Patrick Marquis

So we actually saw control on the affordability of rents, which I think is going to resonate very much with what's going on right now.

And then a sort of third important movement was the creation of public housing.

It wasn't perfect.

You know, I'm not trying to sort of romanticize what was going on, but we actually had a system in place where through public housing and other federal housing programs like the housing voucher programs, which were created in the early 1970s, ironically under the Nixon administration.

So this was a sort of a bipartisan project for many decades.

We have federal housing programs which were aiming to ensure that the poorest Americans could actually, you know, have decent, safe housing.

And that, you know, people, working-class people, low-income folks were going to be sort of buffeted from, you know, the worst excesses of rent increases and the worst, you know, the worst threats of eviction.

Well, there was an economic crisis in the early 1970s, which triggered in New York City an extraordinary loss of employment and of population, but particularly of manufacturing employment.

And New York City had actually already begun to lose some manufacturing jobs from the 1950s and accelerating through the 60s, but there was just a sharp drop off of it in the 1970s.

And

New York City, which had been in many ways, whose economy had been fairly balanced in many ways.

I mean, you had manufacturing, you had, you know, the sort of more traditional industries of, you know, sort of finance and banking, which we're familiar with from the sort of Wall Street era.

You had service sector jobs.

We really lost an enormous number of manufacturing jobs in those years and just an enormous number of jobs in total.

So that created economic shifts, which then put real pressures on the city government.

There was a fiscal crisis in the 1970s.

New York City came close to going bankrupt, frankly, and under pressure from creditor banks and from conservative politicians and with zero help coming from Washington, D.C.,

There were enormous cutbacks in government programs which had been helping working-class and low-income New Yorkers.

And we saw just huge cuts in healthcare programs and education programs, but also in public assistance, income assistance programs, and in housing programs.

New York City in that period also lost an enormous amount of housing.