Ruth Messinger: Local Issues, Socialist Vision
Mort, Jo-Ann
If Ruth Messinger were in high school instead of on the New York City Council, she would be considered "the most likely to succeed." So said a January 1987 Daily News poll. City officials...
...There's an assumption among some people that being on the left means being dogmatic 474 • DISSENT priand inflexible...
...Messinger, first elected to the City Council in 1977 to represent Manhattan's Upper West Side, has become a national figure, far outreaching her duties as a legislator for a community regarded as Manhattan's most liberal...
...They're more interested in what it's like to negotiate with me...
...Even with soaring property values and restaurant mania, the district continues to send her back to the Council with overwhelming support...
...Additionally, she was an early proponent of legislation designed to limit the size of campaign contributions...
...If Messinger's democratic socialism surfaces visibly in her policy work, so does her feminism...
...Through fairly serious Jewish religious training and a familial devotion to social service, I was concerned with people who had less and with government's responsibility to meet their needs...
...City officials and opinion-makers were asked to rate the thirty-five members of New York's City Council and the Council president...
...Tax breaks and land use assistance should be used for this financing instead of granting tax breaks to developers for trees in their buildings' lobbies and atriums, she argues...
...Answering the inevitable charge that she is anti-development, she describes herself as "an advocate for government's responsibility to devise a long-range plan for growth, employment opportunity, and the relationship between residential and commercial development and city services that support that development...
...Today, ten years later, she is probably the most popular elected official on the West Side...
...I was raised in a quintessentially liberal Democratic, ADA, New York Times, Citizens Union Voters' Guide household," recalls Messinger...
...But I'm highly committed to listening to all sides of an issue and at least making clear where I'm willing to negotiate...
...With a four-person staff and a reserve of more than twenty student interns a semester, Ruth Messinger is daily making at least a part of democratic socialism credible, and affordable, for thousands of New Yorkers...
...Ruth has taken untouchable issues like the J-51 tax abatements and turned them into household words," says DuBrul...
...So, asks Messinger, how do you expand day care without the city having to pay either the total cost of the center or the total cost per child...
...I was very involved in a whole set of issues and movements: the anti-war movement, the women's movement, West Side issues like housing and public education...
...but once you enter that universe, it explains a lot of whose wheels go round for whom...
...The J-51 program, created in 1955 to help finance the upgrading of cold-water flats, actually intensified the gentrification of the Upper West Side, where developers were offered tax abatements and exemptions by the city to rehabilitate their housing stock...
...She credits her joining to Paul DuBrul, a longtime city activist and urban planner, who spotted Messinger as someone who could combine the concerns of democratic socialism on a local level with more abstract theoretical concerns...
...Originally, she ran as an insurgent community activist against Manhattan's entrenched liberal reformers...
...In many ways, Messinger's plunge into electoral politics resembles that of other women of her generation who realized that their public service could be put to its best use in political office...
...How did an Upper West Side mother of three, school board activist, and unabashed democratic socialist rise to such prominence in Ed Koch's New York...
...Another issue on which Messinger has focused attention is commercial rent control...
...Messinger joined the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (later Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA) shortly after being elected to the Council...
...Messinger has been able to draw on a socialist tradition of planned growth in her years in the Council, when it has often seemed she was fighting an uphill battle...
...Messinger got the survey's highest overall rating —3.99 —leading in every area from intelligence to accessibility and, most impressively for the one New York City Councilmember who belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America, she led in an understanding of city finance...
...Moreover, in a city where forty percent of the children are growing up in households below the poverty line, day care is "clearly a long-term investment," she observes...
...Trained as a professional social worker, Messinger rose to prominence on the West Side through her leadership in local community issues, but especially as an elected member of Community School Board 3. Her three children are all products of New York's public schools...
...You can't talk about all the things you believe in unless you answer the next round of questions...
...She immediately points out the employment opportunities for women and men in the day care field...
...In turn, her feminism is also informed by her socialism...
...q FALL • 1987 475...
...Women concerned about women in New York City must be concerned with an economic component," she says as she discusses her current thoughts about developing a strategy for adequate day care in the city...
...Recently, she achieved new prominence when, early on in the municipal corruption scandals, her office became a refuge for whistle-blowers willing to risk their jobs to expose corruption in the city agencies...
...Her proposed commercial-rent-control legislation forced Mayor Koch to commission a study even while Messinger continues to advocate regulation...
...Calling small businesspeople the "backbone of neighborhoods," she has built a boroughwide effort to address this problem...
...But I believe that some of the things people find satisfying in dealing with me come from my holding a whole universe of socialist concerns...
...If you had asked me fifteen years ago what I would work on through the 1980s, I wouldn't have mentioned a sophisticated understanding of taxes, revenue, the hard number side of economic equity...
...The trigger that got me involved in how to fund the programs I thought were essential was the issue of tax abatements," she says...
...Yet, today, the city provides day care for just 18 percent of the children who qualify under income eligibility and 10 percent of the youngsters in welfare hotels...
...Entering city government toward the end of New York City's fiscal crisis forced Messinger to formulate answers for those who accused her of big spending...
...I don't think my colleagues or constituents are interested in the particular label of democratic socialist," says Messinger about her affiliation...
...In her last reelection campaign she beat her opponent by a margin of four to one...
...If we are serious about diversifying economic development in this city, especially in other boroughs, well, then, don't do it without day care...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
