New York in the 80s and 90s

The key thing is people assume that New York being a safe city is a given. And it's not. It takes a tremendous amount of work and effort. The natural state of things in the 80s and early 90s was chaos. We had decades of deprivation. Giuliani fixed it. Bloomberg kept it going, we built a model orderly city and it worked. But now they're taking bricks out of the Jenga with bail reform or defunding police. That starts to crumble as well. If you want to see how horrible New York was in the early 90s, watch Home Alone 2 Lost in New York filmed in 1992.