The drug epidemic followed a decade of inner-city turmoil and social upheaval. Anti-police protest movements continued to rage on sporadically. Police were afraid to patrol some neighborhoods. Tourists were told to avoid being out at night in many areas. Never walk back to their hotel alone.
Every year, locals and tourists flocked by the thousands to Times Square to ring in the new year as only New York City can. They were surrounded by porn theaters, shady “massage” parlors, stores that sold off-the-wagon and counterfeit merch, a few actual drug-dens. Reeking bags of trash piled up in the alleys. Drugged-out homeless zombies littered broken sidewalks. The glitz and glamour of NYE in NYC covered it all up for a night. But nothing ever really changed.
Year after year, politicians would ring in their next spending project with grand proclamations of urban renewal and rebirth – just one more program, they promised, a little bit more money, and our problems will be solved. But bloated, broken bureaucracies achieved little, and nothing ever really changed.
Until 1994. In January of that year, a fiery former prosecutor – Rudy Giuliani – was sworn in as Mayor. The first Republican Mayor of New York City in 23 years, Guiliani campaigned on two simple messages: stop the crime, do the work. And Giuliani won. The trash was picked up, the alleys emptied out, the sidewalks repaired. Above all, the law was enforced. And things changed. Times Square blossomed, restoring its place as some of the most desirable commercial real estate in the world. Crime receded. People thrived. And for the next 15 years, New York City – with most of the America’s other great cities quickly, if quietly, following – experienced a renaissance.
Today, Giuliani is mostly known for his foibles in Trump World. That shouldn’t diminish the legacy he left as Mayor, or reduce the imperative for our cities to return to the successful foundations of the policies he spearheaded. 2022 brought stark relief to the harsh realities of America’s inner cities. Crime is out of control again. Trash is piling up as municipal services strain under the weight of broken and non-functional bureaucracies.
The turnaround will be tougher this time. For his iron hand in law enforcement, Giuliani faced relentless, vicious critiques and accusations of racism from the left. Modern reformers face more pervasive social media-driven attacks backed by leftist controlled establishments in media and academia; institutions whose denizens flocked to inner cities made safe by Broken Windows policing - where they have driven rents up and blue-collar workers out, replacing the get-it-done ethos of everyday Americans with a growing flock of university and government employees whose entitled-insider mindset rejects out of hand any policy or government priority that fails to meet a race-obsessed, ever-changing and capricious set of leftist ideals. And none of those ideals has anything to do with results.
America’s great cities set the stage for everything that happens in this country, though, so turning around the sudden post-2019 decline in their livability is critical for every American. The bad policies festering in the hearts of our metropolises must be replaced by common sense policies that spend far less time bowing to the perpetually offended Twitterati, and more time focusing on the needs of everyday citizens and push officials to make the following Three Municipal Resolutions for 2023:
Enforce the Law
It’s perfectly legitimate to have a discussion about which laws we want to have on the books, and what the proscribed punishments for breaking those laws should be. It is entirely illegitimate, frankly dangerous, for judges, prosecutors, and elected officials to selectively choose not to enforce the law on the basis of personal ideology amid the rise of grievance politics. We are witnessing a breakdown of law and order that is damaging the foundations of our nation, and our moral character as humans. We see it every day from the shoplifting sprees, to random violence being perpetrated on our streets, to the reprehensible behavior of airline travelers. Cities across the country looked the other way in 2020 as angry mobs burned, looted, and destroyed. No one was held accountable, never will be: and everyone knows it. This must end.
Enforce the law with an iron hand. Enact broken window policing policies. Support and protect officers: even when they make mistakes (and they will). That doesn’t mean refusing to hold police accountable for their actions – any officer who engages in malicious conduct should always be prosecuted to the full extent of the law – but those sorts of charges must be carefully separated from the mistakes officers will sometimes make in the heat of the moment.
Police must be supported. Criminals must be prosecuted. And every single law on the books enforced.
Free The Housing Market
There’s virtually no city in the U.S. that has built enough housing over the last ten years. The money is there to do it – government regulations, not-in-my-backyard opposition, and bureaucratic inertia are preventing it. And housing is the purest supply-and-demand market in the world: if there’s more supply than people who want to buy, prices drop. It’s that simple, and it’s time to Build Baby Build.
Enact time limits on municipal zoning, planning, and permitting processes. There is absolutely no reason that applications for new housing need to spend years in this process – years that dramatically increase the cost of the final product. Six months is FAR more than enough time to solicit public inputs, process all the paperwork, and proceed to a final vote. Anything more is just a marionette show designed to let elected officials and government agencies off the hook for indecision.
Create more flexibility by including options for tiny homes and apartments, auxiliary dwelling units, and duplex / triplex designs in your local codes. Cut unnecessary requirements like mandating that every unit have a closet for a water heater – a waste of 20 square feet – and allow modern technologies like tankless water heaters to flourish.
Make it easier, cheaper, and faster to build new housing.
Teach Skills
The single greatest deficit in the current economy is skilled labor. Every single trade is experiencing a shortage of workers. And our K-12 system is more focused on ideology than outcomes. It’s time to revamp our schools with a heavier focus on skills training, certifications and all the other elements of quality Career and Technical Education.
That includes training for students to start on the path to becoming fire fighters, EMTs, and police officers. Nurses and behavioral healthcare workers. Virtually every essential career – and these are good paying, rewarding jobs – needs more trained applicants. Local officials need to stop allowing our schools to serve as training grounds for incoherent leftist activism and start churning out the people we need to save lives and swing hammers.
Sam Stone is the Co-Host of Breaking Battlegrounds Podcast & Radio Show, and a Candidate for the Phoenix City CouncilPHX