Big City began its life as a weekly column under my byline in September 2011 with the objective of looking at New York through the prism of economic inequality. Week after week, it chronicled a social unraveling that, to my mind, had seemed to define a place that had ably served the working class for much of the 20th century. With this entry, the column now comes to an end — at a moment as fortuitous as the one in which it first arrived.
By pure chance, it made its debut a week before dozens of people took over Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, giving birth to Occupy Wall Street and its quick escalation into a global movement. Although amorphous and goal-averse, the project delivered a message about disparities engineered by the financial class that has found lasting resonance, especially among the young, disillusioned and debt-ridden.
In the 14 years since, New York has been governed by three different mayors; in two months, it will most likely elect another. If current polling is accurate, the projected winner was a 19-year-old Bowdoin College sophomore when Occupy took off, someone who, barring a sharp ideological pivot, would stand as the most progressive mayor to preside over the city since John Lindsay in the 1960s and ’70s. It has been two months since Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary, but his popularity continues to shock and confuse many New Yorkers who would prefer not to see him spend the next four years or eight in City Hall.
As it turns out, the past decade and a half provides a convenient framework to explain how a candidate focused purely on affordability could emerge to command such attention. During that time, to cite one dispiriting metric, the number of people sleeping in city shelters has more than doubled, to 105,000. If we consider the origin story of Occupy — that the gap between the rich and poor had become insidiously large — we find that the intervening years only broadened the gulf.
Using data from the U.S. Census, the Federal Reserve of St. Louis has tracked income inequality in New York City by borough since at least 2010. From that point on, through 2023 (the most recent year for which analysis is available), the trend lines more or less take the form of straight shots upward.
The Fed measures inequality as the difference between the mean income of those in the top 20 percent of earners and those in the bottom fifth. In Manhattan, where these differences are starkest, for example, the highest earners in 2011 were making 40 times what the lowest earners did; by 2023 they made 47 times the comparative figure.
The fact that Occupy erupted just as social media was beginning to overwhelm our waking hours — Instagram had arrived a year before, in 2010 — had two important consequences. The first was a prolific, visual documentation of the aggressive approach that police officers took toward largely peaceful protesters — unleashing pepper spray, corralling them into bullpens and conducting mass arrests, all of which had the unintended effect of galvanizing sympathy for the activists’ cause.
Second, anyone looking to show off how much fun they were having by virtue of a private-equity windfall had immediate access to a potentially limitless audience eager to hate-consume the unveiling of a $50,000 La Cornue range or a heave of vacation pictures from a rented catamaran in Split. Accounts like the Rich Kids of Instagram landed in our algorithms; the ire easily followed.
But it was not just the marriage of greed and tech, or soaring rents and real-estate valuations, that revealed what could seem like an increasingly unjust world. Nature, too, was asserting itself.
Superstorm Sandy made landfall in New York, one year after Occupy, in October 2012, flooding 17 percent of the city’s landmass, killing dozens of people, forcing the evacuation of thousands more and revealing the city’s precarious position in the era of climate change. Perhaps most indelibly, the storm exposed the vulnerabilities of so many low-income New Yorkers to cataclysmic weather, given how much public housing had been constructed in flood zones.
Older and disabled people living in apartments on high floors of these buildings found themselves “held hostage” as the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, put it in the moment. They were without access to food, water or medical care; elevators were not working. Some people got sick trying to stay warm beside stoves spewing carbon monoxide. Residents of the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn were left without heat and power for weeks.
Long before the coastline bewitched luxury real-estate developers, it was regarded by Robert Moses as a place to conceal the poor from view, in isolated communities like Red Hook, Coney Island and the Rockaways, which were largely cut off from commerce and public transit.
On a gloomy Labor Day the year Sandy hit, I happened to visit a newly built playground in Far Rockaway as part of a piece I was reporting on inequities in the park system. One of the triumphs of the Bloomberg administration was the addition of 850 acres of parkland across the city, some of it — though an argument was to be made that it was not enough — in areas where green space had been long neglected. The opening of the High Line in 2009 and Brooklyn Bridge Park a year later, both adjacent to expensive lofts and townhouses, brought an awareness of how much brown grass and weedy concrete distinguished the recreational spaces in parts of the city full of Section 8 housing.
An effort to rectify the imbalance, Rockaway Park underwent a $30 million renovation that gave it play spaces, a climbing wall and skateboard park, among various other attractions. It opened in August, and Sandy destroyed much of it only two months later; rebuilding would take years.
The early 2010s were also formative in the way that the city came to think about the prevention and punishment of crime. The rise of stop-and-frisk policing and the death of three Black men — Ramarley Graham, Akai Gurley and Eric Garner — at the hands of police officers in a stretch between 2012 and 2014 had a lasting imprint.
The Gurley case, not as well remembered among the long list of tragedies, always stood out — or should have — in my view for what it indicated about the potentially violent and fatal repercussions of failing to tend to basic exercises in building maintenance. Mr. Gurley was leaving his girlfriend’s apartment in the Louis Pink Houses in Brooklyn when a police officer fired a bullet while conducting a routine stairwell patrol — known in cop vernacular as a “vertical” — and struck him in the heart. Mr. Gurley had taken the stairs because the elevator was broken; the officer who shot him, a rookie, was stumbling around in the dark because the lights in the stairwell did not work either.
All of these incidents served to turn up the register on a distrust in law enforcement that would explode in the protests following the murder of George Floyd years later and that continues to reverberate in the city’s politics.
After a police officer on Staten Island choked Mr. Garner to death while he was trying to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes, Mayor Bill de Blasio enraged members of the force when he disclosed that he had warned his biracial son, Dante, of the “dangers” of interacting with the police. While the mayor was presenting a eulogy around then at the funeral of an officer who had been killed in the line of duty, members of the department turned their backs on him as he was speaking, creating an image of his tenure seared into the city’s consciousness.
New Yorkers tend to elect mayors in reaction to whatever came before. Eric Adams, who spent 20 years in the New York Police Department, became the city’s next leader in part because he was considered an avatar of law-and-order governance, a friend of the department. Mr. Mamdani, in turn, has had to fight the impression that he is not.
It is tempting to look at the past five years and indulge a game of alternate history. What would the city look and feel like if the coronavirus pandemic had not happened? What narrative we would be telling if we were not invested in — or repelled by — the fiction that New York was “over,” that whole uptown ZIP codes had decamped to South Florida?
Retail vacancies were already a problem before the spread of Covid, even if the pandemic seemed to extinguish much of what remained of any collective instinct to shop out of the house. Crime spiked, but when it declined, fear did not. Statistics offered little comfort to people who encountered so much erratic behavior on the streets and in the subway system that it left them feeling unsafe no matter what the CompStat numbers were telling them.
It is also true that education has suffered in ways that have yet to be reversed. In the habit of staying home, children went to school with less frequency once classrooms reopened. Before the pandemic, the citywide rate of chronic absenteeism in public schools stood at about 25 percent. During the 2022-23 school year, when the worst of the pandemic was ostensibly over, it reached 35 percent.
I have lived in New York for the entirety of my adult life, which occasionally and more so since the pandemic, invites people who don’t live here to ask me if I have had enough — enough of the suddenly rerouted subways, enough of lugging heavy bags home from the grocery store in a way that leaves my shoulder blade to feel split in two. In the 14 years I have written exclusively about New York, I have encountered hundreds of people — social workers, tenant advocates, museum directors, artists, doctors working with marginalized populations, public-interest lawyers, architects, planners, philanthropists, community board members, food vendors, priests, cooks, transit workers, neighborhood volunteers who wake up early on a Saturday morning to plant curbside marigolds — whose attraction to the city is chemical, whose commitment to making it more livable, more loving, more fun, cozier is steadfast.
So the answer in the end is always the same: No. I haven’t had enough.
Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine.
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