Richard Ravitch, the civic leader and crisis manager who in the 1970s helped save New York City from near bankruptcy and then led its struggling subway system to recovery, has died at age 89, a spokesperson for his family said Monday.
Ravitch, who also once served as New York’s lieutenant governor, died Sunday in a Manhattan hospital, the New York Times reported, citing his wife, Kathleen M. Doyle.
“Dick Ravitch was a titan of New York’s civic world who left an indelible mark on our State, and he will be greatly missed. From steering the MTA through a critical time to serving as Lieutenant Governor, he was a steady, savvy, and brilliant leader and a public servant in the truest sense of the term,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said in a statement.
In New York City’s 1970s fiscal crisis, Ravitch brought together powerful municipal labor leaders like Albert Shanker to draw up the outlines of the city’s rescue.
In Ravitch’s Park Ave. apartment, Shanker, the president of the teachers’ union, agreed to use $150 million of pension fund money to purchase bonds that would help the city avoid default.
Later that decade, with the city’s subway system facing collapse after decades of neglect, Governor Hugh Carey appointed Ravitch chairman and chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to turn around the largest US mass-transit system.
Ravitch, a Brooklyn native, graduated from Columbia College and earned his law degree from Yale University.
In college, Ravitch worked on Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 presidential campaign. After briefly working in Washington, he returned to New York to join the HRH Construction Corp., which his father had co-founded. At HRH, he supervised the development, financing, and construction of more than 45,000 units of affordable housing.
MAC Originator
In 1975, Carey called upon Ravitch to rescue the failing New York State Urban Development Corp., which had 30,000 apartments units under construction. He then worked with Carey and financier Felix Rohatyn to create the Municipal Assistance Corp., formed to issue debt to finance the city’s deficits.
Carey turned to Ravitch again in 1979 to rescue the MTA. With the help of officials from the private sector, Ravitch developed a long-term capital plan to finance a system-wide upgrade of tracks, signals and subway cars.
In connection with the upgrade, Ravitch obtained legislation from Congress and New York state enabling the issuance of tax-exempt bonds secured by farebox revenue.
At a meeting Monday, Janno Lieber, the MTA’s current CEO, called Ravitch “one of the father’s of the mass transit system.”
Ravitch earlier this year pushed for additional state support to close MTA budget gaps. His published opinion pieces helped persuade Albany legislators to boost funding to the transit agency.
“He was just a huge impact to everything that this group works on and part of his legacy is that he stepped up to the plate yet again,” Lieber said.
Bowery Savings
Following his MTA service, Ravitch led the effort to re-capitalize the Bowery Savings Bank, once the nation’s largest mutual savings bank. He helped arrange for its acquisition from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to an investor group and served as chairman and chief executive.
Afterward, the owners of the Major League Baseball clubs hired Ravitch as chief labor negotiator, where he oversaw the creation of a revenue-sharing plan.
Ravitch returned to public service in the aftermath of the subprime mortgage crisis about 15 years ago, when New York state faced a budget deficit of at least $9 billion.
David Paterson, who became governor following the resignation of Eliot Spitzer because of a prostitution scandal, appointed Ravitch to take his place as lieutenant governor.
“Dick Ravitch was a voice of reason,” former Governor Paterson said in an interview Monday.
Ravitch advised former Puerto Rico Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla on the island’s debt crisis in the years leading up to the commonwealth’s record bankruptcy filing in 2017, the largest ever in the municipal-bond market.
He also served as the governor’s representative on the federally appointed financial oversight board that manages the island’s finances.
Volcker Alliance
In the last decade, Ravitch channeled his passion for public finance and sound budgeting in his service as a director for the Volcker Alliance, a nonprofit group founded in 2013 by former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker.
At seminars and in speeches, Ravitch derided the budget and accounting gimmicks that states and cities use to mask their financial condition. He was a prolific op-ed writer, weighing in frequently on issues from mass transit to the city budget to infrastructure.
“His desire to learn and generosity sharing his wisdom was remarkable, always willing to engage with anyone who was knowledgeable, hardworking, and caring,” the Citizen’s Budget Commission, a New York City watchdog group that Ravitch once chaired, said in a statement.
Most recently, Ravitch had helped create the 5Boro Institute, a civic organization that aimed to create policy goals for Mayor Eric Adams’s administration.
In 2014, Ravitch published a memoir, So Much to Do: A Full Life of Business, Politics, and Confronting Fiscal Crises about his decades of public service.
“If I had a purpose and motive it was to plead that young people recognize that the only way you change anything in a democracy is getting involved in politics,” he said in an C-Span interview about the book.
Ravitch’s funeral service is scheduled for 11 a.m. Wednesday at the Central Synagogue on Lexington Avenue and 55th Street in Manhattan.
--With assistance from Michelle Kaske and Skylar Woodhouse.
(Adds funeral arrangements in final paragraph. A previous version of this story misspelled Volcker Alliance)
Author: Martin Z. Braun and Laura Nahmias
