They were turned into political pawns in a power grab, and it destroyed them.
This is the danger we have today. We have a huge underclass – mostly the prominent “minorities” of the last liberal golden age – that has been manipulated into a culture of nihilism through endless bribery schemes of which NYCHA housing was just one. When the money runs out, they will run wild just as they did in the 1970s.
And please, despite the fact many prominent black intellectuals have wrote on this very topic, don’t throw out the race card (this is not necessarily directed towards you MM). This same sociological phenomenon has happened everywhere government giveaways have been tried. From Glasgow to Panama City, Panama – “helping” the poor by giving them essentially free everything always creates a culture of weakness and dependence devoid of civilized ethics.
I think you’re also not picking up on how rapidly things change. Bed-Stuy was still at least half white well into the 1950s. Demographic shifts can and do happen very rapidly. For the record, I do hope you are right – but these kinds of trends are very difficult to predict. When the money starts to run out, I don’t think any of us can make an informed prediction of what the future holds.
im sorry but i see the types of prissy people going in and out of all the new condos. (men and women) lol there’s no way they are going to mouth off to a criminal and not get their face rearranged.
*rob*
We have that already it is called old ladies in the window…
easy, easy 🙂
I do not see why people would not try to resolve this themselves and can create patrol groups on each street and on each block.
I have no problem to join such group. We could have shifts and groups big enough that could simply scare off at least some part of the crime. Groups and members should be registered with local precinct and have to be in direct contact with police offices on duty during shift.