Fear City ─ New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics

An epic and riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster--and an anatomy of the politics of austerity that continues to shape the world today

When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible: how could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? And yet the city was billions of dollars--maybe twelve, maybe fourteen, no one even really knew how much--in the red. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was doomed to failure--and promised apocalyptic scenarios if the city didn't fire thousands of workers, freeze wages, and slash social services.

In this vivid, gripping account, historian Kim Phillips-Fein tells the remarkable story of the crisis that engulfed the city, forever transforming the largest metropolis in the United States and reshaping ideas about government throughout the country. In doing so, she brings to life a radically different New York, the legendarily decrepit city of the 1970s--when the Lower East Side was filled with rubble from broken-down buildings, when Bushwick was burning, the subways were covered in graffiti, and battles raged in the streets as working class people fought to protect neighborhood services from budget cuts. Drawing on never-before-used archival sources as well as interviews with key players in the crisis, Phillips-Fein guides us through the hairpin turns and sudden reversals that brought New York City to the edge of bankruptcy--and kept it from going over. At once a sweeping history of some of the most tumultuous times in the city's past, a colorful portrait of the unwieldy mechanics of municipal government, and an origin story of the politics of austerity, Fear City is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the resurgent fiscal conservatism of today.

Kim Phillips-Fein is a professor of history at New York University and the author ofInvisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal. A recipient of grants from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she has written forThe Nation, Dissent, The Baffler, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, among other publications. A lifelong New Yorker, Phillips-Fein grew up in Brooklyn in the years immediately following the fiscal crisis. She currently lives in Greenwich Village with her husband and two children.