The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America's Big Cities Paperback – February 1, 2000

Well written and insightful. He studies political developments from the 1930’s New Deal and its inversions through the 1960’s and onto 1990’s prefiguring today’s issues.

This great book, from 20 years ago largely about the events of 25 to 55 years ago, is so timely to 2020.Almost everything that is discussed in this book is highly relevant now where it is either being rolled back, revisited or amplified tenfold. We are seeing failed radical 1960-1970s ideology, discredited in the 1990s, infect the entire urban America narrative and governance again... Democrat politician failures in Urban America, race and social justice victimology, "riot ideology", neo-Marxism, Leftist identity-based politicians, Black separatism, lawlessness, urban exodus and a new urban decline, new social programs expanding, bankrupting municipalities, etc.When this book was written cities were beginning a generation of prosperity, safety, somewhat decent governance and re-growth which seems to now be coming to a close thanks to the re-emergence of failed urban ideas that we thought were solved in the 1990s as best seen with Guiliani in NYC.

This is a story - a classic tragedy, if you will. The rise of the big cities. The fall of the big cities. And finally, the promise of their redemption. Fred Siegel's book identifies the source of urban America's decline: their enthusiastic embrace of Sixties Liberalism, not only in personal behavior but as public policy. In 1965, America was in the midst of a midlife crisis. Strong and self-rghteous for so long, the country began to entangle itself in self-doubt. The origins could be tracked to the original Civil Rights Movement which rightfully forced middle-class America to confront their own hypocricy and prejudice. The aims of the original Civil Rights leaders was not to overthrow American society. Rather, it was to demand that we enforce our Constitutional laws and stop mocking the principles in the Declaration of the Independence. Men like Dr. King understood the promise and beauty of America. The last thing they wanted to do was undermine it. But five days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Los Angeles erupted in a race riot. Large sections of Watts were burned to the ground and dozens were killed. In 1967 and 1968, deadly race riots broke out in Washington, Cleveland, Detroit, and other urban centers. Middle class families who lived in the city couldn't understand what was happening. Many of them fled to the suburbs; the so-called "white flight." But most of them stayed - at least initially. At the end of the 1960s, the question that urban leaders faced, writes Siegel, was "how do we deal with the twin problems of race and poverty?" One option was to stick with the past solution of cultural assimilation and private sector advancement. But that wasn't good enough anymore. Instead, a combination of intellectuals, minority activists, big-spending pols, and "compassionate" voters took a large and unprecedented gamble. The millions of black families that had crowded into northern cities since World War II would be the guinea pigs in a great liberal experiment. Blacks and other racial minorities would no longer be encouraged to assimilate into American society. Afterall, the middle-class lifestyle was "sick" and "guilty." In a complete reversal of Dr. King's dream, blacks would be expected to create their own norms, values, and institutions. While this may seem to be a perverse triumph of individualism, it was a unique form; it would be what Siegel labels "dependent individualism." In other words, while city residents would be expected to unshackle themselves of moral restraints, they would also do it at taxpayer expense. Poverty, the liberal activists charged, was a problem of money - people didn't have enough of it. It some cases that was true. But in other cases it wasn't true. Unfortunately, welfare payments came to subsidize a whole dysfunctional subculture. In the 1970s and 1980s, the "riot ideology" impregnated a large majority of city voters. Even though the large cities were in an inexplicable decline, government leaders insisted that the road to Utopia could be reached with even more liberal policies: ever larger "social programs" including job training, public housing, and drug treatment. And even looser moral standards including drug users and prostitutes crowding city parks and aggressive panhandlers harassing city streets. In 1992, after the trillion-dollar "War on Poverty" and a crass civil culture that had dismissed every moral restraint as a need for therapy, Los Angeles erupted into violence again. Siegel says that these riots, which were even deadlier than the Watts upheaval of 1965, fundamentally discredited urban liberalism. After reading his book, the only question the reader can ask is: "What took so long?" In the late 1990s, mayors like Rudy Giuliani of New York and Richard Riordan in Los Angeles have cut crime and the size of the Welfare State. They've proven to be very popular and successful. But resistance to their policies remain, especially in the intellectual class. In recent years, the cities have experienced an "Indian summer." Whether this climate will mature into a "new spring" is far from certain. An engaged citizenry, alerted to the historical mistakes of liberalism but still enchanted by its romanticism, hold the key to our future.

It’s 2019 and it’s happening now. Great read!

Excellent read

The author has written what might have been an excellent history of three major American urban areas since World War II; the book certainly offers the reader a lot to think about and discusses many issues of major concern to big cities. It is not until almost 95 percent of the way through the book that Siegel reveals he was a member of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's transition team when he was first elected; knowing that fact makes all the difference in understanding the neoconservative bias that pervades the book. (I naively bought the book expecting it to be objective because of its author's academic affiliation.)I found the book's analysis of the race riots of the 1960s (and the more recent riots in Los Angeles) to be disturbingly simplistic; it reminds me of the late Edward Banfield's writings on "rioting for fun and profit." Siegel has at best a callous view of the urban underclass and little empathy for the plight of minorities trapped in the inner cities. Among his personal demons are mayors John Lindsay and Tom Bradley, neither of whom deserves the rather short shrift he gives them. (While each of them had their faults, they were to some extent visionaries and innovators; Siegel sees virtually nothing good about their adminisrations.)I had also expected the book to draw some comparisons among the three cities on which it focuses. (After all, why present three case examples if you aren't going to contrast them?) But the histories of the three cities might just as well have been published separately. Little attempt is made to draw lessons from their three disparate recent histories.Although the book was published in 1997--and one cannot expect the author to have foreseen the future--a single assertion perhaps best characterizes the book's deficiencies. Siegel makes the point that those who characterized Rudy Giuliani as racially insensitive and showing proto-fascist leanings had certainly exaggerated their portrait of him. The developments in the Dialo and Louima cases over the last year alone certainly suggest otherwise.And the election of Anthony Williams in Washington seems to indicate that Siegel's pessimistic view of that city was overly overstated. (He characterizes the city as inextricably linked to politicians like "mayor-for-life" Marion Berry and his ilk.) As a person who works in Washington, I feel that Mayor Williams offers a lot of hope for the city.I do not altogether regret that I read this book, but I feel that as an academician, the author was obligated to clearly state his biases at the outset of the book. That way the reader could at least have put the book in the proper context.