The Unending Battle for the Upper West Side: Property owners take on the social-services empire.
With its quiet residential streets, grand apartment buildings, cool air sweeping over the Hudson River, and waterfront esplanades lined with cherry blossoms, New York’s Upper West Side, where I was born and raised, has never looked better. It’s easy to forget that, starting in the 1970s, the neighborhood descended into chaos as a coalition of politically connected developers, nonprofits, labor unions, and government agencies did its utmost to turn the area into a dispensary for social services. Under the cover of compassionate rhetoric, the groups used public funds to convert the Upper West Side’s private residential buildings into welfare hotels, homeless shelters, halfway houses, and methadone clinics, inundating the neighborhood with crime, homelessness, and drug abuse.
The Upper West Side may be known for its affection for leftist causes and Great Society paternalism, but its citizens, seeing the destructive consequences of the policies that resulted, valiantly battled this government-sponsored assault on their community. Their fight began in earnest with the cooperative revolution, which transformed rental tenants into owners with the power to reclaim their broken neighborhoods. These residents—through their co-op boards, self-started nonprofits, and free associations, and with some help from city hall, after Rudy Giuliani’s election—have worked tirelessly to restore the beauty of the Upper West Side. Block by block, tree by tree, they have turned this neighborhood from a forsaken wreck into one of the most tranquil and desirable in the city.
The battle has continued to rage, though. On one side is gentrification, propelled by the new ownership society; on the other is institutionalization, pushed by an agenda that depends on devaluing the neighborhood’s housing stock, the better to convert it into social-services facilities. The balance has tilted toward gentrification, but several recent reversals show that the gains can’t be taken for granted.