I lived in NYC for a blessedly brief time in the mid-1980's, when Reagan was President, but David Dinkins was the mayor. The day-to-day living conditions were clearly in a spiral downward - subway cars with no heat in the winter or air in the summer, garbage on the streets, rats on the West Side, bedbugs uptown (h/t Mick Jagger), homeless window washers aggressively smearing dirty rags on your car at the tunnels, drug dealers and hookers patrolling the streets at night, peep shows and porn parlors up and down 42nd Street.
After I had moved back to my beloved Boston, Rudy Guiliani came in to NYC in 1994 and helped clean up the city... alas for only a while. Once again, it belongs to the criminal elements, the hopelessly indigent, and the ultra-wealthy who live above it all.