Upends entrenched thinking about cities, demonstrating how urban economies are defined—or constrained—by the fiscal imagination of policymakers, activists, and residents.
Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated belief: what's 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 takes—tax-exempt apartments, corporate incentives, debt-financed mega projects—its rationale remains consistent and assumed to be true. But this wasn't 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 strategies—which included cooperatives, public housing, land-value taxation, public utilities, and more—centered 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-London's ambitious history demonstrates the range of options we've abandoned and hints at the economic frameworks we could still realize—and the more democratic cities that might result.
By:
Daniel Wortel-London
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780226841090
ISBN 10: 022684109X
Series: Historical Studies of Urban America
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 15 October 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Introduction Part I. Taxation and Its Discontents, 1870–1913 1. “Monstrous Growth” 2. “Who Created It? Who Gets It?” 3. “That Privately Owned Land May Be Put to Its Best Use” Part II. On What Grounds, 1913–1945 4. “Homes Are More Important than Skyscrapers” 5. “Private Gains at Public Cost Cannot Be Tolerated” 6. “Actual Conflict” Part III. No Alternative, 1945–1981 7. “Front Office of the World” 8. “Communitas” 9. “Poverty of Ideas” Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography Index
Daniel Wortel-London is visiting assistant professor of history at Bard College.
Reviews for The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981
""Wortel-London offers a timely primer on the history of urban economic development, demonstrating how time and again the desire to grow New York City's economy did more to widen inequality than to solve fiscal woes. The Menace of Prosperity challenges the orthodoxy that all growth is good and powerfully asserts that there were--and are--alternative approaches to the elite-driven urban development that has dominated US cities since the nineteenth century. A more just economic future depends on a reckoning with past failures, and Wortel-London has provided a carefully researched and compellingly written account that those who work in urban policy today would do well to consult.""--Claire Dunning, author of ""Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State""
