In The Menace of Prosperity, Daniel Wortel-London argues that cities are made and unmade by “fiscal imagination.” Convinced that local government depends on attracting wealthy firms and residents, municipal governments have lavished subsidies on their behalf, from tax-exempt apartments and corporate incentives to debt-financed mega projects. But this wasn’t always the case. Wortel-London’s survey of New York City from the 1870s and the 1970s reveals how many imagined alternate routes to urban development. From cooperatives and public housing to land-value taxation and public utilities, they sought paths beyond trickle-down, redistributive liberalism. Often depicting fiscal crises as the result of the greed and waste of the rich, strategy centered on making local economies prosperous and just for the normal everyday resident. Overturning stale axioms, this ambitious new book challenges stale axioms, demonstrates the range of alternatives we’ve abandoned, and hints at the more democratic cities that might result.

Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and Professor Emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University, joins in conversation.