Richard Ravitch isn’t going anywhere. “I’ve lived in New York my entire 87 years,” he says. “I will never move myself. I love this city, and I’m tied to it emotionally, physically, in every which way.”
Ravitch, a middle-class-housing developer who built the Manhattan Plaza and Waterside Plaza developments four decades ago, has seen urban crisis before. Among other government-rescue roles he took on beginning in the 1970s, when New York was mired in fiscal and social crises, Ravitch served as chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority between 1979 and 1983, saving the subways from decades of neglect and thus helping to create the conditions for New York’s revival over the ensuing four decades.
Though he’s committed to New York, he’s under no illusions that the city doesn’t face a difficult recovery from the past 13 months. Ravitch thinks that New York is in worse shape than it was in the 1970s. “There’s no similarity at all,” he told me in an interview last week. “What happened in the seventies was simply that the City of New York borrowed money to cover its operating expenses.” When the city had borrowed a worrisome amount—$7 billion, or $34 billion in today’s dollars—the banks cut it off. “So New York had to pay off close to $7 billion in debt, which required creative refinancing of the existing debt, plus federal aid. . . . The major problem was all this overhanging, inappropriately incurred debt. That’s not the problem now.”
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