{"product_id":"the-assassination-of-new-york-9781859841556","title":"The Assassination of New York","description":"Robert Fitch argues that, within a generation, New York City has been transformed from the richest city in the world to one of the poorest in North America. The pillars of its economy--Macy's, the \u003ci\u003eDaily News\u003c\/i\u003e, Citibank, Olympia and York, the Trump organization--have cracked or collapsed. Today, the officially poor in New York number nearly 2,000,000 and more than 400,000 residents of the city are without jobs. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn this indictment of those who have wrecked New York, Robert Fitch points to the financial and real-estate elites. Their goals, he argues, have been simple and monolithic: to increase the value of the land they own by extruding low-rent workers and factories, replacing them with high-rent professionals and office buildings. The planning establishment has been able of raise the value of real estate inside the city boundaries over twenty-fold. In doing so, Fitch suggests, it effectively closed New York's deep-water port, eliminated its freight rail system, shuttered its factories and destroyed its capacity for incubating new business. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eNow the real-estate values have collapsed. The city is left with 65,000,000 square feet of office space--enough to last, without any new building, to the middle of the twenty-first century. In pursuit of those who are responsible, Fitch arraigns the great and the bad of the city's establishment: Roger Starr, architect of \"planned shrinkage\" (the withdrawal of fire, police and mass transit services from black and Latino neighborhoods); the Ford Foundation, which proposed converting vast tracts of the South Bronx into a vegetable garden; City Hall fixers like John Zucotti, Herb Sturz and James Felt, who cut the deals between government and real estate by working for both sides; and the Rockefeller family, whose involuntary investment in the Rockefeller Center became a gigantic \"tar baby,\" nearly swallowing up their entire fortune. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eDrawing on never-before-published material from the Rockefeller family archives, as well as other archival documents, this book aims to expose those responsible for the demise of New York.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Verso\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 04\/17\/1996\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781859841556\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 324\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.07lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.07h x 6.03w x 0.81d","brand":"Robert Fitch","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42506195337397,"sku":"9781859841556","price":25.46,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0473\/0804\/6492\/products\/img_7711fd61-86a8-4363-87bf-778f65b342e6.jpg?v=1668526516","url":"https:\/\/pastforward.org\/products\/the-assassination-of-new-york-9781859841556","provider":"Past Forward","version":"1.0","type":"link"}