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Commentary By Nicole Gelinas

Gotham Falls

Cities New York City

What the hell happened to New York City?

In February, a visitor to New York would have found a thriving, prosperous metropolis, almost the cliché of the perfect city. More than 4 million people, a record, went to work in the city’s private sector every day, packing into crowded subways, buses, and commuter rail to do so. Crime was near record lows; 319 people were murdered last year, compared to 2,262 three decades previously. The earliest arrivals of the year’s likely 70 million tourists, another record, were snapping pictures of each other in Rockefeller Center’s iconic Channel Gardens. What could go wrong?

Of course, any number of things could go wrong: recession, terrorist attack, natural disaster, financial crisis, mass protest. But the city had weathered all those, and more, in recent decades, and bounced back stronger than ever. Whatever new disaster would come — and something always would — the city would be fine.

In early June, the same visitor to New York would have found, instead, almost the cliché of a chaotic dystopia, something out of the most fantastical urban-decline B-movies. Almost nobody is going to work: Only essential workers brave the transit system to staff supermarkets, drugstores, takeout restaurants, and hospitals. One million people have lost their jobs, and the rest are working from home — that temporary “home” for at least half a million New Yorkers, being no longer in the city, since people with resources have fled. Crime has skyrocketed. Murder is up by more than a quarter over the past month, and it’s not just gangbangers at risk. An innocent Uber Eats worker, Mamadou Diallo, was shot and killed waiting for the night bus, because the trains are closed at night for the first time ever.

There are no office workers or tourists — none. Rockefeller Center’s Channel Gardens are boarded up and fenced off, to such an extent that the neighborhood smells like a wood factory. It’s possible to find unswept glass in the gutter, the evidence of the previous night’s looting. Across the street, Saks Fifth Avenue is festooned with razor wire, patrolled by pointy-eared dogs. The only sounds of the city are helicopters, police sirens, and fire horns; anyone out for a walk anywhere in Manhattan risks running into a police-on-protester or looter-on-police skirmish. At 7 p.m., the emergency alert on the phone sounds: The curfew is looming. 

And the crazy thing is that nothing really went wrong. Yes, New York, like the rest of the world, is confronting a pandemic. But it is a pandemic that the city, with its unrivaled tax base, enviable public-health and emergency-response systems, attuned political class, civically responsive populace, and conscientious business community should have been able to handle without losing utter control of the city, to such an extent that Midtown’s Macy’s, a symbol the world over of New York’s hustle and bustle, is now a looting clean-up site. 

This is all shocking, but somehow not shocking. I moved to New York 21 years ago this summer. I have lived in Midtown Manhattan, the thin sliver of concentrated wealth and cultural production that supports a tri-state region with a 100-mile radius, for 18 years, more than 40% of my life. I arrived in a pre-millennial boom, when even young people in the liberal-arts-grad sector of the economy fought to pick up the restaurant bill, to show how well they were doing. I’ve seen terror and financial panic. And I’ve gradually absorbed for years how much of New York’s sturdy success is illusory. The city’s political class, business community, and issues-advocacy community were all brittle. They could not hold, and they haven’t. 

When I moved to New York in 1999, the city was booming, just like it was four months ago, but it was also confronting a social and racial crisis. That February, Amadou Diallo, an immigrant peddler, was outside his Bronx apartment when police called out to him. Diallo reached for his wallet, and police shot him: 41 shots. Diallo should not have died, and the shooting by police of an unarmed black man spurred mass protests. In March, tens of thousands of New Yorkers, including prominent politicians and celebrities, engaged in civil disobedience. Seventeen hundred faced arrest for disorderly conduct, for blocking a public thoroughfare. 

Yet this civil protest didn’t shut down the city. Protesters freely and rightly made their call to action and resumed their daily lives. They demonstrated peacefully, and the police made arrests peacefully. New York continued its by then decadelong trajectory of fewer, although never none, unjustified police shootings and lower crime overall. The city addressed its racial problems through the political and legal process, not on the streets. In 2013, for example, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg faced both political and legal pressure to curtail the use of "stop, question, and frisk," which predominantly affected young black men. Bloomberg sharply reduced such stops, and a new mayor, Bill de Blasio, continued the reduction; crime stayed down. No one claims that this system was perfect, or that New York had become a racial paradise, but it held together. 

Today, the fallout from another unjustified killing at the hands of police has paralyzed a city already facing a yearslong recovery from a three-month-old COVID closure. For more than a week, mass protesters have shut down a city that was already shut down. The city is accustomed to marches and protests for all sorts of existential causes: saving the planet from certain destruction, winning gay marriage, saluting Israel. Racial justice is a worthy, and acute, cause. But the tens of thousands of people in the streets can’t seem to grasp any context at all. Protesters are putting themselves, and, more likely, their older relatives and friends, in danger of severe illness or death from a raging pandemic, not to call for a specific reform, but to abolish the New York Police Department altogether because of a crime committed in Minneapolis, not in the Bronx. They’re doing it not once, to make their political call to action, but day after day, night after night. In some instances, they are engaging violently with law enforcement, burning police cars and hurling objects. In others, police are engaging violently with them, roughly attacking curfew-breakers. 

Worse, anarchists and opportunists are taking advantage of the street chaos to steal or destroy tens of millions of dollars in private property and set back the city’s recovery by months, if not years, imperiling hundreds of thousands of working-class, middle-class, and even upper-middle-class jobs. Are bank CEOs going to rush to open up their offices, exposing their commuting workforce to random wildcat strikes and curfews, anytime before the end of the year? At what point do temporary relocations of the city’s white-collar tax base and high-income residents, and much of the foot traffic for retail stores and arts and entertainments venues, become permanent? 

No elected, business, or civic official will risk any personal or political capital to say to protesters: Go home and stay home. We heard you, loud and clear. We will pass laws to improve local policing, including by making police disciplinary records transparent. But it does no one any good for you to die, or for your relatives to die, of COVID-19. Nor does it do anyone any good to decimate the city’s tax base. De Blasio, although highly inconsistent in his rhetoric, has said he was proud of his adult daughter for being arrested for peaceful protest, when no one should be part of any crowd during a pandemic. The rest of New York’s aspiring Democratic mayoral class has spoken up only to call for an end to police brutality in ever starker terms, never to voice sympathy with good police officers who are themselves under brutal attack by anarchists. The new, trendy political move — supported by one future would-be candidate, Comptroller Scott Stringer, as well as multiple city councilmen — is “defund the police,” a hollow pledge that solves nothing. 

What has happened to New York’s political community, that no aspiring mayor will say something that shouldn’t be that controversial? It is hard to imagine Bloomberg, Rudy Giuliani, David Dinkins, or Ed Koch not at least trying to use their political and personal capital to deter people from engaging in increasingly nihilistic protest in a deadly pandemic. They would have rather risked being called racist than watch people needlessly die, or watch the city’s tax base and workforce needlessly and indefinitely wither. 

The simple answer is the city has no credible political voices. De Blasio won two elections with record-low turnout, and virtually no one paying attention, because of a perceived lack of crisis. In 1993, Giuliani won office because voters saw crime as an existential threat; in 2001, Bloomberg won office because voters saw recovery from 9/11 as an existential threat that couldn’t be left in the hands of his hack-politician opponent. 

De Blasio, on the other hand, is not so much a mayor but a creature of political consultants, who ran him on a platform of anodyne progressive ideas seven years ago: preschool for everyone, tax the rich. His would-be successors, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, and Stringer, have slim name recognition and support. They are unaccustomed to trying to speak to the electorate as a whole, but rather have spent years cultivating the tiniest interest groups. Last year, for example, Johnson and the council spent much time and effort forcing increasingly obscure regulations onto Central Park’s horse-carriage industry, not because there is any evidence carriage horses are mistreated or suffering, nor because the voters were crying out for reform, but because a tiny yet powerfully organized faction, animal-rights activists, vote on this issue. Now, the horses and the 300 jobs they support have been out of business and out of town for three months, making the exercise moot. 

What about the city’s business community? What’s ominous from the world of finance, tech, and real estate aren’t misplaced superficial slogans; JPMorgan Chase is hardly calling to defund the police. What’s ominous is the complete silence. New York has not one corporate leader, not one, who feels comfortable enough to implore despairing New Yorkers to act in their own best long-term interest. Nearly five decades ago, in the city’s (last) fiscal crisis, New York at least had banking, corporate, and real estate leaders who could work responsibly behind the scenes, urging elected officials to put their own squabbles and parochial concerns aside for the greater good. These days, the city’s business community is just another factionalized slice of the global economy. Citigroup, once an emblem of New York’s economy, isn’t a New Yorkcompany. It’s a global company whose thousands of workers are now dispersed far from Midtown for a fourth month running. It answers only to investors, not to a civic purpose. Even marquee real-estate firms aren’t owners, with a stake in maintaining property valuations, as much as they are Trump-style nameplates; their investors hail from Qatar and China. 

How about the civic community, the nonprofit army of advocates for everything from reducing traffic deaths to a $15 minimum wage to encouraging recycling? New York’s civil society, though, doesn’t work so much in the public interest as it does for an atomized array of single-issue causes. Nobody can put aside the here-and-now crisis to get on the phone with the city council member he or she knows best to say: You know what, a tax base that is destroyed is really bad for the future of, say, bike lanes, or composting food scraps, or for all of those $15 minimum-wage jobs we just won. Let’s try together, even if we fail, to stop this madness. 

And even if a brave bike-lane advocate did say that, the political class wouldn’t listen. New York’s political, business, and civil-society class isn’t so much a sturdy coalition, but a series of Tinder one-night stands; I need you at my pro-Uber protest, but if I try to use my support on your pro-Uber bill to convince you, say, that we shouldn’t call for abolishing the police, I will ignore you. There is no long-term goodwill; there is no temporary suspension of rigid ideology. 

What happens next? It does not appear that any of our current political class will rise to the occasion. The moment is lost. The best outcome is a knight-or-dame-in-shining-armor newcomer: someone who can get past the demands to destroy the city unless we destroy the police to see that there is still a silent majority. Most New Yorkers, black, white, immigrant, are dismayed at police brutality. They also understand we need policing. They understand, finally, that we’re not going to fix it by burning it down. As I walk my empty, boarded-up Midtown day after day, I wonder: Is there someone out there who will talk to them before the rest of New York’s neighborhoods give up and leave?

This piece first appeared at the Washington Examiner (paywall)

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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in Washington Examiner