Killing New York

“If New York is a business,” the mayor said in 2003, “it isn’t Walmart—it isn’t trying to be the lowest-priced product in the market. It’s a high-end product, maybe even a luxury product. New York offers tremendous value, but only for those companies able to capitalize on it.”

The city now acts as its own advertisement to draw in members of the so-called “creative class” who are as likely to work in ICE (Ideas, Culture, Entertainment) as in the city’s traditional FIRE (Finance, Real Estate, Insurance) base…. How else to pay for the array of services the city provides if not by building a safe and beckoning environment for elites and their Ivy-educated service class to live and work in, unmolested by an untidy big city?

Bloomberg has used a series of mega-plans including his Olympics bid, historic citywide rezoning changes, and pushing the sale of Stuyvesant Town to cut down what remained of working- and middle-class Manhattan. Gone, going, or forcibly shrinking are the Flower District, the Fur District, the Garment District, the Meatpacking District, and the Fulton Fish Market. Even the Diamond District is being nudged out of its 47th Street storefronts and into a city-subsidized new office tower.

Middle-class incomes in New York have been stagnant for a decade, while prices have soared, with purchasing power dropping dramatically. Never mind Manhattan—Queens taken as its own city would be the fifth most expensive one in America. While unemployment in the city has dropped below 9 percent, through June the city had replaced only about half of the 146,000 jobs lost during the recession—and the new jobs have mostly been in low-paying retail, hospitality, and food services positions, according to the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. Poorly paid health care and social-service jobs, often subsidized by the city, make up 17.4 percent of all private-sector jobs as of 2007, a nearly one-third increase since 1990. Only 3 percent of the private-sector jobs in New York are in relatively high-paying manufacturing positions as of 2007, a figure that’s in the low double digits in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. And the jobs expected to appear over the next decade are also clustered at the bottom of the pay scale.

A Marist Poll this year showed a striking 36 percent of New Yorkers under 35 intending to leave in the next five years, with 61 percent of that group citing the high cost of living. New York State already leads the nation in domestic out-migration—and New York City has had more than twice the exit rate of struggling upstate locations like Buffalo and Ithaca. More New Yorkers left the city in every year between 2002 and 2006 than in 1993, when the city was in far worse shape, with sky-high crime rates and an economy on the verge of collapse.

Harry Siegel: Citizen Bloomberg