1989: New York City's New Government and the Fall of the Board of Estimate
Our modern city government arose after the old form was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1989. How did we move on? What did we move on from?
See this essay’s companion piece: “1898: The Birth of New York City”
New York City’s government is only about 33 years old.
In 1989, voting with 9-0 unanimity, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision you’ve never heard of: Board of Estimate of City of New York v Morris.
It invalidated the voting structure of the city’s most powerful, central governing body: the Board of Estimate. The Board had been at the center of New York City since its consolidation in 1898, and plenty of people feared that the five boroughs would splinter into chaos without it.1
This is one of the most important moments in New York City’s history, but many of its residents couldn’t tell you about it. They probably don’t even know what the Board of Estimate was, or how our previous system from 1898-1989 differs from the post-1989 paradigm we live under today.
What was the Board of Estimate?
The image above depicts the 8-member board that sat at the center of New York City’s government until 1989. Although its powers and exact composition changed over time, it made most of the city’s consequential decisions in land use/zoning, disposition of city property, franchises, and much more.
We had a city council at the time, but:
There was a 35-member City Council too…“What is the difference between the City Council and a rubber stamp?” wagged Henry Stern, [Mayor] Ed Koch’s Parks commissioner. “A rubber stamp leaves an impression.”2
The Board comprised the three citywide elected offices (mayor, comptroller, and president of the city council), who each had two votes, and the five borough presidents—each of which had one vote. And it was the equal voting power of the borough presidents that brought the Board down.
After all, Staten Island and Brooklyn had wildly different populations (a few hundred thousand versus around two million), but the same level of representation via their borough presidents. This, according to the Supreme Court, violated one person, one vote (OPOV), which was established in a series of cases in the 1960s. OPOV required that all legislative districts be equal in population (or very close), otherwise, goes the Supreme Court’s reasoning, citizens would not have equal voting power via their representatives.
Accordingly, the Board of Estimate was abolished, and New York City’s government was completely changed:3
When the verdict came down from the Supreme Court, it was like a torpedo sent from Washington to New York City, sent to obliterate the political system that had governed the nation’s largest city for 90 years. With a unanimous ruling, the court decided that the Board of Estimate violated the principle of “one person, one vote.” They may as well have decided that the U.S. Senate and half of federal Cabinet agencies were unconstitutional too, and left 245 million Americans the task of figuring out what should come next.4
FAQs about the Board of Estimate story
What happened to the borough presidents?
They’re still around, of course, but the immense amount of formal power they wielded as members of the Board of Estimate is gone. Although they retain some powers, like appointments to the City Planning Commission, a lot of the role’s significance lies in the bully pulpit—the ability to change conversations and soft power flows within city politics. The borough presidency is also a springboard to higher office for some. NYC’s current mayor, Eric Adams, was the Brooklyn Borough President.
For an extended conversation about the role of borough presidents in the wake of 1989, see The Policy and Politics of Charter Making: The Story of New York City’s 1989 Charter (p.88 in the PDF).
If the Board of Estimate was unconstitutional via one-person-one-vote, isn’t the federal Senate too?
No: the Senate is definitionally constitutional just like the presidency. “Constitutional” does not mean “good” or “bad” or “just” or “fair.” It means “the Constitution allows it.” Article 1, Section 3, of the Constitution begins: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State…”
The U.S. Supreme Court generally disapproves of “the federal analogy”—comparing state and municipal legislatures to the federal Senate. The Senate fundamentally represents states, not people, so it does not need to be apportioned according to population. No such analogous relationship exists within states; there are no smaller units that joined together to form states the way the states joined together to form the United States. The Court accepts the Senate as a bedrock, hardwired component of our government:
The system of representation in the two Houses of the Federal Congress is one ingrained in our Constitution, as part of the law of the land. It is one conceived out of compromise and concession indispensable to the establishment of our federal republic.5
Could the equal power of the borough presidents on the Board of Estimate be compared to the federal Senate? The smaller boroughs were scared of being overshadowed by Manhattan and Brooklyn, so they demanded equal representation to join Greater New York in 1898?
This is a popular myth. Here it appears in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer:
The Board of Estimate arose out of the consolidation of New York City, in 1898. Big counties like Brooklyn and Queens feared living under the bootheel of Manhattan domination. So at the Board of Estimate, each borough president got one vote, while the three citywide elected offices — of mayor, comptroller, and the now-defunct City Council president, got two.6
There are a lot of things wrong with this history.
New York City was consolidated in 1898—that’s when the boroughs were created, and then immediately merged into one central government. At the time of consolidation, Manhattan and Brooklyn comprised the vast majority of the new city’s population (nearly 88%). To some people’s eye, this resembles the Great Compromise of the American Constitutional Convention of 1787—small states demanded equal representation in the federal government so that they wouldn’t be completely outgunned by larger states (thus both the House of Representatives, which is representation based on population, and the Senate, which is equal per state).
But this isn’t what happened when New York City consolidated in 1898. The city’s first charter created the office of borough president, but they didn’t sit on the Board of Estimate. They were only added after a 1901 overhaul—and even then, both the Manhattan and Brooklyn borough presidents had more voting power than the other three boroughs.
Here’s the Board of Estimate as originally constituted:
Here’s the Board of Estimate after the 1901 charter overhaul:
And here’s the Board after 1957 changes that equalized votes among the borough presidents (in 1978 the votes were all divided by two—2 per citywide, 1 per borough president):
Requiem for the Board
The Board of Estimate’s voting structure was invalidated by the Supreme Court in March of 1989, and the voters of New York City voted in favor of a new city charter in November of 1989.
The Board’s last official act (and death) came in the summer of 1990:
Why is it important to understand this history?
New York City’s government is only 33 years old! This surprises people, and is an example of how—if you haven’t looked into it—you probably don’t know much about the reality of government. It is stranger than fiction.
NYC’s government is not static, and it is far more dynamic than you would expect if your benchmark is the rate of change in the federal Constitution.
A lot of people had predictions (for good and ill) about what would happen if the Board fell. We can check to see how those predictions turned out, and use those checks to help evaluate claims made in the modern day.
Our current system of government really only makes sense if you understand its history, especially the story of the Board of Estimate. If you don’t know the story, you’ll remain mystified at many things (especially the modern offices of the five borough presidents).
It shows how huge changes can happen pretty quickly, especially if they’ve been set up well.7 It shows how political change is highly contingent on time and place variables, in addition to deliberate work done by political actors. And it shows that huge changes can be effectively and competently managed by government.
1989 is a proper bookend to 1898; in both cases, change was forced on New York City from a higher power. In both cases, had local authorities gotten their way, nothing would have changed. The state government overrode local officials to combine all the boroughs together in 18988, and the U.S. Supreme Court required the end of the Board of Estimate’s unequal voting structure in 1989.
Reading books like The Power Broker and The Death and Life of Great American Cities is fundamentally different when one understands that these are histories of a political system that is three decades dead. They both feature the Board of Estimate and a system of power that has completely changed. The Power Broker was published in 1974, and Death and Life in 1961. If you’re reading these books to “learn about how NYC government works,” you will come up quite short.
Principal sources and some further reading:
The Policy and Politics of Charter Making: The Story of New York City’s 1989 Charter (written by the chair of the charter commission that rewrote the city charter in 1989)
Final Report of the New York City Charter Revision Commission, January 1989—November 1989
Restructuring the New York City Government: The Reemergence of Municipal Reform, Proceedings, vol. 17, no. 3, The Academy of Political Science, 1989.
Netzer, Dick, Bellush, Jewel, Urban Politics New York Style, 1990. Special attention to Chapter 15, “The New Charter: Will It Make a Difference?”
For a popular account of the Board of Estimate’s fall, read Not That Long Ago, New York City Really Was Run From a Smoke-filled Backroom. But note: it does contain the incorrect-but-popular contention that the Board of Estimate arose in 1898 in the same way the federal Senate did in 1787.
The first New York City Charter, passed by the New York State Legislature and signed by the Governor in 1897, effective as of January 1, 1898.
The second New York City Charter, passed by the New York State Legislature in 1901.
Peter Zimroth was NYC’s corporation counsel (head of the Law Department) from 1987 to 1989. He argued the city’s side before the Supreme Court, and voiced fears that New York would face severe consequences, up to disintegration via Staten Island’s secession (which they tried), if the Board of Estimate was invalidated. You can find the transcript of Board of Estimate v Morris’s oral argument here (look under the media panel, and control+f for “Staten Island” until you hit the part of Zimroth’s argument where he discusses the danger that NYC would face should the Board of Estimate fall).
“Not That Long Ago, New York City Really Was Run From a Smoke-filled Backroom,” Intelligencer, June 2018. After the Board fell, the City Council would inherit many of its powers, and grow from 35 members to the 51 we have today.
The Supreme Court did not require the Board of Estimate to be abolished in their ruling. In Board of Estimate v Morris, all they really invalidated was the voting structure of the Board (giving equal votes to borough presidents). New York could have theoretically revised the voting structure to give borough presidents voting power proportional to borough populations, but this introduced its own set of complications—and in many ways defeated the purpose of the Board as it existed. So the city just got rid of the Board altogether.
“Not That Long Ago, New York City Really Was Run From a Smoke-filled Backroom,” Intelligencer, June 2018.
“Not That Long Ago, New York City Really Was Run From a Smoke-filled Backroom,” Intelligencer, June 2018.
New York City’s City Council had two at-large members from each borough until 1983. These were struck down in federal court on one-person-one-vote grounds, and this paved the way for the eventual case against the Board of Estimate:
From 1898: The Birth of New York City:
In a non-binding 1894 referendum on the question of consolidation, almost every polled municipality—including Brooklyn, by 277 votes—voted in favor of it. While this certainly added momentum to the movement, it wasn’t until May 11, 1896, that the New York state government passed the consolidation bill, overriding vetoes from both the mayors of New York and Brooklyn to do so. And it wasn’t until 1897 that the state government ratified the new city charter, boroughs and all, overriding yet another veto from New York’s mayor to do so.
On May 5, 1897, the New York City that we know today was signed into law by Governor Frank Black.
The obvious inconsistency between the equal representation of states in the Senate (the one part of the Constitution that can't be amended) and OPOV just goes to show that OPOV is BS made up by SCOTUS rather than actually in the Constitution. They decided alternatives weren't "good", or "just" or "fair", so they got rid of them elsewhere.