Does New York City Have a Future?

The question is burning through every New Yorker’s brain: will the city come back? Will New York ever return to its glory days or will it remain a worn out hulk, filled with drug addicts, the homeless and an ever increasing crime rate.

In a long and comprehensive and excellent article for City Journal Nicole Gelinas offers a balanced assessment of the problem. (via Maggie’s Farm) This means that she, like most sensible New Yorkers, remain skeptical but optimistic.

Apparently, the beaten down New York residential real estate market is showing signs of life, because rents have been reduced across the city. And yet, the people who are moving in are young people, recent college graduates. The people who moved out were people with families. The latter constitute the city’s tax base. The former do not. Take it for what that’s worth.

I was especially attuned to her analysis since she is writing, for all intents and purposes, about my neighborhood, midtown Manhattan. And she remarks that New York City’s future depends largely on whether or not the large office towers in midtown remain empty. For now, there are signs of life-- the animal spirits are beginning to stir-- but it is too soon to tell.

Gelinas explains the importance of midtown Manhattan:

For six decades, Gotham has relied on midtown Manhattan as the physical, economic, and fiscal center of the metropolis. From 34th Street to 60th Street, from Third Avenue to Eighth Avenue, 236 hyper-dense blocks across just 2.5 square miles (less than 1 percent of the city’s landmass) support jobs, wealth, and tax revenue—not just for the city but for the entire tristate region. In terms of dense, successful downtowns, nothing quite like midtown exists elsewhere in the United States. The global models that come closest are London and Tokyo.

Her reporting was focused on the state of midtown two months ago, before, that is, the virus was defeated by the vaccines.

As of mid-March 2021, midtown was a ghost town, all but empty for an entire year—something unthinkable before the pandemic struck in March 2020. Despite the Manhattan real-estate industry’s best efforts, most office workers have chosen to work from home, all the time, using little more than laptops and WiFi. Their employers have allowed, and even encouraged, them to do so. Tourists, too, who round out midtown’s transitory population, have stayed home because of strict international border closures, a reluctance to travel domestically during the outbreak, and the shuttering of almost all entertainment options.

Midtown depends on office workers. It is not a very residential area:

The loss of foot traffic has frozen midtown’s ecosystem. With its tiny residential population—about 28,000 people, compared with 132,000 on the similar-size Upper West Side—midtown cannot support itself. Chain coffee shops like Starbucks and Pret A Manger have severely reduced their hours or closed completely. Chain retailers like Godiva and the Gap have left behind papered-up vacant storefronts. Many small independent restaurants still have year-old hand-lettered signs from last March taped to their doors, promising to return in a few weeks. A pedestrian can walk for blocks at rush hour and encounter only a few other people, mostly construction workers, security guards, and adventurous regional tourists, compared with the throngs of bankers and lawyers who once made Fifth and Sixth Avenue sidewalks more congested than the city’s streets.

The city needs a new infusion of tourists, as well as office workers:

What happens next? Provided New York’s elected officials keep the city safe—and that’s no guarantee, given a troubling new crime wave—the tourists will return when the entertainment venues reopen, and, in fact, regional tourists have gradually been returning as the weather has warmed. New York has withstood short downturns in tourism, and it can do so again. The much bigger challenge for New York’s future governor and mayor is persuading office workers to come back. For the first time in recent urban history, they, and their employers, have proved that they don’t need the city. A threshold exists beyond which the costs of agglomerating employees in an urban district—high rents, high taxes, and long and expensive commutes—is not worth it. To lure workers back, New York will have to offer better-quality public services, from mass transit to lunchtime park space, than it did before the pandemic.

Even the best-designed strategy for midtown might not succeed. But it’s far too early to admit—and thus assure—defeat, and give up on a matchless, and hitherto invaluable, central business district.

Naturally, Gelinas has some recommendations for solving the problem. Obviously, someone has to do something about crime and homelessness. One begins to wonder whether the city and state governments might have been allowing the problem to metastasize during the Trump presidency-- because it would make Trump look bad. And one wonders whether their newfound concern might just be a reaction to the potential political fallout in the next elections:

How can New York tip the scales in favor of return? First and most important: ensure quality of life. Returning workers or tourists don’t want to be intimidated by the drug addicts, mentally ill individuals, and vagrants who now haunt key transit stations. “The city and state have to work together to improve the street experience,” says Moss. “We have a homelessness issue that has to be dealt with thoughtfully, creatively, and effectively.” Barth concurs. “We need active champions in the public sector—screaming from the rooftops that New York is open for business,” he says. “One of the reasons New York blossomed [was that it] benefited from its status as the safest big city in the world,” a brand that the city “could sell in Paris, Moscow, Shanghai.”

To counterpoint the Gelinas analysis, I will add a few remarks from the Daily Mail. Its reporter too has been out in New York’s streets.

 

Here are a few of the denizens of the Big Apple, as only the Daily Mail can describe them.

In Times Square, the most densely tourist-populated place in the United States, a mentally disturbed man known as Mr. Kim begs cops to kill him. 'I want to die. You have a gun? Shoot,' he pleads. After the officers demur, he picks up a plank of wood and starts smashing it against the Pele soccer shop.

On Sutton Place, one of the most affluent residential areas in the city, a lone man squats on the sidewalk, intently reading a paperback novel next to a shopping cart that contains his worldly goods. He begs for cash with a sign saying he has lost everything. 'Trying to survive,' it adds.

In Greenwich Village, a well-dressed man leaves his office  minding his own business when a menacing character attempts to sucker punch him. The 6'4' suit ducks the punch, shrugs and walks away.

At Harlem's famed 125th Street, at 2pm on a sunny May day, a middle-aged man sleeps off whatever he needs to sleep off on a bus stop bench outside a sneaker store, unaware that his naked backside is exposed for the world to see.

Scenes from the sidewalks of New York:

These scenes come from across Manhattan as it struggles to get back on its feet after the coronavirus pandemic cut off its lifeblood of tourism, sent many of its wealthiest residents scurrying to places as diverse as Vermont and Florida and upped the ante on homelessness, mental illness and crime - particularly random assaults and stabbings.

Things are so bad that even Gov. Andrew Cuomo is noticing. People no longer feel safe in New York City:

'New Yorkers don't feel safe and they don't feel safe because the crime rate is up. It's not that they are being neurotic or overly sensitive - they are right,' Governor Andrew Cuomo declared on Wednesday. 

'We have a major crime problem in New York City. Everything we just talked about, with the economy coming back, you know what the first step is? People have to feel safe.' 

Other city officials are more optimistic, talking up Gotham once again. 

'The ship has turned. We are headed towards recovery,' Chris Heywood of NYC&Company, the city's official tourism organization, told DailyMail.com.

It feels a bit repetitive to keep citing crime statistics, but here are a few:

In 2021, almost every type of violent crime is on the rise in New York City. According to recent figures from Compstat, the NYPD's data gathering unit, crime is up 30 percent city wide. 

And serious crime has shot up. Over the past four weeks murders in the city are up 67% from 27 in the same period last year to 45. Rapes are up 25%, robberies 54%. Shootings have risen by a staggering 130%.  

You will be happy to know that Mayor Bill de Blasio hasn’t noticed. He is too stoned. Who was it who said that we get the political leaders we deserve.