The looming financial disaster has people looking back to understand what we’re facing, as well as to search for possible solutions.

In the early 1990s, crime overran many parts of New York. Seniors were mugged on their way home from church, sleeping children were shot in their rooms and subway passengers became cash machines for criminals. While increasing the city’s various police departments by 6,000 officers alone failed to bring crime under control, the Dinkins Administration’s appointment of Bill Bratton to head the Transit Police brought a new approach to crime-fighting.

Bratton used a simple tactic. He stopped fare beaters at the turnstiles. He guessed right that most muggers were not using tokens to enter the subway. And when undercover officers arrested fare beaters, they also confiscated hundreds of weapons used to terrorize commuters. Subway crime dropped.

Bratton’s approach was right out of a theory known as “broken windows.” The theory declares you need to fix broken windows right away to avoid more. Anyone involved in community work understands this. Litter attracts more litter. A rundown park attracts loiterers, not families. A vacant house means trouble for the rest of the block.

New York did make a comeback from those terrible days for a lot of reasons, not the least of which involved fixing lots of broken windows.

But in too many parts of the city, lots of broken windows never got fixed. As wealthy communities enjoyed dramatic improvements in public and private amenities, service gaps remained on the streets of the poor and working classes. And as the city tumbles into this bleak economic mess, these broken windows will become gaping holes without attention.

Many Bronx streets have never become as safe as they should be. Immigrants are victimized at will, drug sales and related violence continue to jeopardize bystanders while muggings and burglaries rise along with unemployment. My own street in Bedford Park has never had so much graffiti and is often filthy. Our parks show the signs of deferred maintenance. Would the vacant city-owned land at Oliver Place be a rat infested dump anywhere in mid-town Manhattan?

Too many children remain in overcrowded, antiquated classrooms even as the city eliminates new buildings from the capital budget. Temporary schools placed in playgrounds years ago are now considered permanent seats.

And the subways, once a symbol of the city’s renaissance, may lead us back to the past.  They have already grown filthy again even as the MTA announces service and staff reductions. Is graffiti far behind?

Yet again a crisis not of our making threatens this great city we love. Another part of the broken windows theory relies on an involved citizenry for solutions. We won’t create solutions by calling New Yorkers crybabies and ignoring their concerns. We can’t solve crime by endlessly citing statistics that don’t tell the truth about our streets. And we certainly won’t help our city by fixing broken windows for the rich while ignoring those of the poor.

John Reilly is a lifelong resident of Bedford Park and executive director of the Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation.