Fools for the city by Stefan Beck

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Nov 30, 2007 02:24 AM

Fools for the city

by Stefan Beck

There are few things more irritating than listening to some pale, behoodied ectomorph hold forth about how much better New York City was before Rudy Giuliani got hold of it. Better here means grittier, for in the Dinkins years you could look forward to such popular tourist attractions as being stabbed in the face by homeless psychotics. Ed Koch presided over a similarly worm-ridden Big Apple. A New York Times article of May 12, 1979 has this to tell us about the exciting, artist-friendly, and thoroughly ungentrified NYC of its day:

The discovery of the rats came Thursday night when a woman walking toward her parked car near the site on Ann Street, just south of City Hall, felt a tug on her leg.

The tug became a sharp, searing pain. The woman screamed. She was being attacked by a pack of rats, one of which apparently bit her on one leg.

The account of the attack, provided by witnesses, was released by the police. One of the witnesses was a man who said he had run to help the victim, pulling off his light summer jacket to use to wave the rats away.

But more rats appeared, and the man ran to dial 911 . . .

What the rat—I mean hipster—population always forgets is that what seems colorful and diary-worthy when it can be escaped at a moment’s notice is considerably less so when you’re stuck in it forever. Anybody with half a soul will look at news like this and breathe a sigh of relief for the real people whose ugly circumstances are improving.

Drive around Los Angeles’s Skid Row with Commander Andrew Smith and you can barely go a block without someone’s congratulating him on his recent promotion. Such enthusiasm is certainly in order. Over the last year, this tall, high-spirited policeman has achieved what for a long while seemed impossible: a radical reduction of Skid Row’s anarchy. What is surprising about Smith’s popularity, however, is that his fans are street-wizened drug addicts, alcoholics, and mentally ill vagrants. And in that fact lies a resounding refutation of the untruths that the American Civil Liberties Union and the rest of the homeless industry have used to keep Skid Row in chaos—until now.

For 25 years, the advocates used lawsuits and antipolice propaganda to beat back every effort to restore sanity to Skid Row. They concealed the real causes of homelessness under a false narrative about a callous, profit-mad society that abused the less fortunate. The result: a level of squalor that had no counterpart in the United States. Smith’s policing initiatives—grounded in the Broken Windows theory of order maintenance—ended that experiment in engineered anarchy, saving more lives in ten months than most homeless advocates have helped over their careers.

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