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City Journal's 25th Anniversary Issue Is An Urban Policy Goldmine

This article is more than 8 years old.

Ever since becoming a cross-country traveler, I’ve visited New York City for at least one weekend every year to track all the new developments. The last couple trips, I've included a meeting with Aaron Renn, who is a Manhattan Institute fellow, author of the popular Urbanophile blog, and great resource for discussing all things city and urban. Last Monday, I visited him at MI's midtown office. During our conversation, a staffer went around passing out advanced copies of the 25th anniversary edition of City Journal, the institute's quarterly publication. Renn handed me his copy for my flight back to Miami, and I've since read it cover-to-cover. Like past issues, this Autumn 2015 one is an urban policy goldmine, and even more given it's a special double issue.

By spearheading New York City's reform efforts over the last 25 years, City Journal has served as somewhat of a chronicle for the city's recent history, and its ongoing fight for common-sense government. When the first issue was published in 1990, New York City had just completed 4 lost decades following its peak population in 1950. Along with uncontrollable global forces like deindustrialization and suburbanization, this decline resulted from a succession of bad mayors, poor financial decisions, urban renewal, lax policing, and work-discouraging welfare policies. By 1975, the city had nearly gone bankrupt, and throughout the next 15 years, slogged through a sub-par economic performance. In 1990, it suffered a record 2,245 murders and nearly a million welfare caseloads. Of the 140 Fortune 500 companies headquartered there in 1950, only 40 remained. Even more pertinent than the dire statistics, though, was the physical decline, as evident in old photographs showing graffiti-caked subways and rows of abandoned buildings in now-trendy areas like Bushwick.

The appropriate narrative has been that left-wing governance--embodied in New York City's well-educated but know-nothing Great Society mayor John Lindsay --hurt the city, and that the pragmatic, pro-business leadership which eventually followed from Mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg revived it. But there were intellectual underpinnings behind the changes, and no publication provided them better than City Journal. For over two decades, it has published numerous lengthy reform papers. As longtime Editor-At-Large Myron Magnet wrote in this most recent issue, taking a look back, many of the journal's ideas became policy, especially under Giuliani. Following his 1994 election, wrote Magnet:

It seemed that City Journal could have some real influence--especially since I recalled watching Giuliani scribble notes non-stop at an all-day Manhattan Institute seminar on fixing the city just before his 1993 campaign...The results turned out better than any journalist's wildest dream. Imagine having a politician actually listen to your proposals! Giuliani, to whom we always sent preview copies of the magazine, once flourished a copy of City Journal in a speech and said, "I don't know if you can plagiarize policies, but if you can, this is where I plagiarize mine."

Giuliani put them into practice, and following that early-90's low-point, when Time Magazine announced "The Rotting of the Big Apple ," the city has experienced an alarming drop in crime and increase in jobs. Rather than viewed from abroad as a war zone, it is one of the world's destination cities.

That said, the improvements City Journal proposed were not rocket science, but merely intuitive--the publication called for clean streets, safe parks, imprisonment for violent criminals, streamlined bureaucracies, school competition and work requirements for welfare recipients. The fact that the city would so dramatically reverse fortunes once provided these things showed what potential it had all along.

And yet, fast-forward 25 years to this issue, and you realize just how little the underlying rot of New York City's public administration has been scrubbed away. Nicole Gelinas writes about a Metropolitan Transportation Authority whose disorganization and labor rules cause projects to come in multiple-times over budget; Sol Stern criticizes a city teacher's union that still won't fire bad educators; and articles from other recent issues describe how progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio has tried rolling back the reforms that do exist.

Meanwhile, reform efforts in other U.S. cities, especially liberal legacy ones along both coasts, have been even slower--a phenomenon also covered in this issue. Heather MacDonald describes how carjackers and violent criminals are being released after several months in prison back into California's cities; Fred Siegel bemoans the destructive riot ideology of Baltimore, and the unwillingness of local politicians and intellectuals to condemn it; and Steven Malanga covers the terminal corruption and mismanagement of Atlantic City. Renn himself reports on the billions allocated by New York's state government to revitalize Buffalo through new housing, healthcare and infrastructure. But this is the wrong strategy, he argues, for a city whose cold weather and industrial decline has left behind an even smaller population to maintain any of it.

Indeed, after reading City Journal's 25th anniversary issue, I realized that the publication, for all its merits at reviving Gotham, has only changed but so much of the broader urban American status quo. Rather than following the journal's platonic governing ideals, many cities invert them--by protecting, rather than cutting, bureaucratic waste; by encouraging rather than policing criminality; and by embracing idiotic industrial policies, while regulating against the entrepreneurs who actually spur growth. This is a reminder of why we still need such publications.