New York shifted from a celebrated center of social-democratic experimentation to a state of neoliberal inequality, driven by a half-century of political and municipal transformation.
That sweeping evolution is the subject of Mason B. Williams’s new book, City of Fortune: Inequality and the Making of Contemporary New York, reviewed in the December 2026 issue of The Nation. Williams chronicles how the city’s economic capacity grew alongside unprecedented levels of poverty and urban division.
In 2013, Williams published City of Ambition, which detailed New York’s New Deal era. During that period, federal funding powered Fiorello La Guardia’s expansive municipal vision, supported by Franklin D. Roosevelt and a growing labor movement. Federal dollars built the public infrastructure, housing systems, and transit lines that defined generations of city life.
City of Fortune examines the post-1970s fiscal crisis that dismantled that local New Deal order. Williams centers his historical analysis on three political flash points: policing, education, and housing. Each area reshaped material conditions and ideological assumptions across the five boroughs.
Facing a massive crime surge in the 1960s and 1970s, the New York Police Department initially appeared powerless. However, under Mayor Ed Koch and subsequent administrations, new strategies like “broken windows” theory reshaped police activity, targeting minor acts of disorder in communities of color.
By the early 1990s, crime rates began to fall. Despite the declining crime numbers, the NYPD maintained intense pressure through aggressive “stop-and-frisk” practices. In 2011, the department recorded an astonishing 685,724 stops, disproportionately targeting young Black and Latino men.
In education, the city grappled with severe racial segregation. Officials experimented with magnet schools and alternative learning communities championed by educators like Deborah Meier. While these public school choice initiatives attracted middle-class families, critics noted they often siphoned vital resources and top teachers away from the broader system.
New York’s housing market faced parallel struggles over rent regulation. “Nothing animated the city's business community quite like rent regulation,” Williams observes, framing his discussion of housing around the never-ending contest over whether to expand, diminish, or eliminate rent control, as strict rent laws preserved a massive base of working- and middle-class renters.
In 1970, 1.3 million pre-1947 apartments were covered by strict rent control, while newer units fell under rent stabilization.
Real estate interests consistently lobbied to dismantle these protections, leading the New York State Legislature to institute “vacancy decontrol” in 1971. Although tenant mobilizations and organized labor repeatedly pushed back against deregulation, the affordability crisis worsened. By 2011, the median New York rental household became officially rent-burdened, spending more than 30 percent of income on rent.
Williams highlights two critical dynamics shaping these municipal struggles. First, state politics in Albany retain ultimate control over local systems, from rent regulation and tax rates to charter schools and transit funding. Even with recent legislative pushes, local leaders have faced roadblocks in securing approval for higher income taxes on wealthy residents.
Second, public policy maintained a striking continuity across different political parties and mayoral administrations. As the debate over urban equity continues, the structural shifts of the last fifty years remain deeply embedded in contemporary New York.
