I did a lot of reading in 2025 and, out of every book I opened up, none affected my thinking more than Daniel Wortel-London’s The Menace of Prosperity.1 The book is both a history of New York City’s economic development as well as the different ideologies that shaped the worldviews of, and informed the strategies pursued by, the city’s policymakers over the span of a century.
I was so fascinated by the story, I reached out to Daniel about sitting down to chat. We were able to connect in December and this is the recording of that conversation (with timestamped summary below) — enjoy.
Amazon Won’t Save Us
[00:01 – 03:00] Contemporary urban economic development often defaults to courting large firms as the primary growth strategy. This orientation is not accidental. It is the result of long-running institutional shifts that narrowed municipal fiscal tools and made cities structurally dependent on private actors to generate taxable value.
Economic policy reflects ideas as much as outcomes. New York City provides a long-run case study of how theories about land, taxation, and public authority hardened into durable development regimes.
Give Me Land, Lots of Land
[04:00 – 06:50] By the mid-19th century, New York was a rapidly growing city anchored in port trade, manufacturing, and finance. As national expansion accelerated, capital flowed back into the city, translating directly into rising land values.
Growth intensified conflict over distribution. Land—not labor or productivity—became the primary constraint shaping affordability, investment, and political tension.
Losing My (Civic) Religion
[07:00 – 10:00] Early on, New York City relied on public land leasing and municipally run enterprises to fund itself. This model eroded in the early 19th century due to legal reforms, fears of corruption, and state-level efforts to curb municipal power.
The city was pushed toward a narrow fiscal base centered on property taxation. Instead of capturing land value directly, governments became dependent on private development and its taxable increases in real estate value.
Public Investment, Private Wealth
[10:30 – 12:30] With limited taxing authority, New York used debt-financed infrastructure to raise land values indirectly. Streets, sewers, and parks were justified as investments that would expand the tax base.
This created a pro-growth coalition of landowners, builders, and officials reliant on continual appreciation. When financial shocks hit in the 1870s, the model collapsed. A wave of municipal bankruptcies exposed the fragility of growth dependent on ever-rising land values.
Enter the Georgists
[13:00 – 16:00] Georgism emerged as a critique of land-driven urban economies. Its core claims were that land rents extracted value from productive activity and that taxing land value could both fund cities and free enterprise.
Georgists diverged internally. Early advocates sought to eliminate speculative rents entirely, while later reformers focused on capturing high land values through taxation without necessarily suppressing them. This tension—end speculation versus tax it—shaped how Georgist ideas were absorbed into mainstream governance.
Ye Old Timey Growth Ponzi Scheme
[21:00 – 24:00] By the 1920s, New York recommitted to land-value-driven expansion. Infrastructure for outer boroughs was financed citywide, while tax burdens increasingly fell on dense central neighborhoods.
The result was a self-reinforcing loop: expansion required infrastructure, infrastructure raised costs, central land intensified to pay for it, and higher values justified further expansion. This dynamic closely resembles a municipal growth Ponzi scheme.
Homeownership and Political Reversal
[25:00 – 27:30] Mass homeownership in the outer boroughs transformed urban politics. Formerly producer-oriented constituencies became landholders, reducing support for land value taxation and heightening resistance to change.
Populist rhetoric persisted, but its targets shifted—from landlords and monopolists to public spending and redistribution. Property ownership rewired political incentives.
Postwar Corporate Urbanism
[29:00 – 33:30] After the Depression, city leaders pursued white-collar corporate growth through urban renewal, rezoning away from manufacturing, and active firm recruitment. The theory was substitutional: attract high-income firms and workers, tax them, and fund social services indirectly.
This tied the welfare state to corporate success, creating mutual dependence between inequality and redistribution rather than addressing structural drivers of poverty.
Community Development and Its Limits
[35:00 – 37:30] In neighborhoods like Harlem and Bed-Stuy, activists described their economies as internally colonized: labor flowed out, ownership remained external, and capital failed to accumulate locally.
Proposals ranged from supporting local businesses to community-owned enterprises aimed at retaining surplus and building political capacity. By the 1970s fiscal crisis, most were subordinated to the dominant financialized urban economy.
Federal Intervention and Reinforced Dependencies
[39:00 – 41:30] New Deal programs expanded social spending but also reinforced land-centered growth. Housing finance and infrastructure investment revived private real estate markets, while welfare programs complemented rather than replaced corporate-led development.
Later critiques focused narrowly on social spending, obscuring the role of ongoing corporate subsidies embedded in planning, zoning, and tax policy.
New Times, Old Debates, and the Mamdani of it All
[42:30 – 48:00] Modern debates over affordability and development replay familiar patterns: scarcity treated as inevitable, corporate attraction framed as fiscal necessity, and housing politics front and center.
As for Zohran Mamdani, it’s difficult to say whether he represents a meaningful break with the past, but he is reconfiguring voting blocs in ways that make for previously unworkable coalitions.
The unresolved questions remain structural—whether cities can move beyond inflating land values and redistributing the proceeds, toward institutions that align growth, access, and public benefit from the outset.
Full Title, The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865 -1981
