In It’s a wonderful life, Andrew Sullivan compares modern London to the New York City of the 1970s:
You heard the same arguments 30 years ago in America. No one believed things could or would improve. Many conservatives assumed that the 1970s had all but ended civilised life, and that only a minor miracle could rescue the family from terminal decline as a social institution. Crime would merely spiral upward; ditto illegitimacy and divorce.And then over the next few decades something surprising happened. The trends slowly faltered, reversed and improved with surprising speed. From a hellhole far deeper and more worrisome than even the most depressed Londoners could conjure today, New York emerged in only a couple of decades as a different place altogether.
These days, even in the terrifying wake of 9/11, New York City boasts record low crime rates, a solid economy, rising educational standards, less racial tension and lower and lower levels of illegitimacy and domestic violence. In fact, much of what was once an edgy, terrifying, almost gothic Gotham now seems bathed in a near-narcotic calm, a bourgeois suburban theme-park from midtown south. If you want a good investment, try buying some housing stock in Harlem — yes, Harlem — the latest piece of former ghetto to become an impending upscale urban oasis.
New York was one of the more exceptional points of light in a two-decade upswing of social improvement. But much of America experienced the same beneficent trends: the reconstitution of the family, the decline of illegitimate births, the collapse of crime, the reinvention and expansion of work.