FRED SIEGEL
225
participating residents are required
to
wait at least five years before a
sale below the assessed value entitles them to file a claim. That catch has
been crucial. Having committed to live with their new neighbors for at
least a few years, many longtime white residents discovered that inte–
gration wasn't the horror they had expected.
Neighborhoods, notes
The Wall Street Journal's
Jonathan Eig, are
class as well as race-sorting mechanisms:
The home-equity program serves as a reminder that racial integra–
tion often is a matter of economic assimilation. Many of the black
families that moved in a decade ago are now enrolling in the pro–
gram because they fear that the new wave of Hispanic home buy–
ers will damage property values, and Hispanic buyers are signing
up because they're not so sure about the next generation of His–
panICs.
Today the older Mayor Daley looks like a man ahead of his time on
a variety of issues. He had doubts not only about high-rises but also
about the social programs of the 1960s. He asked, "Is poor housing the
cause of murder and arson?" Similarly, long before broken-windows
policing became a great success, he understood that a city has to take
care of the small things to maintain its quality of life.
The Lindsayites, however, seem stuck in the past. Recently I took part
in a debate at the City University of New York Graduate Center on the
question of whether John Lindsay was the worst New York mayor of
the twentieth century. The event doubled as a Lindsay alumni reunion
so the audience was packed with Lindsayites. And here I should note
that the phrase "limousine liberal" is not merely a metaphor-after the
debate, as I left the auditorium to go out onto Fifth Avenue, both sides
of the street were lined with long black stretch limos.
During the course of the discussion the Lindsayites replied to every
disaster, from the doubling of the welfare rolls in the midst of an eco–
nomic boom to the bankruptcy Lindsay's policies visited on the city, with
one of two responses. The first was that Lindsay was a "compassionate
man": "Why, he even cried at the death of a black colleague's father."
The other was to argue that no one who wasn't a part of the adminis–
tration could understand or evaluate it. "You had to be there, you had
to be inside the administration" to judge it, they insisted time and again.
This argument, it so happens, was the favorite of the Lindsayites' arch–
nemesis, Archie Bunker. When Bunker's son-in-law tried to explain to
Archie why Vietnam was wrong, Archie replied that "Meathead" didn't
