The Menace of Prosperity

Upends entrenched thinking about cities, demonstrating how urban economies are definedor constrainedby the fiscal imagination of policymakers, activists, and residents. Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated belief: whats good for the rich is good for cities. Convinced that local finances depend on attracting wealthy firms and residents, municipal governments lavish public subsidies on their behalf. Whatever form this strategy takestax-exempt apartments, corporate incentives, debt-financed mega projectsits rationale remains consistent and assumed to be true. But this wasnt always the case. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, a wide range of activists, citizens, and intellectuals in New York City connected local fiscal crises to the greed and waste of the rich. These figures saw other routes to development, possibilities rooted in alternate ideas about what was fiscally viable. In The Menace of Prosperity, Daniel Wortel-London argues that urban economics and politics are shaped by what he terms the fiscal imagination of policymakers, activists, advocates, and other figures. His survey of New York City during a period of explosive growth shows how residents went beyond the limits of redistributive liberalism to imagine how their communities could become economically viable without the largesse of the wealthy. Their strategieswhich included cooperatives, public housing, land-value taxation, public utilities, and morecentered the needs and capabilities of ordinary residents as the basis for local economies that were both prosperous and just. Overturning stale axioms about economic policy, The Menace of Prosperity shows that not all growth is productive for cities. Wortel-Londons ambitious history demonstrates the range of options weve abandoned and hints at the economic frameworks we could still realizeand the more democratic cities that might result.