Abstract
This chapter illuminates the relationship between New York City’s fiscal crisis in 1975 and its reinvention as a global city in the 1980s. It argues that the city’s global turn was not a product of globalization; rather, the origins of “global” New York—and of the global city phenomenon more broadly—were located in U.S. national politics and policy. Specifically, it was the failures of federal urban policy, which the fiscal crisis embodied and accelerated, that led the city to pursue the expansion of its financial sector and seek new forms of foreign direct investment. New York’s rise as a global city in turn facilitated the transformation of U.S. global economic policy and prompted other cities around the world to adopt New York’s model.
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Notes
- 1.
Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017), 164.
- 2.
David Binder, “Schmidt Criticizes ‘Restrictive’ U.S.,” The New York Times, October 3, 1975.
- 3.
Memorandum of conversation with Gerald Ford, Helmut Schmidt, Berndt von Staden, Dieter Hiss, Henry Kissinger, and Brent Scowcroft, October 3, 1975, National Security Adviser’s Memoranda of Conversation Collection, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0314/1553253.pdf (last accessed 8/5/21).
- 4.
Newsweek International Editorial Service, “Europe Weighs Impact of NY Default,” Newsday, October 16, 1975.
- 5.
Cong. Rec. 94 Cong., 1 sess. (1975), 34098.
- 6.
Jackson and Humphrey quoted in Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Hearings on the New York City Financial Crisis, 94 Cong., 1 sess. (October 1975), 20, 21, 27.
- 7.
Frank Van Riper, “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” New York Daily News, October 30, 1975.
- 8.
Phillips-Fein, Fear City, 197–200.
- 9.
Notes from Economic Summit in Rambouillet, France, November 16, 1975, National Security Adviser’s Memoranda of Conversation Collection, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0314/1553299.pdf (last accessed 8/5/21).
- 10.
Phillips-Fein, Fear City.
- 11.
Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 196.
- 12.
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987); Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
- 13.
For a helpful overview of these debates, see Daniel Sargent, “The Cold War and the International Political Economy in the 1970s,” Cold War History, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2013), 393–425.
- 14.
Greta Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
- 15.
Krippner, 87.
- 16.
Masha Sinnreich, New York, World City: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Future of New York City (Cambridge, MA: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1980), 3.
- 17.
Sinnreich, 5, 3.
- 18.
Sinnreich, 138.
- 19.
Phillips-Fein, Fear City, 197–200.
- 20.
Deborah Wallace and Rodrick Wallace, A Plague on Your Houses: How New York was Burned Down and National Public Health Crumbled (New York: Verso, 2001).
- 21.
Ella Howard, Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 179–209.
- 22.
Sinnreich, 29, 9, 30.
- 23.
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- 24.
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- 25.
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- 26.
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- 27.
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- 29.
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- 30.
Sinnreich, 121.
- 31.
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- 32.
On how U.S. governance structures have fostered inequality, see Peter Drier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century, 2nd Edition (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). On municipal bond markets, see Destin Jenkins, The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
- 33.
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- 34.
On capital flight from the Midwest to the Sun Belt, see Tom Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis; and Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). On suburbanization in the Northeast and Midwest, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003); and David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago, IL, 2007).
- 35.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “What Will They Do for New York?,” The New York Times, January 27, 1980.
- 36.
Phillips-Fein, Fear City, 292–93.
- 37.
Moynihan.
- 38.
See Fiscal Policy Institute, “New York City Taxes—Trends, Impact and Priorities for Reform,” January 13, 2015, http://fiscalpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/NYC-Tax-Report-Summary.pdf (last accessed 8/5/21).
- 39.
Drier et al., 136–37; Lizabeth Cohen, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 323–25.
- 40.
Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
- 41.
Robert Goodman, The Last Entrepreneurs: America’s Regional War for Jobs and Dollars (Boston: South End Press, 1979).
- 42.
Sinnreich, 121–22.
- 43.
Sinnreich, 138, 146, 45, 162, 31, 138.
- 44.
Sinnreich, 10–12, 27.
- 45.
Sinnreich, 158, 8, 127, 10, 5, 6.
- 46.
Sinnreich, 33–34.
- 47.
“A Guide to the New York City Economic Development Agencies,” 1985, New York City Municipal Library.
- 48.
Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
- 49.
Samuel Stein, Capital City Gentrification and the Real Estate State (New York: Verso, 2019).
- 50.
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- 51.
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- 52.
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- 53.
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- 54.
Sarah Miller-Davenport, “The Cultural Center of the World: Art, Finance, and Globalization in Late Twentieth-Century New York,” Journal of Urban History, published online January 2022.
- 55.
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- 56.
Richard Cole, Delbert Taebel, and Rodney Hissong, “America’s Cities and the 1980s: The Legacy of the Reagan Years,” Journal of Urban Affairs, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1990), 345–60.
- 57.
Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the New York City Partnership Luncheon in New York,” January 14, 1982, Reagan Library, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-new-york-city-partnership-luncheon-new-york-january-14-1982 (last accessed 8/6/21).
- 58.
John Plender, “London’s Big Bang in International Context,” International Affairs, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Winter, 1986–1987), 39–48.
- 59.
Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, “The US is increasingly a net debtor nation. Should we worry?” Brookings Institution blog, April 14, 2021.
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Miller-Davenport, S. (2024). The New York City Fiscal Crisis and the Domestic Origins of Globalization. In: Bessner, D., Brenes, M. (eds) Rethinking U.S. World Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49677-6_10
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