What do you think?
Rate this book
The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981
Upends entrenched thinking about cities, demonstrating how urban economies are defined—or constrained—by the fiscal imagination of policymakers, activists, and residents.
Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated what’s good for the rich is good for cities. Convinced that local finances depend on attracting wealthy firms and residents, municipal governments lavish public subsidies on their behalf. Whatever form this strategy takes—tax-exempt apartments, corporate incentives, debt-financed mega projects—its rationale remains consistent and assumed to be true. But this wasn’t always the case. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, a wide range of activists, citizens, and intellectuals in New York City connected local fiscal crises to the greed and waste of the rich. These figures saw other routes to development, possibilities rooted in alternate ideas about what was fiscally viable.
In The Menace of Prosperity, Daniel Wortel-London argues that urban economics and politics are shaped by what he terms the “fiscal imagination” of policymakers, activists, advocates, and other figures. His survey of New York City during a period of explosive growth shows how residents went beyond the limits of redistributive liberalism to imagine how their communities could become economically viable without the largesse of the wealthy. Their strategies—which included cooperatives, public housing, land-value taxation, public utilities, and more—centered the needs and capabilities of ordinary residents as the basis for local economies that were both prosperous and just.
Overturning stale axioms about economic policy, The Menace of Prosperity shows that not all growth is productive for cities. Wortel-London’s ambitious history demonstrates the range of options we’ve abandoned and hints at the economic frameworks we could still realize—and the more democratic cities that might result.
Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated what’s good for the rich is good for cities. Convinced that local finances depend on attracting wealthy firms and residents, municipal governments lavish public subsidies on their behalf. Whatever form this strategy takes—tax-exempt apartments, corporate incentives, debt-financed mega projects—its rationale remains consistent and assumed to be true. But this wasn’t always the case. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, a wide range of activists, citizens, and intellectuals in New York City connected local fiscal crises to the greed and waste of the rich. These figures saw other routes to development, possibilities rooted in alternate ideas about what was fiscally viable.
In The Menace of Prosperity, Daniel Wortel-London argues that urban economics and politics are shaped by what he terms the “fiscal imagination” of policymakers, activists, advocates, and other figures. His survey of New York City during a period of explosive growth shows how residents went beyond the limits of redistributive liberalism to imagine how their communities could become economically viable without the largesse of the wealthy. Their strategies—which included cooperatives, public housing, land-value taxation, public utilities, and more—centered the needs and capabilities of ordinary residents as the basis for local economies that were both prosperous and just.
Overturning stale axioms about economic policy, The Menace of Prosperity shows that not all growth is productive for cities. Wortel-London’s ambitious history demonstrates the range of options we’ve abandoned and hints at the economic frameworks we could still realize—and the more democratic cities that might result.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published November 19, 2025
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 13, 2025
Book Review: The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981 by Daniel Wortel-London
Rating: 4.8/5
Daniel Wortel-London’s The Menace of Prosperity is a revelatory gut-punch of urban history—a book that dismantles century-old economic dogmas with the precision of a scholar and the urgency of a street protest. As someone who’s witnessed New York’s skyline transform under the weight of luxury condos and corporate subsidies, I was electrified by Wortel-London’s excavation of forgotten alternatives: cooperative housing models, land-value taxes, and public utilities that once promised a more equitable city. The chapter “Homes Are More Important than Skyscrapers” (Part II) left me equal parts inspired and furious—how had these ideas been erased from mainstream policy discourse?
Wortel-London’s genius lies in framing economic policy as a battleground of “fiscal imagination” rather than inevitability. His archival sleuthing reveals how 19th-century labor activists and mid-century planners dared to question whether chasing wealthy residents truly benefited cities—a radical notion even today. The prose balances academic rigor with narrative flair (the case study of 1970s tenant movements reads like a thriller), though I occasionally craved more voices from marginalized communities to complement the focus on policy intellectuals. Still, this is a minor quibble in a work that brilliantly connects historical fights over subway fares and utility ownership to contemporary debates about Amazon HQ2 and Penn Station redevelopment.
By the conclusion, I felt armed with something rare in urban studies: hope. If these alternatives once flourished, they could again.
Summary Takeaways:
- The Silent Spring of urban economics—Wortel-London proves prosperity isn’t trickling down; it’s being hoarded.
- For fans of Evicted and The Power Broker—a bombshell revision of New York’s ‘growth at all costs’ mythology.
- Turns Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses into a sideshow. The real fight was always rich vs. rest—and this book picks a side.
- A time capsule of lost futures: The Menace of Prosperity resurrects the blueprints for cities that never were—but could be.
- Required reading for every YIMBY, NIMBY, and ‘just tax land’ meme-sharer. History’s verdict? We’ve been doing it wrong.
Thank you to the University of Chicago Press and Edelweiss for the advance copy. The Menace of Prosperity isn’t just urban history—it’s a manifesto for reclaiming cities from the 1%.
Rating: 4.8/5
Daniel Wortel-London’s The Menace of Prosperity is a revelatory gut-punch of urban history—a book that dismantles century-old economic dogmas with the precision of a scholar and the urgency of a street protest. As someone who’s witnessed New York’s skyline transform under the weight of luxury condos and corporate subsidies, I was electrified by Wortel-London’s excavation of forgotten alternatives: cooperative housing models, land-value taxes, and public utilities that once promised a more equitable city. The chapter “Homes Are More Important than Skyscrapers” (Part II) left me equal parts inspired and furious—how had these ideas been erased from mainstream policy discourse?
Wortel-London’s genius lies in framing economic policy as a battleground of “fiscal imagination” rather than inevitability. His archival sleuthing reveals how 19th-century labor activists and mid-century planners dared to question whether chasing wealthy residents truly benefited cities—a radical notion even today. The prose balances academic rigor with narrative flair (the case study of 1970s tenant movements reads like a thriller), though I occasionally craved more voices from marginalized communities to complement the focus on policy intellectuals. Still, this is a minor quibble in a work that brilliantly connects historical fights over subway fares and utility ownership to contemporary debates about Amazon HQ2 and Penn Station redevelopment.
By the conclusion, I felt armed with something rare in urban studies: hope. If these alternatives once flourished, they could again.
Summary Takeaways:
- The Silent Spring of urban economics—Wortel-London proves prosperity isn’t trickling down; it’s being hoarded.
- For fans of Evicted and The Power Broker—a bombshell revision of New York’s ‘growth at all costs’ mythology.
- Turns Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses into a sideshow. The real fight was always rich vs. rest—and this book picks a side.
- A time capsule of lost futures: The Menace of Prosperity resurrects the blueprints for cities that never were—but could be.
- Required reading for every YIMBY, NIMBY, and ‘just tax land’ meme-sharer. History’s verdict? We’ve been doing it wrong.
Thank you to the University of Chicago Press and Edelweiss for the advance copy. The Menace of Prosperity isn’t just urban history—it’s a manifesto for reclaiming cities from the 1%.
August 15, 2025
I've written a lengthy review of this book; you can read it here. But the too-long-didn't-read version is quite simple: I think The Menace of Prosperity deserves to join the classics of urbanism by Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and many others you. I learned something new, and found something new to think about, argue with, and reflect upon, on every single page. It is a great, great book.
April 4, 2026
In Daniel Wortel-London’s The Menace of Prosperity, we get a hundred year history of New York’s economic development paradigms and strategies. As much as the book is about the arc of this time period, London also advances some salient theoretical ideas, like that of the fiscal imagination. He makes clear that “cities must earn their keep,” that this is a structural necessity for survival and solvency, but the key question is how this obligation is translated into action by cities and the coterie of policy makers, planners, lobbies, and coalitions which shape them. The orthodoxies and strategies that inform both the financing and the creation of economies, what is considered possible and impossible, what is prioritized and de-prioritized in a legislative agenda, who is at center of benefiting and who is left to lose out, are all components of a given fiscal imaginary.
Another core argument present throughout the book is the distinction between growth and development. Growth brings heavy expectations of economic returns. territorial expansion, and increasing valuation, whereas development broadly encapsulates the means by which economic activity collectively ensures financially stable and fiscally self-determined communities. For Wortel-London, the battle between the pursuit of growth and alternative development possibilities is the political struggle at the heart of this history.
The title, taken from Lewis Mumford, concerns the risk of one fiscal imaginary prevailing among the others: elite-driven growth. Elite-driven growth is a fiscal imaginary rooted in a tax redistribution approach where the emphasis is placed on entrenching white-collar economic growth and then taxing it to pay for social programs. In the sequence of the book, New York City’s arrival at a fiscal strategy of elite-driven growth comes midway through the historical story, and one can feel a narrowing consensus forming in the plot that, for its proponents, this is simply the way cities operate. For Wortel-London, this enclosure of economic thinking is a bit of a devil’s bargain, always teetering towards contradiction. The logic is that progress pays for poverty, and wealth pays for welfare, sure, but is the type of progress also a source of poverty, and is the overconcentration of wealth a reason for such high welfare need?
By drilling down into factional history and bestowing new monikers onto organized interest groups, The Menace of Prosperity restores agency and openness to what at times feels like an overdetermined trajectory in New York City history. Thinking with the interests of developmental populists in mind, for example, who wanted both low tax assessments on their new outskirts of the city homes as well as the public improvements of municipal infrastructure, it becomes possible to see how white homeowners had the value of their assets protected and increased based on overtaxing innercity communities of color. A racialized growth paradigm in which wealth was siphoned to subsidize public value capture on private assets. Others among the groups that Wortel-London labels are the fiscal communitarians, the fiscal stabilizers, and others. He sketches them each possessed of an ideological repertoire, a core set of policy pursuits, and with varying degrees of political influence, from marginal and subversive to holding real and consequential levers of power.
The most vital contributions of the text to me as a reader lie in the elevation of counter-history. Other authors have chronicled the rise of New York City’s power elite, presiding over the “Monied Metropolis” as Sven Beckert put it in his book of the same name, but for Wortel-London, the documents of movements that lost out in the long duree of struggles over alternative development also merit canonization. Documents like “The Economic Development of Harlem,” a pamphlet which offered a strategy for alternative, endogenous economic development of Harlem, are brought into the story as a counterweight to the power of the real estate state. Drawing insight from the financial corruptions of colonialism, radical activists discerned the realities of “as above so below,” with gentrification and ghettoization operating as a kind of urban colonialism, in which cheap labor is exploited, wealth flows outward, and ownership is concentrated outside the neighborhood.
In its place, “The Economic Development of Harlem” argued for local self-reliance and scalable interdependence around key anchor businesses owned by folks within the community.
The book offers useful insights to remember and hold onto as well. Whether it be the existence of federal support during the New Deal serving as a deferral in debates over the pursuit of independent economic development, or the rise of the community development corporation, first as a vehicle for project creation with radical aspirations assimilated into a milieu of capitalist minority business ownership.
Wortel-London succeeds in making the case that cities’ fiscal orientation is not a fixed reality, but merely a hegemonic one. As fiscal imaginaries open and close over the span of time, alternative development tools like community land trusts, municipal ownership, and land value taxes win by not losing, just as in guerrilla warfare, by showing durability during crisis. He brings his story up to the present, highlighting organizations like NYC’s “New Economy Project,” and others who represent the Georgists of our present moment, in pursuit of measures like tenant and community ownership, public banking, and social housing. Against the arrayed forces of Wall Street, the book makes legible that the backdrop of these contests is a struggle over our fiscal imaginary, one that persists into the 21st century.
Another core argument present throughout the book is the distinction between growth and development. Growth brings heavy expectations of economic returns. territorial expansion, and increasing valuation, whereas development broadly encapsulates the means by which economic activity collectively ensures financially stable and fiscally self-determined communities. For Wortel-London, the battle between the pursuit of growth and alternative development possibilities is the political struggle at the heart of this history.
The title, taken from Lewis Mumford, concerns the risk of one fiscal imaginary prevailing among the others: elite-driven growth. Elite-driven growth is a fiscal imaginary rooted in a tax redistribution approach where the emphasis is placed on entrenching white-collar economic growth and then taxing it to pay for social programs. In the sequence of the book, New York City’s arrival at a fiscal strategy of elite-driven growth comes midway through the historical story, and one can feel a narrowing consensus forming in the plot that, for its proponents, this is simply the way cities operate. For Wortel-London, this enclosure of economic thinking is a bit of a devil’s bargain, always teetering towards contradiction. The logic is that progress pays for poverty, and wealth pays for welfare, sure, but is the type of progress also a source of poverty, and is the overconcentration of wealth a reason for such high welfare need?
By drilling down into factional history and bestowing new monikers onto organized interest groups, The Menace of Prosperity restores agency and openness to what at times feels like an overdetermined trajectory in New York City history. Thinking with the interests of developmental populists in mind, for example, who wanted both low tax assessments on their new outskirts of the city homes as well as the public improvements of municipal infrastructure, it becomes possible to see how white homeowners had the value of their assets protected and increased based on overtaxing innercity communities of color. A racialized growth paradigm in which wealth was siphoned to subsidize public value capture on private assets. Others among the groups that Wortel-London labels are the fiscal communitarians, the fiscal stabilizers, and others. He sketches them each possessed of an ideological repertoire, a core set of policy pursuits, and with varying degrees of political influence, from marginal and subversive to holding real and consequential levers of power.
The most vital contributions of the text to me as a reader lie in the elevation of counter-history. Other authors have chronicled the rise of New York City’s power elite, presiding over the “Monied Metropolis” as Sven Beckert put it in his book of the same name, but for Wortel-London, the documents of movements that lost out in the long duree of struggles over alternative development also merit canonization. Documents like “The Economic Development of Harlem,” a pamphlet which offered a strategy for alternative, endogenous economic development of Harlem, are brought into the story as a counterweight to the power of the real estate state. Drawing insight from the financial corruptions of colonialism, radical activists discerned the realities of “as above so below,” with gentrification and ghettoization operating as a kind of urban colonialism, in which cheap labor is exploited, wealth flows outward, and ownership is concentrated outside the neighborhood.
In its place, “The Economic Development of Harlem” argued for local self-reliance and scalable interdependence around key anchor businesses owned by folks within the community.
The book offers useful insights to remember and hold onto as well. Whether it be the existence of federal support during the New Deal serving as a deferral in debates over the pursuit of independent economic development, or the rise of the community development corporation, first as a vehicle for project creation with radical aspirations assimilated into a milieu of capitalist minority business ownership.
Wortel-London succeeds in making the case that cities’ fiscal orientation is not a fixed reality, but merely a hegemonic one. As fiscal imaginaries open and close over the span of time, alternative development tools like community land trusts, municipal ownership, and land value taxes win by not losing, just as in guerrilla warfare, by showing durability during crisis. He brings his story up to the present, highlighting organizations like NYC’s “New Economy Project,” and others who represent the Georgists of our present moment, in pursuit of measures like tenant and community ownership, public banking, and social housing. Against the arrayed forces of Wall Street, the book makes legible that the backdrop of these contests is a struggle over our fiscal imaginary, one that persists into the 21st century.
August 25, 2025
What a blast of sanity and amazing history the author has combined here. "The billionaires will save us" turns out to be a story that began in the 1980s, like so many other bad ideas. In a highly readable style, the author traces the rise and fall of different ideas about how best to raise revenue for New York City--and (here's a new thing) their social costs.
Did you know the urban policy mix in NYC once included worker coops, land-value taxes, and community-owned enterprises?
Here's a book to expand our "fiscal imaginations", to use the author's term!
Did you know the urban policy mix in NYC once included worker coops, land-value taxes, and community-owned enterprises?
Here's a book to expand our "fiscal imaginations", to use the author's term!
February 18, 2026
4.5 stars. A vital book for urban historians and those curious about growth/degrowth and whatnot.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews