NYC in 1981 = Toronto in 2010?

[greenleaf]

I thought the UT board would find this interesting.

Google books has lots of magazines in their archives and I came across this New York Magazine article from November 2, 1981 by Nicholas Pileggi titled "Wounded City: What's happened to our life here?" (scroll down to p. 26; let me know if the link doesn't work)

There are a number if similarities between NYC in 1981 and Toronto in 2010:

• A balanced city budget
• The city looks/feels dirty with trash scattered in the streets
• Infrastructure issues, including needing to replace aging pipes, water mains, sewers, etc
• Deferred maintenance and/or lack of federal or state funding for major projects including subways, bridges, and potholes
• Transit issues (in 1980 they had an average of 196 subway car breakdowns...per day! also to note: they had 458 subway stations and over 6700 subway cars at the time)

Differences:

• Drug dealers taking over public spaces and other antisocial behaviour
• Outright disregard for police
• Commonality of cars running red lights

It was an interesting article to see where NYC was and where it is now, about 30 years later. To further compare them in 1981 and us in 2010, NYC population at the time was a little over 7 million and I think the GTA's population now is almost 6 million.

 

[Darwinkgo]

I don't think it is really comparable, as Toronto's problems really are a revenue problem, not anything else. Toronto city council continues to refuse to bring property taxes in line with 905 area communities and in turn continues to authorize growth in services.

The being neglected in funding from other levels of government couldn't be further from the point. Compared to the late 90s right now is still, and will continue to be an embarrassment of riches. It is also great that the water system has been set up to not require tax support anymore which like garbage the city has made huge strides on solving (from a financial point of view). In my mind, when the city puts some skin in the game they have a right to complain about funding for new build transit. Beyond the new street cars and the Toronto segment of the Spadina subway extension the city is getting a free ride. As for an operating subsidy for transit - in every other city in english speaking Canada the subsidy is a lot bigger per ride and is funded out of property taxes - why should Toronto be special?

 

[nfitz]

I thought the UT board would find this interesting.

Google books has lots of magazines in their archives and I came across this New York Magazine article from November 2, 1981 by Nicholas Pileggi titled "Wounded City: What's happened to our life here?" (scroll down to p. 26; let me know if the link doesn't work)

There are a number if similarities between NYC in 1981 and Toronto in 2010:

• A balanced city budget
• The city looks/feels dirty with trash scattered in the streets
• Infrastructure issues, including needing to replace aging pipes, water mains, sewers, etc
• Deferred maintenance and/or lack of federal or state funding for major projects including subways, bridges, and potholes
• Transit issues (in 1980 they had an average of 196 subway car breakdowns...per day! also to note: they had 458 subway stations and over 6700 subway cars at the time)

Differences:

• Drug dealers taking over public spaces and other antisocial behaviour
• Outright disregard for police
• Commonality of cars running red lights

Wow ... that's hugely out of context. New York City has improved immensely in the last 30 years on these issues, and is still worse than Toronto today.

And if anything Toronto has improved on many of these issues in the last 5-10 years. Our roads are generally well-maintained ... and compare the good state of our sidewalks to even other Canadian cities such as Vancouver.

 

[taal]

Can someone correct me if I'm wrong ...

But from what I recall NYC's current budget (as of today that is) is a complete mess! The amount of debt they own is staggering?

 

[Hipster Duck]

In the late 1970s, NYC was a disaster. Entire neighbourhoods in the Bronx didn't have running water or garbage pickup. Crime was at an all-time high; the 198 subway car breakdowns per day was probably not far off. City unions were staffed by incompetent, sinecured workers who seemed to exist for no other reason than to draw a salary. When the blackout happened in 1977, the result was anarchy - a complete breakdown of the very fragile social order that existed in New York to begin with. When you couple that with the runaway stagflation of the late 1970s, and understand that a lot of NYC's civic mess was a result of Keynesian policies enacted both at city hall and in Albany, I begin to see why Americans took a sharp turn to the right in the 1980s.

For all our gripes here in Toronto, nfitz is correct that NYC is still characteristically wasteful and is still run by machine-style union politics that make even the most inept public sector unions, like the TTC's ATU 113, look like a paragon of responsibility. A teacher in the New York City Dept. of Education is basically unfireable, and the worst instructors are basically sent to paid detention; the NYCMTA has 70,000 workers, and I think that the TTC's 11,000 is too much.

That said, under Miller/McGuinty Toronto's spending teetered a little too close to the edge for my fiscally conservative sensibilities. Spending needs to be reined in, or we as a society have to accept a higher tax burden to pay for these services. While I acknowledge that we should accept higher taxes to pay for things we value in the city, such as avoiding deferred maintenance, some of our labour costs are starting to get a little out of line.

 

[Chuck]

The most important similarity might be that in the decades prior, both cities relied so heavily on their reputation that they failed to take the steps necessary to maintain it. Cracks started to appear in different areas between the two cities, but the similarity is that both cities coasted for long enough that eventually a chain reaction of failures started to occur.

 

[Long Island Mike]

HD and Everyone: This is an interesting comparison between NYC in 1981 and Toronto today - I remember that NYC hit rock bottom in the late 70s as HD mentions as a result of NYC's financial crisis being a good example and the decade of the 80s was a recovery period of sorts but also had rocky periods like the late 80s-early 90s crack epidemic with its resulting high murder and crime rates.

I remember Toronto to be one of the safest and cleanest North American cities from my travels there between 1979-1990 largely but it seems that from staying in touch somewhat on how Toronto is changing and especially since I joined UT I noticed that urban problems that plagued many US cities has spread across the border to affect Canadian cities over time. I made my last trip to Toronto briefly in June 1998 and I noticed changes like graffiti-which was largely nonexistant for most of the 80s.

I hope that Toronto never downgrades to anywhere near how bad NYC was back in the late 70s era when residents were leaving in droves to move elsewhere as a result of the City's problems and entire neighborhoods-as HD mentions-were practically abandoned and looked like bombed-out war zones.

I feel that Toronto should look at how things were back in that era in NYC and NEVER let a great City like Toronto downgrade to the point that NYC had fallen then in this era.

Opinions and thoughts by LI MIKE

 

[Glen]

On the issue of graffiti issue, yes Toronto is the New York of the 70s.

 

[taal]

This makes no sense at all ...

Toronto is still one of the safest cities in North America - if not the safest given its size - I'd like to see some evidence indicating Toronto was safer in 1981 ... and you really need to factor in the entire GTA population for this to be a fare comparison.

Yes, we have graffiti ... many cities do - we don't spend much in the way of cleaning this up, and this is something that can improve but I'm sure NYC today sees way more of this problem then we do, they just happen to do a better job of cleaning it up.

Why should we care what happened to NYC back in the 70s ... there's no comparison with the state Toronto is in today.

HD and Everyone: This is an interesting comparison between NYC in 1981 and Toronto today - I remember that NYC hit rock bottom in the late 70s as HD mentions as a result of NYC's financial crisis being a good example and the decade of the 80s was a recovery period of sorts but also had rocky periods like the late 80s-early 90s crack epidemic with its resulting high murder and crime rates.

I remember Toronto to be one of the safest and cleanest North American cities from my travels there between 1979-1990 largely but it seems that from staying in touch somewhat on how Toronto is changing and especially since I joined UT I noticed that urban problems that plagued many US cities has spread across the border to affect Canadian cities over time. I made my last trip to Toronto briefly in June 1998 briefly and I noticed changes like graffiti-which was largely nonexistant for most of the 80s.

I hope that Toronto never downgrades to anywhere near how bad NYC was back in the late 70s era when residents were leaving in droves to move elsewhere as a result of the City's problems and entire neighborhoods-as HD mentions-were practically abandoned and looked like bombed-out war zones.

I feel that Toronto should look at how things were back in that era in NYC and NEVER let a great City like Toronto downgrade to the point that NYC had fallen then in this era.

Opinions and thoughts by LI MIKE

 

[adma]

On the issue of graffiti issue, yes Toronto is the New York of the 70s.

Not when it comes to the subway...

 

[Junction416]

I thought the UT board would find this interesting.

There are a number if similarities between NYC in 1981 and Toronto in 2010:

• A balanced city budget
• The city looks/feels dirty with trash scattered in the streets
• Infrastructure issues, including needing to replace aging pipes, water mains, sewers, etc
• Deferred maintenance and/or lack of federal or state funding for major projects including subways, bridges, and potholes
• Transit issues (in 1980 they had an average of 196 subway car breakdowns...per day! also to note: they had 458 subway stations and over 6700 subway cars at the time)

Differences:

• Drug dealers taking over public spaces and other antisocial behaviour
• Outright disregard for police
• Commonality of cars running red lights

It was an interesting article to see where NYC was and where it is now, about 30 years later. To further compare them in 1981 and us in 2010, NYC population at the time was a little over 7 million and I think the GTA's population now is almost 6 million.

The two cities could not be more different so its not really fair to compare them. In addition, the list of similarities could be written about any cities at any time ever. Transit will always require investment and maintenance, infrastructure will always get old and break, cities will never been as clean as we would like, and societies will always defer maintenances costs. Finally, Toronto is mandated by law to balance its budget, so that happens every year so that will never change either.

p.s. New Yorks population was in a free fall in the 1980s dropping 10 percent during that decade, so again nothing like Toronto where we are experience a modest gain in total population.

 

[Silence&Motion]

Without hard quantitative data on things like crime rates, population growth, economic growth, etc, these comparisons tend to be pretty useless and based on subjective opinions like "the crime in Toronto really seems to be getting out of hand", or "the streets in Toronto have never been dirtier".

And also, I don't understand how Toronto and New York "relied so heavily on their reputation" and "coasted". What does that even mean?

 

[adma]

p.s. New Yorks population was in a free fall in the 1980s dropping 10 percent during that decade, so again nothing like Toronto where we are experience a modest gain in total population.

Actually, it was in the 1970s when NYC dropped 10%, and the 1980s when it began to rise again...

 

[fiendishlibrarian]

I think the more apt comparison is comparing the *Toronto* of 1981, with the Toronto of now. You don't need to compare us to New York of that era to see quite substantial declines in transit construction, up-keep of public spaces, etc.

 

[Conrad Black]

On the issue of graffiti issue, yes Toronto is the New York of the 70s.

Oh please! What utter nonsense.