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the new owners defaulted on these loans there was widespread aban–
donment and devastation. Carl Levin then Detroit City Council Presi–
dent, now a liberal Democratic senator, called the upshot "Hurricane
HUD."
The Chicago Tribune
wrote that "no natural disaster on record
has caused destruction on the scale of the government's housing pro–
grams.... " For a Gotham analog we have only to look to East New
York in the 1960s, where urban renewal and HUD policy produced
massive foreclosures in private properties bought with federal aid. More
recently a real estate revival in Harlem has been stalled by a new HUD
scandal in which the Section 203(k) program created in 1978 to bring
stability to low-income neighborhoods has been used, explains
The
New York Times,
by "real estate speculators, mortgage lenders and non–
profit groups involved in a complex scheme in which they pocketed mil–
lions in rehabilitation money and profits from selling and reselling the
buildings in quick succession."
As the passions of the sixties cooled and the costs of that era became
apparent, Lindsay's moralism seems less alluring and his managerial
failings seem more significant. New York's City Club (Lindsay himself
was a member) complained that the mayoralty was "in the hands of
people who know all about management-or its vocabulary-except
how to get a job done."
If
Lindsay often viewed issues through a veil of
abstraction aimed at impressing
The New York Times
editorial board,
Daley emphasized the mundane housekeeping elements of the mayor's
job which anticipated today's concern with quality of life issues. What
Daley couldn't grasp was the liberal-moralist dimensions of racial poli–
tics. When Daley was confronted by Martin Luther King in 1968, he
told the civil rights leader that "your goals are our goals" but offered
very little in the way of either concrete changes or symbolic acknowl–
edgment of white guilt. King was taken aback when Daley threw the
ball back into his court, asking him, "What are your solutions, how do
you eliminate slums and blight overnight?" When Jesse Jackson got his
first audience with Daley, the mayor offered him a job as a toll-taker.
Daley had an immensely personal concern with the city, extending
from everything: from individuals-it's said that he knew half of the
city'S forty thousand workers personally-to keeping the city clean and
attractive. Today it is his son who has completed his vision of cleaning
up the Chicago River for recreation.
Daley may have been dubbed a dinosaur in the 1960s, but Lindsay,
the self-styled progressive, was on the wrong side of history when it
came to the central issues of property and homeownership. While Daley
was the champion of property-owning democracy, one of the few
