The Nation: Should New York City Be the 51st State?

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Lindsay suggests that this kind of objection could be met by making each of the five boroughs a city in the new state. A Lindsay staff memorandum insists that "statehood is not an unrealistic possibility. Indeed, it may well be the only sensible approach to governing New York City." Statehood supporters contend that the city's residents and corporations last year paid $2.8 billion in taxes to the state and got back only about 600 in local aid for each dollar (they paid almost $12 billion to the Federal Government, as well, and got back less than 13¢ on the dollar). The staff memo places the city's gain in revenue at about $1 billion a year, even after the city assumes the state's share of running such services as courts and subways. As a state, it would also presumably qualify for a bigger share of the many federal aid programs. Yet the whole structure of existing fiscal ties between the city and state is so confusingly interwoven that no one knows just how much better off—if at all—the city would be after the arrangement is unraveled.

There is considerable validity to New York City's arguments for greater freedom to handle its own affairs. In an urban age, the nation's destiny and the well-being of most of its citizens depend upon the quality of life and economic health of its large cities. Most academic experts agree that states have not only shortchanged and hamstrung their cities but are themselves the least creative and effective of the three levels of government. But the general weakness of state government and its dwindling usefulness makes the experts also question the utility of solving anything by creating another state. New York City's conversion would be particularly unworkable without incorporating its populous suburbs; but they are thriving precisely because their residents wanted to escape the city's many plagues. No one in Lindsay's office believes that neighboring Westchester and Nassau counties would want to join the new state.

Basic changes in government relationships, however, are sorely needed, not only to aid New York City but to ease the agonies of many large cities. Says Harvard Sociologist Daniel Bell: "The whole system is out of whack now. Almost nothing meshes. Services that should be performed by the Federal Government are now saddled on local governments, and others that could be handled much better at a local level are exclusively Washington's." Rexford Tugwell, the New Deal brain-truster who has headed a six-year production of an imaginary new U.S. Constitution at Santa Barbara's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, points out that cities are not even mentioned in the Constitution. "The concept of a governmental entity the size of the city of New York or Chicago or Los Angeles did not even exist at the time the Constitution was written." He considers state domination of the large cities "preposterous."