Abstract

The Apple Polisher

The article discusses the book "The Rise and Fall of New York City," by Roger Starr. Starr has been the kind of public figure New York City's housing activists love to hate. He has often invited that hatred, delivering himself of dyspeptic observations about an ill-mannered populace whose selfishness and myopia he blames for the disaffection of major investors and hence for New York City's fall from civic grace. He tells readers that courting capital requires well-mannered city officials and good workers; that it requires such legal bribes for investors as generous zoning and tax concessions; that those and other social costs of private ventures must be artfully marketed to restive tax-payers; and, most important of all, that the city needs the provisional dictatorship of visionaries, who forced open the city to an automobile age that would otherwise have passed it by.