The rising social disorder and crime of the 1970s and 1980s drove out not only hundreds of thousands of residents from New York City, but also many businesses.
Within a few years, entire communities lacked basic amenities like supermarkets and drugstores; empty storefronts littered shopping districts.
That started to change only when crime began falling in the 1990s and neighborhoods rebounded — first in New York and then in other big cities — prompting national retailers to begin setting up shop in places that they had once avoided.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Steven Malanga is the George M. Yeager Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a senior editor at City Journal. Adapted from City Journal.
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