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Critics accuse Koch of giving away the government to political bosses and giving away Manhattan to developers. Koch has coddled builders with tax breaks while their towering, ego-driven projects block out the sun, overload already groaning services and paralyze traffic. Celebrities like Jacqueline Onassis, Henry Kissinger and Paul Newman have joined hundreds of West Side residents in protests against skyscrapers proposed by Builders Donald Trump and Mortimer Zuckerman. Bowing to public pressure, Zuckerman has offered to scale down his 68-story tower, which would cast shadows across Central Park. NBC has backed away from Trump's proposed Television City, probably killing his dream for the world's tallest building: 150 stories that would throw morning gloom across the Hudson River into New Jersey.
Author Robert A. Caro, whose book on the legendary city planner Robert Moses was a Pulitzer-prizewinning study of the exercise of urban power, decries Koch's lack of vision. "The physical transformation of a city changes it for generations, for centuries. I see a city being cemented into place against the sky -- a city of monstrous buildings, with a disregard for human scale, human values. Koch is building a big city, not a great one. The Koch administration, I fear, will go down in history surrounded by shadows, the shadow of corruption and the shadows cast by enormous buildings."
While developers have been eager to build upscale offices renting for as much as $50 per sq. ft., the city suffers from a brutal shortage of moderate and low-cost housing. "The big weakness -- and real danger -- to the city is the failure to provide housing," says George Sternlieb, founder of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University. Families are forced by costs to move out of New York. Ultimately, says Sternlieb, "they take their jobs with them. Eventually the boss says, 'Why pay premium wages to people to commute? I can put together a better work force in the suburbs.' "
Astronomical real estate costs have already led to an exodus from Manhattan by the "back offices" of financial-service companies, as well as some corporation headquarters. So many companies have been lured across the Hudson to New Jersey that Koch, with characteristic moxie, posed for an ad showing him sealing off the Lincoln Tunnel. "The rats are leaving," he growled recently, unwittingly casting his city in the role of sinking ship.
The exodus will accelerate as companies realize they cannot resupply their work force with the products of city schools. While corporations are demanding more literate, computer-sophisticated workers, New York's 940,000 public school students are afflicted by a one-third dropout rate. The blue-ribbon Commission on the Year 2000, which studied New York's needs, has called the public schools a "deteriorated system that fails to equip a shockingly large proportion of the students who enter it for the world in which they will live."
The failure of the schools augurs a worsening of the present statistics: a quarter of the city's population lives below the poverty line ($10,989 for a family of four), and 14% are on welfare (compared with 6.2% nationally). Jobs are going begging -- but the jobless lack even rudimentary skills. "It is the grimness of poverty that troubles us more than any other problem," declared the commission.