John Zuccotti and New York’s Austerity Regime 1975-1994
by Jonathan Soffer, Associate Professor of History, NYU Polytechnic Institute.
Recent demonstrations by Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park, focusing on the unequal distribution of wealth and protesting austerity have a strange resonance for New Yorkers who lived through the fiscal crisis of 1970s and 1980s. The park is named for John E. Zuccotti, who was installed by the Emergency Financial Control Board as first deputy mayor in 1975, over Mayor Beame’s objections. Zuccotti presided over deep across-the-board budget cuts and restructuring of the city government from 1975-77. Some of this restructuring made the city government more productive, but many cuts were irrational, with measurable effects that cost the city more than they saved.
For example, cuts in the Probation Department made in 1975 slowed the release of prisoners, which cost the Corrections Department more money to keep incarcerated than the reduction in the Probation budget had saved. Most glaringly, the failure of the federal government to back New York City bonds meant that the city’s infrastructure was left almost entirely without repairs for more than five years, and the deteriorated capital plant cost vastly more to repair than if maintenance had remained routine, and reduced tax revenues during the crisis by reducing construction employment. Some decisions, such as the imposition of tuition and decline in public support for the City University of New York merely shifted burdens to individuals, as students accumulated debt for their education. Indeed, as studies have shown that people with even a year of college education are less likely to commit crimes, the tuition decision may have contributed to rises in the crime rate as much as cuts in police.