Quality of Life, On a Budget
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Just hours after The New York Sun hit the streets yesterday with a lead news article about the graffiti problem on a city-owned building just steps from City Hall, a four-person graffiti-removal crew was hard at work scraping the vandalism off the building (please see the photograph at page 3). We take that as an encouraging sign that Council Member Martin Golden’s warning that “It’s 1989 all over again” was a little premature. The clock has not been turned back to the period before the city made great strides against graffiti, squeegee men, public drunkenness, aggressive panhandling, and other disorders.
But there is a new administration at City Hall. Some of the signs of deterioration — more graffiti, serious rat infestations, more people begging or sprawled out sleeping in the subways — seem real. And the city is facing a budget crisis and a recession that will make some of the solutions of the past unaffordable.
So it’s worth asking — how does the city maintain its quality of life when there just isn’t enough money in the budget to send a social worker and a police officer and a graffiti eradication crew and an exterminator trailing after every teen delinquent and vagrant?
Part of the answer is that people can help. Rather than waiting for the city to find problems on its own, citizens can call the city’s toll-free quality of life hotline at (888) 677-5433 to report problems. Property owners can keep their garbage in closed containers and erase graffiti on their buildings. Giving to panhandlers on the subway only encourages them; if you want to help the poor, there are plenty of charities around that can use the money.
There’s still plenty for the city to do, of course, starting with aggressive enforcement of existing laws against vandalism and aggressive panhandling. It’s nice to see the city cleaning its building, but the more graffiti “artists” are off the streets and in jail, the fewer clean-ups will be necessary. In 2002, though, merely holding the line on the city’s quality of life gains, not to mention making advances, is going to require action not just from City Hall, but from the citizenry.
