New York

Brain Drain or Birth Dearth?

Seth Forman — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 01:38:10 -0400

Observers and advocates on Long Island — New York's Nassau and Suffolk counties — have repeatedly used age group population estimates to bolster land use policies based on their preferred narrative. The assumption? Young adults are moving away from the region in large numbers due to the high cost of living, particularly housing prices. So, the story goes, the suburban pattern must be broken, and small, high density housing units must replace detached, single-family homes as the dominant urban form if young adults are to be retained.

When the Long Island Housing Partnership dedicated a dozen affordable housing units in Southampton town in 2007, a spokesperson explained. “We're losing our young from the ages of 20 to 34 at five times the national average. People can't stay because of the high cost of living.” The region's premiere daily, Newsday, editorialized a few years later, “Unless Long Island stops this brain drain, it won't prosper.”

In reality, explanations for the changes in the size of age cohorts from decade to decade amount to little more than speculation. Census estimates of the population by age group tell us next to nothing about if, when, where, or why people are moving or “disappearing.” The data is a static picture of population age groups as they exist in a given geography on a given day.

Demographers have long believed that the primary driver of changes in age cohorts are changing patterns of birth and death rates. For example, in 1980, there were 141,917 fewer children below the age of 10 than in 1970 in Nassau-Suffolk (484,145 vs. 342,228). This correlates roughly with the decline of 150,262 in the number of 10-19 year-olds between 1980 and 1990, the decline of 110,663 in the number of people between 20 and 29 years of age in the 1990s, and the decline of 107,657 in the number of people between the ages of 30 and 39 in the 2000s (441,008 vs. 333,351).

This makes perfect sense. Individuals born in the 1970s would be in their teens in the 1980s, in their 20s in the 1990s, and in their 30s in the 2000s. If there were 150 thousand fewer children aged 0-9 in the 1970s, one would expect there to be over 100 thousand fewer people in their 30s in the 2000s.

It is, in other words, the case that the sharp decline of twenty-somethings in the 1990s and of thirty-somethings in the 2000s is largely the result of the “birth dearth,” a sharp decline in the birth rate that Nassau-Suffolk experienced in the 1970s, the decade after the “baby boom” from 1947 to 1964. The 1970s birth cohort is wending its way through the life cycle.

Indeed, even as critics decry the “brain drain,” it looks like this pattern has started to partially reverse in Nassau-Suffolk. Because birth rates rose in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there has been a substantial increase in the number of people between 15 and 24 years of age in the past decade. The population aged 15-19 increased by 17.4 percent, between 2000 and 2010, while the 20-24 year-old group increased by 18 percent, for a total increase of 15-24 year-olds of 54,726 over the last ten years. If the correlation between housing costs and people in their early 20s was strong, it is unlikely that during a period when the median price of a single-family home increased by 66 percent (from $220,000 in 2000 to $366,000 in 2010), that the population in their early twenties would increase as well.

All of this is not to discount the importance of migration patterns, or the attractiveness of a particular region to those in a particular age group. But the misinterpretation of data can lead to misplaced policy priorities. In this case, it's generally believed that when young adults move away from a region it's unhealthy for the area, and that policies that encourage a reversal of the trend — “hip” downtowns, sports stadiums, entertainment venues, small attached housing units — should be put in place.

But numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, recently crunched for the Suffolk County Comprehensive Plan, show that 74.1 percent of 15-24 year-olds who move out of Suffolk are enrolled in college. When looking at only 18-21 year-olds, the primary college-aged group, the percentage of those leaving Suffolk because they're enrolled in college rises to 85.4 percent (see Figure 1).

Suffolk County had a college-going rate among high school graduates of 86.5 percent in 2010. Is this high rate something that needs to be reversed? Many of these college goers return to Long Island, sometimes after stints in New York or other cities as young careerists, and help to raise the median household income of migrants coming into Suffolk county to $81,471 (2008 dollars), compared to only $67,241 for those leaving Suffolk.

One more finding from the Suffolk Comprehensive Plan on domestic migration —movement within the United States — seems to mitigate against received wisdom. While the college-goers age group had the largest net domestic migration out of Suffolk, the second largest group was the 55-64 year-olds. (see Figure 2)

In other words, the age groups widely believed to be the most in danger of shrinking or “disappearing” due to outmigration are, according to the best available data, the least in danger of doing so. In general, the 25-34 and 35-44 year-old age groups are the smallest net domestic migration “losers,” because it is a relatively stable time in life. If people marry, and/or care for young children, move up the ranks of a career, or invest in a home, it is typically in these years that they do so.

As far back as 1978, Newsday screamed that “An Exodus of the Young Threatens Life-Style.” In fact, the 1970s saw a sharp increase in the number of young adults in Nassau-Suffolk; as the population aged 15-39 grew by 178,179, or 21 percent, from 846,070 in 1970 to 1,019,249 in 1980.

Demographic data can be a useful tool for policy makers attempting to clarify complicated public issues. But when data is not properly understood, or it is misinterpreted, then public policy debate is stymied.

Seth Forman, Ph.D, AICP, is author of American Obsession: Race and Conflict in the Age of Obama and Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism, among other books. His work has appeared in publications that include National Review, Frontpagemag.com, The Weekly Standard, and The American. He is currently Research Associate Professor at Stony Brook University, and the Chief Planner for the Long Island Regional Planning Council. His opinions are not associated with any of these institutions. He blogs at www.mrformansplanet.com.

Photo by SaraPritchard, Warped Tour'10, Long Island, New York

The Demise Of The Luxury City

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 12:18:11 -0400

The Republican victory in New York City’s ninth congressional district Sept. 13 — in a special election to replace disgraced Rep. Anthony Weiner — shocked the nation. But more important, it also could have signaled the end of the idea, propagated by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, of New York’s future as a “luxury product.”

For a decade, the Bloomberg paradigm has held the city together: Wall Street riches fund an expanding bureaucracy that promotes social liberalism and nanny-state green politics. Indeed, Wall Street’s fortune — guaranteed by federal bailouts and monetary policy under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — has been the key to the mayor’s largely self-funded political success. Under Bloomberg, Wall Street’s profits allowed city expenditures to grow 40% faster than the rate of inflation. Bloomberg was also able to buy political peace by bestowing raises two to three times the rate of inflation on the city’s unionized workers.

Now this calculus is falling apart. Layoffs are mounting on Wall Street, while bonuses — the red meat that fuels everything from high-end condos to expensive boutiques and restaurants — are expected to drop 30% from last year.

The newly Republican ninth district — stretching from south Brooklyn through the upper-middle-class strongholds around Forest Hills, Queens — reflects growing unease in the non-luxury parts of the city. The area is decidedly middle class, but with a median income of $55,000 it is the city’s least wealthy white district. For the most part, its residents have not benefited from Bloomberg’s management nor from Obama’s economic policies.

Rather, the district reflects the kind of anxiety that is sweeping middle class areas across the country. “These people are worried about their kids and their future,” says Seth Bornstein, executive director the Queens Economic Development Corp. “The fire may not be in the backyard, but it’s around the corner.”

Like many native New Yorkers, Bornstein sees Manhattan — the epicenter of the “luxury city” — as something of a “fantasy land,” inhabited by those who, despite living in Gotham’s historic core, are “not really New Yorkers.” Most Manhattanites, he notes, did not grow up in New York, and a majority live in single households. They largely either go to school, work in media or Wall Street, or make their livings servicing the rich.

The ninth district is different socially as well. It is family-oriented. Barely one-third live in single households, compared with a near majority in Manhattan. Unlike the tony Upper East Side or trendy Soho, there are few celebrities or multi-millionaires. Although some of the ninth district’s inhabitants do work in the financial sector, many are tied to industries such as garments, work as professionals, such as doctors or accountants, or own their own small businesses.

Some Democrats like California Rep. Henry Waxman have another explanation for the vote: greed. “They want to protect their wealth,” he explained, “which is why a lot of well-off voters vote for Republicans.” You almost have to admire the chutzpah of such views from a man who represents Beverly Hills.

Waxman, of course, is wrong. This election was driven not by desertions of the rich but by the shift to the GOP among largely middle or working class voters. In many ways this election followed the pattern established by Sen. Scott Brown’s stunning 2009 Massachusetts victory, which came largely from middle-income voters. The ninth district’s new representative, Bob Turner, won big in modest Middle Village and South Brooklyn, while losing decisively in the wealthiest precincts such as Forest Hills and some minority, immigrant-oriented enclaves.

The big story here, as Bornstein suggests, lies in the growing unease about the national and New York economies among large sections of the city’s beleaguered middle class. Despite the enormous wealth generated on Wall Street, New York’s middle class has been fleeing the city at breakneck speed for decades.

According to the Brookings Institution, New York has suffered the fastest declines of middle class neighborhoods in the U.S.: Its share of middle income neighborhoods is roughly half that of Seattle or the much maligned Long Island suburbs. Twenty-five percent of New York City was middle-class in 1970, but by 2008 that figure had dropped to 16%.

Even the young, who so dominate parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, do not appear to be hanging around once they get into their 30s, particularly after their children reach school age. One reason: Bloomberg’s much touted school reforms have been, for the most part, ineffective in turning the bulk of the city’s public schools around.

Ultimately, the basic truth is this: Bloomberg’s luxury city has failed most of its citizens. Despite its self-celebrated “progressive” image, New York has the most unequal distribution of income in the nation. The bulk of the job growth has not been on Wall Street, where employment has declined over the decade, but in hospitality and restaurants, which pay salaries 60% below the city average. In fact, restaurants are now the largest single private employers in Manhattan, with more people serving tables than trading equities. As the New York Post quipped: “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere — as a waiter.”

It gets worse for the poor. One in five New Yorkers lives in poverty. Black male joblessness hovers at around 50%. Overall, New York’s household income, based on purchasing power, ranks 21st in the nation, behind not only such rich areas as San Francisco or Washington, but also places like Houston, Dallas, Indianapolis, Kansas City and even Pittsburgh.

Ultimately, suggests Jonathan Bowles, president of the Center for an Urban Future, the future of New York’s middle class depends on reducing dependence on Wall Street. The city needs to focus on industries and niches outside finance, including education, health, design, high-tech services, media and smaller businesses, many of them owned by immigrants.

Bowles suggests diversification needs to speed up particularly now that Wall Street, the very engine of the “luxury” economy, is sputtering. Such a change will require a new political climate. Voter engagement and political choice in New York have atrophied under the Medici-like Bloomberg, who has managed to pay off many interest groups with a combination of his own and the city’s money. Combined with a union-financed get-out-the-vote, the choices offered by the city’s once contentious politics have become increasingly constricted.

But something is stirring in the boroughs. The district’s voters not only embarrassed their civic betters by voting Republican, but they also demonstrated that New York’s middle class, politically quiescent under Bloomberg, may need to be taken seriously again.

This gives hope for what Bornstein calls “the real New York” — a place that is neither particularly glamorous nor severely bifurcated between the rich and those who service their needs. With a more diversified economy and family orientation, this unexpected rebellion could represent the first step toward restoring New York’s roots as a city not of luxury but of aspiration.

This piece originally appeared at Forbes.com.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and an adjunct fellow of the Legatum Institute in London. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

Photo by flickr user zoonabar

Beyond Words: A 9/11 Remembrance

Mark Ribbing — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 21:47:58 -0400

On September 7, 2001, a Friday, the communications staff of New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani gathered to plan for the week ahead. I had joined the Giuliani administration the previous April as a speechwriter, one of three on the mayor’s staff.

The biggest event on the schedule was the primary election on Tuesday, September 11, when New Yorkers would choose each party’s nominee to succeed Giuliani. The mayor would be casting his own ballot at Public School 66 on East 88th Street at 7 a.m., followed by a fairly routine round of staff meetings.

In the evening, he was scheduled to give remarks at the black-tie opening night performance of the New York City Opera, which was to debut its season at Lincoln Center with Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Concurrently, there would be an election-night party at the Dylan Hotel on East 41st Street. The mayor might drop in on either of these events, or both of them, or so we all assumed on September 7.

Four mornings later, I got off the subway at the Brooklyn Bridge station. Looking up, the sky was a bright blue, with one exception: running across it, like a ribbon stretched taut, was a thin but dense cloud of grey. This surprised me a bit, because no one had predicted a storm.

Up on the sidewalk I kept my eyes on the pavement, lost in my own thoughts. Finally, after a good 70 yards or so, it occurred to me that the street was different today. There were countless people out, as always, but instead of rushing around in their usual morning bustle, they were standing still. Something about this felt weird, displaced, transfixed. It momentarily reminded me of children huddled outside a school during a fire alarm.

Then I looked up. Ahead and to the right, four blocks to the southwest, the Twin Towers were burning. Keeping symmetry even now, each tower had a gash of yellow flame from which black smoke blew upward in tight veils.

City Hall was a whirl of confused, frightened activity. The mayor was not in the building. He had gone to the towers. In the frenzied buzz, reports and rumors flew. Someone said a hijacked plane had hit the State Department; someone else added that another plane had struck the Pentagon; another jet, its intentions unknown, was said to be heading for New York.

Then speculation stopped, and there was only sound.

It penetrated like the blast of close thunder, but it was not instant. This was a terrible unfurling of sound, a prolonged cascading roar with a shrieking undertone of metal. Then, an ashen cloud – a swirl of chalk-white, grey and brown – hit the glass front doors of City Hall like a wave. Shadows appeared in the cloud, and hands thrust out from the billows, grasping at the doors.

“Let them in! Let them in!” someone shouted. But a security guard had raced across the rotunda floor and held the doors shut. The ash cloud covered the front of City Hall like a curtain, blinding us to the world outside.

After a few minutes, we learned that the building was being evacuated. Someone handed me a paper respiratory mask as we went out the front doors. The air was hazy, and the plaza in front of the building was coated in white ash, as if snow had fallen.

We boarded a city bus that had been detailed to get us out of Lower Manhattan. But then we saw police officers and firefighters in full bunker gear running up the street toward us, as if in flight from something. Because the pall at the World Trade Center was still so thick, we couldn’t see what was going on back there. We just scrambled off the bus and ran. As we did, there was another terrible roar.

After a few dozen yards, we stopped running. We joined the hundreds of other people walking uptown. We soon came to a scene from another era: A throng of New Yorkers huddled around a radio on the sidewalk, listening for news from the front. It was there that I first learned that the Twin Towers had been completely destroyed, dissolved, along with anyone still inside them. This was an astonishing fact to absorb, a vast and sudden elision of prior understandings. There was nothing to do but keep walking uptown.

So we did. Almost everybody seemed calm, orderly, reasonable. There were exceptions. One woman in the middle of the sidewalk wasn’t walking anywhere. She was just standing there, facing uptown and then downtown, screaming the same thing over and over again: “This is Jesus’s will!”

We tried to determine where the scattered members of the mayor’s staff were reassembling. At Union Square, which had a subterranean police station, we learned that the mayor and his team were gathering at the police academy on East 20th Street between Second and Third avenues.

The police academy served as mayoral headquarters for a few days following September 11. Then operations moved to Pier 92, a shipping terminal on the Hudson River at 52nd Street.

This huge interior space housed not only the mayor’s office, but also the operations of many city, state and federal agencies. At the end of the terminal was the river. On the banks, soldiers in green camouflage stood at sandbagged gun turrets, as armed patrol boats worked the currents.

***
Mayor Giuliani conducted meetings on the rescue and recovery effort in a small conference room upstairs from the main floor of the makeshift command center. This room, really just a small, rectangular space set off with partitions, was where the mayor brought together the heads of the relevant agencies to talk about every aspect of the city’s response to 9/11.

At a large table, the mayor sat in the middle, typically with Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen and Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik close by. Other officials – a shifting cast that included New York Governor George Pataki and visiting national politicians – would also attend, with aides taking up chairs along the wall or standing near the doorway.

I valued the opportunity to sit in on these meetings. It was heartening to see a roomful of public officials address an acute challenge with civility and seriousness. In the meetings I witnessed, grandstanding was at a minimum – no small feat, considering that the individuals around the table were accustomed to supremacy within their administrative domains.

One day, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry walked into the conference room. Giuliani interrupted the meeting to welcome the Democratic senator, and graciously invited him to sit at the table. Kerry just as graciously declined, and remained standing near the doorway as the meeting continued. It was a nice interaction, instructive in its way, though much of what it represented would soon pass.

***
In the spring and summer months leading up to 9/11, Mayor Giuliani’s speech schedule had stuck to the standard big-city ceremonial fare: ribbon cuttings, ethnic festivals, the occasional policy address. Only once during this period did anything jar the normal rhythms and knock all other priorities off the board.

On June 17, Father’s Day, a Queens hardware-store fire killed three firefighters – John Downing, Brian Fahey and Harry Ford, all fathers themselves. For the next week, researching and preparing the funeral speeches was more or less the sole focus of our office.

The message was clear: When a firefighter or police officer dies in the line of duty, giving his life in service to the city, all other demands on a mayor’s attention come second. That the mayor would personally attend the funeral – upending any prior commitments, no matter how important – went without saying.

The sheer scale of the September 11 attacks meant that the process of civic bereavement would have to be handled differently: 343 firefighters were dead, along with 23 New York City police officers and 37 members of the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD).

There was no way the mayor could attend each uniformed service member’s funeral. Several would be taking place at once: a dozen were on the schedule for Friday, September 28; there were 21 listed for the following day. The funerals would be held in all five boroughs, the Long Island suburbs, New Jersey, and southerly “upstate” New York counties like Dutchess and Orange.

The mayor would attend as many services as he could, but some other senior municipal official – typically a deputy mayor or the head of a major department – would be representing the city at most of them. This arrangement satisfied no one, including the mayor, but it was the only way to proceed under the circumstances.

The mayor’s speechwriters wrote for any official who spoke for the administration at the funerals. There were four of us now – John Avlon, Owen Rounds, Matt Lockwood and myself. The directive remained the same as it had been after the Father’s Day fire: Recognize the uniqueness of each firefighter or police officer who had died.

If anything, this rule was especially important now, since many surviving service members and civilians would be attending multiple funerals and hearing a lot of eulogies. We did not want these speeches to seem in any way rote or impersonal. Some repetition of certain general sentiments from one eulogy to another was unavoidable, but we tried to individualize the speeches as much as possible.

This involved learning all we could about the lives of those now dead. We did not contact the families, but relied instead upon the public-information staffs of the FDNY, NYPD and PAPD, who were generally thorough, timely and gracious in providing necessary biographical details. The daily work of gathering these details and writing the eulogies gave us an ongoing introduction to a community of men and women who had all been taken from this world prematurely, brutally, and more or less simultaneously.

FDNY Battalion Chief John Moran, who had directed rescue efforts at the Father’s Day fire, was among the dead on September 11. So was First Deputy Fire Commissioner William Feehan. He had been the first person in the history of the fire department to hold every possible rank, and it was said that he knew the location of every hydrant in the city.

Gone now, too, was Lieutenant Joseph Leavey, who was laid to rest on what should have been his 46th birthday. Like many firefighters, Lieutenant Leavey had an esoteric field of interest. He was an avid student of New York architecture, and had a fascination with the Twin Towers, taking numerous photographs of them.

NYPD Sergeant Timothy Roy, 36 years old, had served in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. He earned praise for his efforts to ease tensions between blacks and Jews following the 1991 riots in that neighborhood. Sergeant Roy was last seen alive in the main concourse of the 5 World Trade Center building, helping someone who had suffered severe burns.

I was drawn to a particular group of the fallen, the officers of the Port Authority Police Department. For many Americans, the abbreviations FDNY and NYPD were synonymous with the lost rescuers of 9/11. Those totemic letters were everywhere in the months following the attacks – t-shirts, hats, bumper stickers, even the flanks of missiles in Afghanistan. There were few such references to the PAPD, despite that department’s grievous losses and the bravery of its officers.

In a way, this was in keeping with the nature of the PAPD’s mission, which involves patrolling airports, bridges, tunnels and harbors in New York and New Jersey, as well as the Port Authority’s namesake bus terminal on Eighth Avenue. This is essential, life-protecting work, but not quite the stuff of television dramas.

September 11 was a many-layered tragedy for the Port Authority. This was the agency, after all, that had built the World Trade Center in the first place, as a 1970’s downtown-renewal project. Its headquarters were there. Soon after the planes hit on 9/11, PAPD officers from both sides of the Hudson River sped toward the Twin Towers. At least one, Officer Kenneth Tietjen, commandeered a taxicab to reach them. PAPD Captain Kathy Mazza, a former operating-room nurse, assisted the evacuation of Tower One by shooting out glass walls in the mezzanine.

Officer Tietjen and Captain Mazza were among the PAPD officers killed at the World Trade Center, as was the department’s police superintendent, Fred Morrone. In addition to the heavy toll on its police force, the Port Authority lost 47 civilian employees, including its executive director, Neil Levin. The agency’s role in the rescue effort was both noble and underappreciated, and I sought to write the eulogies for its members whenever I could.

***
Just as the number of casualties on 9/11 altered the city’s official mourning process, so too did the nature of the violence. The steel-buckling forces of fire and gravity that drove two skyscrapers into the earth made the recovery and identification of the dead especially difficult. As of early October, for example, only five PAPD officers were confirmed dead, with 32 still officially counted as missing.

Recognizing the inevitable, relatives of the missing began to hold memorial services. As the recovery team at Ground Zero gradually found more remains, several families had second ceremonies to mark their return. The funerals would take place through the end of the year, as the recovery team continued its work.

Researching and writing the eulogies was a daily reminder that the September 11 attack was the murder of thousands of individual human beings. It is easy to remember that day as a collision of mass forces, of crashing planes and clashing civilizations. Yet 9/11 was not just the death of an era, or of our innocence, or of a relatively quiescent phase in geopolitics.

It was also the death of Officer Antonio Rodrigues, 35, husband of Cristina; father of Sara and Adam; son of Jose and Cecilia; brother of Marisa; four years with the NYPD; one with the PAPD; a landscape artist and trained aeronautical engineer; a native of Portugal.

One man, gone a decade now. To pause on a single life lost is – as it was then – to consider the numberless possibilities of stolen years, and to fail in the attempt to multiply the unknowable by thousands.

The author was a senior speechwriter for Rudolph Giuliani from April to December of 2001. He returned to his hometown of St. Louis, where he worked for Mayor Francis Slay as a speechwriter and crime-policy aide, and then joined the Progressive Policy Institute as director of policy development. He is now the senior communications advisor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon.

Photo by Ennuipoet * FreeVerse Photography (David Bledsoe): 9/11 Memorial; September 11, 2010, Floating Lanterns. At Pier 40, New Yorkers gathered for an interfaith memorial, including floating paper lanterns with messages from New Yorkers written on them.

Ground Zero Tolerance: With No Politician Willing to Take Charge, the 9/11 Recovery has Dragged on Far Too Long

Harry Siegel — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:27:26 -0400

This piece originally appeared in the Village Voice.

A decade into its unhappy and unexpectedly long life, Ground Zero has undergone its annual if short-lived transformation from New York politicos' red-headed stepchild to belle of the ball, at least until September 12.

Governors Cuomo and Christie, among other politicians, have been reportedly jockeying with the mayor for pride of place at the Bloomberg-run anniversary ceremony to score valuable camera time at a charged event that's valuable to politicians precisely because of its aura of being outside of politics—much as the 40-plus TV specials, complete with "investigations" of twins lost in the twin towers and endless ads featuring terror porn of the planes striking the towers are somehow supposed to be in the "public interest." The "sacred" site has doubled nicely as a profitable one, as detailed by Graham Rayman in last week's Voice.

In a sense, the politicians who will pay tribute this week are benefiting from their own neglect: Except for one week a year, New York's elected leaders try to have as little as possible to do with Ground Zero. And that's the main reason why 10 years later and despite a booming real estate market for most of it, there's still a Ground Zero for them to make pilgrimage to and offer on-air genuflections. The question remains: Once the annual ritual has passed, is there a politician willing to take ownership of Ground Zero?

In part, the problem has been Giuliani's big shadow. "American's Mayor," who has profited immensely from the unlikely title in the years since, emerged as such a potent symbol in his final days in office that the area's political leaders turned their attention elsewhere—and let a series of unelected, unresponsive, and unproductive special authorities (read: bureaucrats) take control of the site. Mayor Bloomberg turned his attention to his Far West Side Olympics dream, while a succession of weak governors in New York and New Jersey never managed to leave a mark despite their control of the Port Authority, which owns the site. Bloomberg, whose star has of late been dimmed by two strong new governors, has emerged as the closest thing to a de facto spokesman for the site, while still maintaining some distance from it.

Absent an elected leader willing to stake his office to the site, a dangerous gamble no one has taken so far—Ground Zero has "progressed" through a series of ill-conceived "master plans"—the Freedom Tower, the Libeskind Master Plan, the insanely pricey Calatrava PATH station, the ever-more-pricey memorial that will finally open on September 11, 2011—that kept the private market from rebuilding even as demand boomed in the low-interest bubble the Fed inflated after the attack in part to dampen its economic impact. It's no coincidence that the only completed structure at the 16-acre site is private developer Larry Silverstein's 7 World Trade Center and that the other towers have managed to draw future tenants only through highly subsidized leases for "needy" tenants such as Goldman Sachs. The most glaring example of the absence of leadership, though, was the August 2007 Deutsche Bank fire, which killed two firefighters and seriously injured dozens more after city Housing and Fire inspectors missed glaring violations in the structure, which, at that point, had been awaiting teardown for nearly six years. (It finally took more than nine to take it down.) Neither Bloomberg nor any other politician took much heat for a needless tragedy that cost the lives of additional first responders.

Years of public frustration with the impossibly slow pace of rebuilding finally manifested in last year's ugly fight over the so-called "Ground Zero mosque." Although liberal New Yorkers tried to pretend Republicans had hijacked a local issue to score cheap points nationally, polls showed New Yorkers overwhelmingly opposed the Muslim community center, which, in fact, would be located several blocks from the site. Margaret and Peter Steinfels, co-directors of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, recalled hearing a Catholic priest speculate that the surprising outburst of anti-Muslim sentiment, which was largely absent from the city after the attack itself, wouldn't have happened if the site had been rebuilt. "The priest," the Steinfelses said, "felt that this void left a lot free-floating emotion that had been displaced to opposition to the Islamic center."

The absence of local accountability extends to the events of 9/11, as well as the site. The brave uniformed officials who ran into the cloud as others fled now find themselves reduced to actuarial table figures. The Victims Compensation Fund Special Master Sheila L. Birnbaum, another politically insulated appointee, isn't covering cancer-related medical costs, arguing a causal link hasn't yet been proved.

Chris Ward, the Port Authority executive director appointed by Governor Paterson in 2008, who has had success in pushing construction forward ahead of the anniversary, when national attention will briefly refocus on the site, albeit at a steep price tag, delivered a powerful speech last week that seemed to be a parting shot amid reports that Governor Cuomo wants to bring in his own man after the anniversary to finish the job.

Calling the September 11, 2011, opening a moment to "begin the important process of weaving this memorial at the heart of the site into the fabric of New York City," Ward said the PA had "stepped back from a difficult conversation about what the World Trade Center should be, and stripped the site of what I call monumentalism, and focused on construction, of what it could be."

If Cuomo manages, with Ward or a replacement, to finally heal the open wound that's bedeviled the city for a decade, New Yorkers will remember. If he fiddles around as his predecessors have, we'll remember that, too. Any change at the Port Authority needs to come with a credible plan and time frame on which to judge the results and the governor.

It's late, but it might not be too late.

Contact Harry Siegel at hsiegel@villagevoice.com

Photo courtesy of bbcworldservice

Who Lost the Middle Class?

Fred Siegel — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 01:12:58 -0400

Forty years from now, politicians, writers, and historians may struggle to understand how America, once the quintessential middle-class society, became as socially stratified as Europe or even Brazil. Should that dark scenario come to pass, they would do well to turn their attention first to New York City and New York State, which have been in the vanguard of middle-class decline.

It was in mid-1960s New York—under the leadership of a Barack Obama precursor, Hollywood-handsome John Lindsay—that the country’s first top-bottom political coalition emerged. In 1965, Gotham had more manufacturing jobs than any other city in the country.programs failed. New York City responded by inflating its unionized public-sector workforce to incorporate minority workers.

Higher taxes to pay for bigger government joined higher crime to produce a massive exodus of manufacturing and middle-class jobs. Over the last 45 years, New York has led the country in outmigration. A recent study by E. J. McMahon and Robert Scardamalia of the Empire Center for New York State Policy notes that since 1960, New York has lost 7.3 million residents to the rest of the country. For the last 20 years, “New York’s net population loss due to domestic migration has been the highest of any state as a percentage of population.”

New York City, meanwhile, solidified its standing as the most unequal city in America. Twenty-five percent of New York was middle-class in 1970, according to a Brookings Institution study. By 2008, that figure had dropped to 16 percent, and the numbers have only plunged further since the financial crisis, with virtually all the new jobs in the city’s hourglass economy coming at either the high end or the low. Only high-end businesses can succeed in a local economy that has the nation’s highest taxes and highest cost of living—and even those businesses, in many cases, weathered the downturn only by living off the Fed’s policy of subsidizing banks. Despite the federal largesse, more of the city’s new jobs are in the low-wage hospitality and food-services industries than in the financial sector. The middle has lost its political voice in a city dominated by the politically wired wealthy and the public-sector unions that service the poor.

New York is the picture of what the Tea Party fears for the country at large. In the 1970s, liberal mandarins seized the high ground of American institutions in the name of managing social, racial, gender, and environmental justice on behalf of the disadvantaged. Their job, as they saw it, was to protect minorities from the depredations of middle-class mores. In the wake of the Aquarian age, the U.S. developed the first mass upper-middle class in the history of the world. These well-to-do, often politically connected professionals—including the increasingly intertwined wealthy of Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley—espoused what might be called gentry liberalism, a creed according to which the middle classes had to be punished for their racism, sexism, and excess consumption.

And they have been punished—with job losses. These losses are the inevitable result of the costs of an ever-expanding, European-style public sector; environmental restrictions on manufacturing, mining, and forestry, which push high-paying jobs offshore; and illegal immigration, which reduces overall wage levels. At the same time, the decline in the quality of K–12 schools has undermined what was once a ladder of economic ascent. After completing high school today, students are likely to require a raft of remedial courses in college. Then, after college, many middle-class students graduate not with an education but with a credential—and a bag of enormous college loans that paid for the intermittent attention of a highly paid, tenured faculty.

The private-sector middle class’s plight has been exacerbated by international competition and technological innovation, which have undermined job security, including for unionized manufacturing workers, who had enjoyed an unprecedented prosperity for about a quarter-century. Median household incomes have grown only marginally since the early 1970s, despite the mass movement of women into the workplace. Many dual-earner families have been caught in the two-income tax trap: on the one hand, they pay for services once performed by the homemaker; on the other, notes economist Todd Zywicki, they’re pushed into a higher tax bracket when the wife’s salary is added to the husband’s.

Adding to the woes of the middle and lower classes is that their families are far less stable than they were a generation ago. The decline of marriage has been driven not only by changing mores but also by a decline in male employment. In 1970, only one of 14 working-age men was out of the workforce. Today, notes Nina Easton, one in five is either “collecting unemployment, in prison, on disability, operating in the underground economy, or getting by on the paychecks of wives or girlfriends or parents.” Whites who don’t attend college have out-of-wedlock birthrates approaching those that triggered Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s concerns about the black family in 1965. Today, four in ten American babies are born out of wedlock.

During the current downturn, the black and Hispanic middle class has been particularly hard hit. From 2005 to 2009, according to a recent Pew survey, inflation-adjusted wealth fell by 66 percent among Hispanic households and by 53 percent among black households, compared with 16 percent among white households. These families worry with good reason that in the face of continuing high unemployment, they may fall out of the middle class. For the Obama administration and the public-sector unions, the solution to this slide is to force the nearly one in four employers that have contracts with the federal government to pay above-market wages. Here again, New York has been a pacesetter. Recently, public-sector unions and their allies tried to force a developer rebuilding a decayed Bronx armory to follow their wage and hiring guidelines; the deal collapsed, leaving one of the poorest sections of Gotham in the lurch.

There’s a major difference, though, between New York and the country as a whole. The New York option—move somewhere else—doesn’t apply to private-sector middle-class workers fighting adverse conditions that exist throughout America. So they’ve exercised the classic democratic right of political action, organizing themselves to compete in elections. The Tea Party is the national voice of the private-sector middle class—despite the demonizations heaped upon it by public-policy elites whose own judgment and competence leave much to be desired.

Middle-class decline should be front and center in 2012, which is shaping up as a firestorm of an election. It’s likely to be a bitter contest, in which the polarized class interests of those who identify with the growth of government and those who are being undermined by its expansion face off without the buffer of mutual goodwill. Liberals, unless they change their tune, will blame Tea Party “terrorists” for the tragedy of a fading middle class. They will continue to delude themselves into thinking, as Al Gore said in 2000, that their rivals represent “the powerful” and that they themselves act on behalf of “the people,” even though President Obama’s policies have poured money into Wall Street and the politically connected “green” businesses that form the upper half of his top-bottom electoral coalition. The question is whether the country will buy this line and, more broadly, whether it will follow the New York model. Should it do so, those future historians will no doubt look at the election of 2012 as the contest in which the middle class staggered past the point of no return.

This piece originally appeared in The City Journal.

Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.

Photo by SEIU International.

The Shifting Geography of Black America

Aaron M. Renn — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 20:38:32 -0400

Black population changes in various cities have been one of the few pieces of the latest Census to receive significant media coverage. The New York Times, for example, noted that many blacks have returned to the South nationally and particularly from New York City. The overall narrative has been one of a “reverse Great Migration.” But while many northern cities did see anemic growth or even losses in black population, and many southern cities saw their black population surge, the real story actually extends well beyond the notion of a monolithic return to the South.

The map below, showing total growth in Black Only population from 2000 to 2010, indeed shows that northern and west coast cities had low or even negative growth while various southern cities boomed.

Here is a list of the top ten metro areas (among those with more than a million total people) for black population growth:

And here are the bottom ten (among those with more than one million people):

Of course, looking at total population numbers can mislead. Some cities grew slowly or lost people as a whole while others boomed. With Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta all adding over a million people each, it's no surprise these regions added lots of blacks. Working and middle class African-Americans likely shared many of the same motivations to move to these cities – such as lower housing prices – as Americans of other ethnicities. In that light, a look at change in black population share (the percentage of the population that is black) provides additional perspective:

Here we see not a single-minded return to the South, but a complex mixture of shrinking and growing regions in various parts of the country. This includes some surprising places, like Minneapolis-St. Paul, which was one of the top ten metros in the country for total black population growth, and also saw its black population share grow strongly. Now the Twin Cities, along with Columbus, Ohio, another strong performer, are two of the top destination for African immigrants from Somalia and elsewhere, which doubtless accounts for part of that strong growth. But anecdotal reports indicate that they are also benefitting from Chicago's expanding black diaspora, along with places like Indianapolis and various Downstate metros.

Atlanta, well known as America's premier metro area for blacks, continued to dominate the charts. Not only far and away the leader in adding raw numbers of blacks, the African-American share also grew share strongly too. Charlotte is also clearly emerging as another key black population hub, ranking #6 in America for total black population growth, which is impressive for a smaller city, and adding nearly two percentage points in black population share. It grew its black population much faster than other fast growing small cities like Raleigh or Nashville, and added share at more than three times as fast.

By contrast, Houston, which grew total black population significantly, had a much lower share gain. Austin, one of America's fastest growing metros, added only 28,000 blacks and actually lost black population share. And Washington, DC, despite being a traditional black population and cultural hub, also lost black population share regionally as gentrification in the District resulted in its loss of its black majority for the first time in decades, according to the Brookings Institution.

So even among rapidly growing metro areas in the South, the appeal to black population is selective, favoring places like Atlanta, Charlotte, Florida cities, and even slower growing cities along the length of the Mississippi River like Memphis. Even some cities in the North are retaining their allure to blacks as well. Less favored or even out of favor are metros like DC, Dallas, and Houston as well as cities such as Charleston and Savannah along the southeast coast.

Slow or negative black population growth is particularly concentrated in traditional tier one “global cities”, as well as those facing economic or other hardship like Detroit, Cleveland, and immediate post-Katrina New Orleans.

The latter may be understandable – whites have been leaving these regions as well – but the former is quite troubling. The global city model, focused on high end and creative services, is supposedly the bright and shining savior of American urbanism. Indeed, it's hard to find a city that doesn't have some aspect of that as a core plank in its civic strategy. Yet the cities that have been most focused at promoting this notion – such as New York, San Francisco, and Chicago – are generally those disproportionately driving blacks away. The reasons for this aren't clear, but the high and increasing cost of living in those places seems like one logical explanation.

Here's a more detailed look at the percentage growth in Black Only population in some tier one global type metros:

New York barely broke even on black population, while Chicago, LA, and the Bay Area all actually lost black residents, a stunning reversal from their past as black magnets. However, Boston, not a traditional black population hub, grew its black population strongly on a percentage basis, as did Miami and DC, though as noted before, the share change in DC was negative. Here is that metric for the same metros:

With the notable exceptions of Boston and Miami – and Philadelphia, seldom ranked highly as a global city but still a traditional large northern metropolis – most global city regions appear to be increasingly inhospitable to Blacks. Thus their model of success, whatever its appeal to some, at a basic level simply lacks inclusiveness. This shows its clear limits as an overall model for America’s urban centers as a whole.

Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs based in the Midwest. His writings appear at The Urbanophile. Data analysis, maps, and charts in this piece were prepared with Telestrian.

Citizen Bloomberg - How Our New York Mayor has Given Us the Business

Harry Siegel — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 01:10:51 -0400

This piece originally appeared in the Village Voice.

After a charmed first decade in politics, Mayor Mike Bloomberg is mired in his first sustained losing streak.

His third term has been shaky, marked by the Snowpocalypse, the snowballing CityTime scandal, the backlash to Cathie Black and "government by cocktail party," and the rejection by Governor Andrew Cuomo of his plan to change how public-school teachers are hired and fired. With just a couple more years left in office, Bloomberg is starting to look every one of his 70 years.

Soon, he'll be just another billionaire.

The mayor's legacy is remarkably uncertain—largely because he's done his best to keep New Yorkers in the dark about what it is he's really set out to do in office.

In part, this is because the mayor has been far more effective at selling his Bloomberg brand than in getting things done. But it's also because what he has done—remaking and marketing New York as a "luxury city" and Manhattan as a big-business monoculture—he prefers to discuss with business groups rather than the voting public.

Withholding information while preaching transparency is a Bloomberg trademark. He aggressively keeps his private life private—meaning not just his weekends outside the city at "undisclosed" locations, but also his spending, his charitable giving, and his privately held business.

New Yorkers who have received city, campaign, or Bloomberg bucks in one form or another and who expect to do business again in the future agreed to speak anonymously with the Voice about the mayor's personality, the intersection of his political and private interests, and the goals he aims to achieve.

Several sources agreed to speak only after hearing what others had said. "It's Julius Caesar time," said one source. "There's lots of knives, but no one wants to be first." Others refused to be quoted, but encouraged me to give voice to their complaints—which sometimes diverged but often built into a sort of Greek chorus, an indictment of Bloomberg's mayoralty from those who have seen it in practice, and are vested in it.

"Hanging out with a billionaire does bad things to your brain," a source said. "It makes you think you're right."

The candidate who first ran in 2001 on his private-sector résumé and a deluge of advertising never did bother telling voters much about his agenda.

He pledged in that first run not to raise taxes and to step away from the daily running of his private company if elected to public office, but he brushed aside both vows after the election. In the case of his business, he claimed to have kept his word until his own testimony in a lawsuit unsealed in 2007 showed that he'd been far more active than he'd previously acknowledged.

The vast redevelopment schemes he unveiled in office were never mentioned on the stump.

New Yorkers have no trouble picturing Giuliani's New York, or Dinkins's "gorgeous mosaic," or Koch's "How'm-I-doing?" New York, or Beame's bankruptcy, or Lindsay's "Fun City."

After two full terms and change, what do you call Bloomberg's New York? In many ways, the mayor has been merely a caretaker.

While Bloomberg has called himself the "education mayor," his claimed success with the public schools has been exposed as largely accounting tricks.

When asked to describe the boss's vision for the city, aides and allies tack post-partisanship on to a checklist of Bloomberg LP buzzwords: transparency, data-driven results, and a CEO fixed on the bottom line. Pressed for actual accomplishments, the city's post-9/11 resurgence usually is mentioned first.

The attack and its economic fallout played key roles in all three of Bloomberg's runs, though the story has less to do with strong leadership than with good timing and salesmanship.

The attack itself, along with his opponent Mark Green's fumbled response to it, helped put Bloomberg over the top in 2001. The ensuing Fed-sponsored low-interest-rate bubble inflated New York's markets just in time to help rescue the mayor from record-low approval ratings and ensure his re-election in 2005. When that bubble finally burst in 2008, the Wall Street meltdown became the public rationale for the "emergency" third term.

"Post-partisanship" has always meant the party of Bloomberg, a convenient handle for a lifelong Democrat who left the party to avoid a contested primary in New York. After the presidential plotting that occupied most of his second term fell short (the big hit that began his losing streak), Bloomberg aimed for a soft landing with a nakedly undemocratic "emergency" bill to allow himself a third term. Instead, it alienated New Yorkers and wrecked his expensively built reputation as a "post-political" leader in the process.

Transparency has always been something Bloomberg has preferred to pitch rather than practice. In his 1997 business memoir, Bloomberg on Bloomberg—a sometimes valuable guide to the mayor's approach—he notes that "if public companies change what they're doing midstream, everyone panics. In a private company like Bloomberg, the analysts don't ask, and as to the fact that we don't know where we're going—so what? Neither did Columbus." It's a philosophy Bloomberg brought with him to City Hall.

"Data-driven"? It's hard to credit that when crime numbers are artificially deflated by re-classifying rapes as misdemeanors, NYC-reported public school gains disappear when compared to outside measures, and when the city's 65 percent graduation rate is undercut by state tests showing only 21.4 percent of city students are ready for college.

"Bloomberg's data-driven shtick," said one source voicing a sentiment repeated by several others, "means no one will tell him anything's failed."

As the city's "CEO," Bloomberg has managed only to track the ups and downs of Wall Street and the national economy. It's a strictly replacement-level performance.

New York went through its rainy-day reserves this year and, with the federal stimulus money spent, now faces $5 billion budget holes in each of the next three fiscal years. The coming budget crunch, says Manhattan Institute fellow Sol Stern, stems in large part from the mayor's penchant for awarding generous contracts to teachers and other public-sector workers that also add to the pension bills the mayor has at times written off as "fixed costs."

Pushing the idea that the city, like a corporation, has a bottom line, Bloomberg diverts attention from the fundamental issue every mayor faces: what the city ought to be doing.

So what kind of New York has Bloomberg tried to produce?

The "buck-a-year mayor" offered his business success and vast wealth as his main credentials for running New York. In office, he has envisioned a big-business-friendly city supporting a New Deal welfare state.

To make that work, he's promoted "knowledge workers" as New York's distinguishing resource, the way that waterways, rail lines, and manufacturing facilities were for industrial cities.

The mayor has often described that group (which, not coincidentally, matches the profile of Bloomberg terminal subscribers) as "the best and brightest," with no irony intended. 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. In his typical salesman's formulation, Bloomberg often suggests that the only alternative to courting that crowd and their wealthy employers would be a cost-cutting race to the bottom.

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?

That promised environment is the vastly expanded and uninterrupted Midtown Central Business District, a coveted goal of the business and real estate communities for nearly a century—if one viewed with suspicion farther south on Wall Street, where Bloomberg effectively ceded control of Ground Zero to a succession of bumbling governors, a major reason that it's taken a decade for the Trade Center site to even begin rising back up.

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.

"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."

(Perhaps oddly, the mayor is a big booster of Walmart's push to open stores in the city. Earlier this month, he defended the big-box store's $4 million donation to a city summer job program, snapping at a Times reporter, "You're telling me that your company's philanthropy doesn't look to see what is good for your company?" Asked how Walmart fits into the mayor's vision, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson told me on Twitter that it "fits into the strategy of creating jobs and capturing tax $$ here that are currently going to NJ and LI.")

But even as Wall Street has revived, ordinary New Yorkers haven't benefited from the promised trickle-down.

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.

Despite the mayor's recruiting efforts, people with bachelor's degrees continue to leave the city in greater numbers than they arrive here, with Brooklyn alone declining by 12,933 such citizens in 2006, according to the Center for an Urban Future, with many of those leaving discouraged by New York's high costs, and the low quality of the public education available to their children.

Mike Bloomberg thinks everyone's dream is to come to the city with an MBA and find an inefficiency to exploit and become a billionaire, or at least get a good job with one, argued three unrelated sources who have worked with the mayor, all of whom asked not to be quoted directly on the mayor's view of himself. His idea that everyone's dream is to be on Park Avenue, say those sources, has alienated and insulted outer-borough "Koch Democrats." Their dream is a house, and Mike Bloomberg diminishes that dream because he thinks everyone wants to be him.

As Bloomberg memorably put it while floating his candidacy in early 2001: "What's a billionaire got to do with it? I mean, would you rather elect a poor person who didn't succeed? Look, I'm a great American dream."

Without an impressive public-school system, Bloomberg's vision for New York falls apart. But the public-school "miracle" the mayor touted for years has proven all pitch and no payoff.

Despite a massive 40 percent hike in per-pupil spending during Bloomberg's first two terms, along with a 43 percent boost in teacher pay, the "historic" gains the mayor trumpets failed to register at all on the gold-standard national tests taken by the same students. When new state leaders put an end to the state's easily gamed tests, what was left of the city's years of paper gains disappeared.

The ever-rising test scores Bloomberg had relentlessly promoted fell almost all the way back to the mundane levels that had prevailed when the mayor took control of the system in 2002. The incredible success he's claimed in closing the achievement gap between black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian peers that's vexed generations of educators disappeared entirely by some measures.

Without high-quality schools to produce a cadre of well-educated citizens attractive to employers, Bloomberg's implicit social contract with New Yorkers—that courting big businesses will help the little guy—breaks down, and the city's appeal to those businesses is seriously tarnished, along with its long-term appeal to employees with children.

"Bloomberg yoked his education agenda to his ambitions for higher office," said Stern, who had initially backed both mayoral control of the schools and Bloomberg's education agenda. "He recognized that the way he was going to prove [to voters nationwide] that he'd given more bang for the buck was through test scores, while at the same time he was also introducing cash incentives to principals and teachers for getting the scores up." (That program was quietly shuttered this month after a city-commissioned study found the payments had no impact on student performance.)

"So he invited the corruption," Stern said, adding that he expects a numbers-juicing scandal to hit before Bloomberg leaves office. New Chancellor Dennis Walcott, responding to reports of grade-tampering in the city and a nationwide wave of such scandals, announced his own investigation this month, but it remains to be seen if the school system can fairly probe itself, and with the mayor's reputation hanging in the balance.

Asked in 2007 how New Yorkers could register their discontent with the schools now that he was presumably term-limited out of office, Bloomberg cracked, "Boo me at parades."

Some New Yorkers have taken him up on that, but more significantly they've also stopped caring enough to vote.

The mayor has indeed governed as the city CEO he promised to be in 2001, redefining public life so that businesses are "clients," citizens "customers," and Bloomberg the boss entrusted with the city's well-being, with no need to consult with the board before acting.

After 1.9 million New Yorkers took to the polls in the 1989 and 1993 contests between Dinkins and Giuliani, less than 1.5 million voted in 2001's nail-biter, and just 1.3 million turned out in 2005, when the outcome was never in doubt. Bloomberg nonetheless spent $84.6 million running up the score in a 19-point win intended to make him look "presidential." In 2009, the mayor, responding to internal polls showing most New Yorkers wanted him out, broke the $100 million mark to project inevitability and discourage voters from showing up at all. Despite perfect weather on election day, three out of every four voters didn't bother to participate. Just 1.2 million New Yorkers voted in an election that Bloomberg won by only 50,000 votes—collecting the fewest winning votes of any mayor since 1919, when there were 3 million fewer New Yorkers and women didn't have the franchise. For the first time, Bloomberg's spending failed to translate into popular support.

As the city's electorate shrank around him—even as its population grew by more than a million people between 1990 and 2010, Bloomberg's political stature swelled. The voters who just stayed home allowed the mayor to hold on to power despite an outnumbered base of the city's social and financial elites and the technocratic planners they often bankroll, a political and governing coalition last seen 40 years ago under fellow party-switcher John Lindsay.

"My neighbors [in Manhattan] don't vote in city primaries," said a source. "They vote in presidential elections where their vote is useless. They've privatized their lives. Private schools, country houses, Kindles instead of libraries, cars instead of trains."

In exchange for Citizen Bloomberg's benighted leadership, we've accepted a staggering array of conflicts of interest. The mayor's fortune renders obsolete the "traditional" model of interest groups buying off politicians. He not only does the reverse, buying off interest groups to advance his political agenda but also uses his fortune to staff and support his business. At the same time, he builds the Bloomberg brand that supports it all: Bloomberg LP, the Bloomberg Family Foundation, Bloomberg Terminals, Bloomberg News, Bloomberg View, Bloomberg Government, Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Markets—not to mention Mayor Bloomberg.

The mayor wrote his own rules in a remarkably deferential 2002 agreement with the city's toothless Conflict of Interest Board, and then ignored them when it was convenient, continuing to be regularly involved in his company's affairs and acting in city matters where Bloomberg LP or Merrill Lynch (which until recently owned 20 percent of Bloomberg LP) had a stake.

Top-level City Hall workers, favored legislators, and others have moved freely between City Hall and the mayor's private interests, keeping it in the "Bloomberg Family." Bloomberg LP is now run by former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, while the Bloomberg Family Foundation's approximately $2 billion endowment is controlled, on a "volunteer" basis, by Deputy Mayor Patti Harris. The prospect of a private Bloomberg jackpot job is on a lot of minds around City Hall and throughout New York.

Craig Johnson, the former state senator who lost a re-election bid after bucking his party to back the mayor in supporting charter schools, was hired this month by Bloomberg Law. "I wasn't about to let him go to some other company," Bloomberg said, all but winking. "I was thrilled to see my company hired him. I didn't have anything to do with that."

Beyond the $267 million he spent in three mayoral runs, he documented nearly $200 million more in "anonymous" charitable contributions. And that cool half-billion is just the spending Bloomberg has chosen to disclose.

Harris, now City Hall's highest-paid official, came to the administration from Bloomberg LP. Through her control of Bloomberg's ostensibly anonymous donations passed through the Carnegie Foundation to local institutions, she's served as the Medici Mayor's chief courtier—working for the city while using his private fortune to rent the silence, and occasionally the active assent, of its cultural groups on his behalf. That city giving dropped precipitously when Carnegie was replaced by the new Bloomberg Family Foundation, also run by Harris, which is now spreading cash to potential Bloomberg constituencies nationwide.

As Bloomberg explained in 1997, when Harris worked for Bloomberg LP: "Her sole job is to decide which philanthropic activities are appropriate for our company and to ensure we get our money's worth when we donate time, money, and jobs. One of Patti's questions is, 'When does helping others help us?'... Not only does Patti commit our dollars, she also follows, influences, and directs how our gifts are used, ensuring our objectives are met."

Elsewhere in his memoir, he adds: "Peer pressure: Its impact in the philanthropic world is hard to overstate."

Meanwhile, Bloomberg News, supported by income from his sophisticated "Bloomberg terminals," has grown to employ about 2,500 journalists, and at some of the best rates in the industry.

After offering up vague statements about avoiding conflicts of interests—no easy task when the boss is a potential presidential candidate, mayor of the nation's biggest city, and one of that city's wealthiest men—Bloomberg View debuted in May with a remarkable opening editorial. The editors conceded that they didn't know yet what their principles would be—"We hope that over time a general philosophy will emerge"—but they were confident they would end up aligned with the "values embodied by Mike Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg LP."

In June, brand-name Bloomberg pundit Jonathan Alter launched into an exceptionally vitriolic attack on charter school detractor and former Bloomberg education adviser-turned-foe Diane Ravitch. The piece ran with no acknowledgment of the evident conflict of interest in taking shots at perhaps the most prominent critic of Citizen Bloomberg's education policies, under the Bloomberg View banner.

Bloomberg seems to view himself as congenitally above such conflicts, explaining in Bloomberg on Bloomberg, "Our reporters periodically go before our sales force and justify their journalistic coverage to the people getting feedback from the news story readers.... In return, the reporters get the opportunity to press the salespeople to provide more access, get news stories better distribution and credibility, bring in more businesspeople, politicians, sports figures and entertainers to be interviewed.... Most news organizations never connect reporters and commerce. At Bloomberg, they're as close to seamless as it can get."

Speaking of seamless, in 2000 Bloomberg rolled out a new city section, just in time for the boss's run. Jonathan Capehart, brought in from Newsday, ended up doing double duty as candidate Bloomberg's policy tutor and his host in different corners of the city, according to former Times reporter Joyce Purnick's biography of the mayor, Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics. When the mayor-elect reached out to Al Sharpton on election night to tell him "things will be different with me as mayor," it was Bloomberg News employee Capehart who placed the call.

Much as City Hall staffers dream of a Bloomberg job as the big payoff for their loyal labors, few reporters will go out of their way to tweak a potential employer, let alone one who frequently lunches with their current boss. And especially one whose long-rumored ambition is to buy the Times one of these days—a buzz that the mayor's camp hasn't discouraged, Berlusconi comparisons be damned. (The Italian prime minister and Ross Perot are two of Bloomberg's neighbors when he weekends in Bermuda).

Along with Berlusconi, other comparisons heard in various conversations about Bloomberg included his Trump-like leveraging of his name ("It would be me and my name at risk. I would become the Colonel Sanders of financial information services.... I was Bloomberg—Bloomberg was money—and money talked"), his Hearst-like seduction of legislators with private jet rides and self-serving party-jumping, and his Rockefeller-like use of his private fortune on behalf of the state GOP, though for very different reasons.

The lifelong Democrat who became a Republican to dodge the mayoral primary has also given millions to the state GOP (as well as $250,000 to the Republican National Committee in 2002, and $7 million in support of the 2004 Republican convention in Manhattan). The cash shipments continued even after the mayor left the party in 2007 to hitch his star to the misleadingly named "Independence Party"—run in the city by crackpot cultist Lenora Fulani.

While Bloomberg's support for the GOP dwarfed the money he channeled to the Independence Party, both received just a drop from his enormous bucket of cash—which still made Bloomberg easily the state Republicans' biggest patron, his table scraps their feast. The party repaid that support in part with their ballot line in 2009, two years after he'd left the party, to go along with his "Independence" line, which proved crucial to his 2001 and 2009 wins, and would have been key had his presidential plans moved forward.

His Albany cash, though, has often failed to pay off. Perhaps that's because Bloomberg hasn't been willing or able to salt the state's interest groups and leadership class as thoroughly as he has the city's—his political persuasiveness and popularity have always been coterminous with his cash. In each of his terms, major aims—Far West Side development, congestion pricing, and teacher hiring—have been simply abandoned in the capitol without so much as a vote. Those losses came despite dealing with three weak governors before Cuomo, whose dramatic ascent has left the mayor further diminished. (One of Bloomberg's rare wins in the state capitol, mayoral control of the city schools, was actually given to him by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the mayor's most frequent Albany foil—who had withheld the same gift from Mayor Giuliani.)

Given Citizen Bloomberg's success in buying off the city's opinion makers, cultural institutions, community groups, and organized protesters, it's no wonder the mayoralty began to feel too small for him, and he spent the bulk of his second term trying to leverage it into the presidency. While his signature congestion-pricing plan failed in the city, it succeeded in landing him on the cover of Time. He followed up by a nationwide victory tour with then-Chancellor Joel Klein and well-compensated occasional sidekick Sharpton to tout the school system's "amazing results."

The master salesman, who talked of transparency while keeping his own cards down, used his fortune to establish at City Hall the "benevolent dictatorship" he saw at Salomon and then employed in his private business: "Nor did so-called corporate democracy get in the way. 'Empowerment' wasn't a concept back then, nor was 'self-improvement' or 'consensus,' " Bloomberg writes in his business memoir. "The managing partner in those days made all the important decisions. I suspect that many times, he didn't even tell the executive committee after he'd decided something, much less consult them before. I'd bet they never had a committee vote. I know they never polled the rest of us on anything. This was a dictatorship, pure and simple. But a benevolent one."

But dictatorships never last. "Once Bloomberg leaves a room, it doesn't exist to him," said one source, skeptical that the mayor would care about maintaining his influence after he exits office. But given the value of his name, he is taking care to be sure that it isn't damaged in the exit process.

Campaign filings released last Friday show the lame duck nonetheless spent $5.6 million on TV and direct mail spots promoting himself in March and April. And after failing to groom a successor, the mayor has belatedly been trying to institutionalize parts of the Bloomberg way.

"The administration is finally trying to do systematic reform, that's what [Stephen] Goldsmith is here for," a source said, referring to the former Indianapolis mayor who emerged as a star of the 1990s "reinventing government" movement, and signed on for Bloomberg's third term as a deputy mayor. "I think he's really frustrated. He complains a lot about lawyers."

While Police Commissioner Ray Kelly reportedly mulls a Republican run, buzz has been building that Bloomberg will support City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, his Democratic partner in changing the term-limits law, as his successor. A slush-fund scandal left her damaged, but a third term she and the mayor pushed through bought her time to recover, along with a chip to cash with him. Mayor Koch last month outright said that Bloomberg had told him he was backing Quinn, before Koch dialed back his words later the same day.

But some of the Bloomberg-for-Quinn hype has come from operatives with reason to find a new patron once the billionaire exits office. The mayor, meanwhile, has reason to want a pliant speaker in his final years.

"Even if he does back her," a source noted, "he's not giving her $100 million for a campaign, or to wield as mayor. Once he's gone, it's done."

Contact Harry Siegel at hsiegel@villagevoice.com

Photo courtesy of Be the Change, Inc. :: Photo credit Jim Gillooly/PEI

The Next Boom Towns In The U.S.

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 15:20:24 -0400

What cities are best positioned to grow and prosper in the coming decade?

To determine the next boom towns in the U.S., with the help of Mark Schill at the Praxis Strategy Group, we took the 52 largest metro areas in the country (those with populations exceeding 1 million) and ranked them based on various data indicating past, present and future vitality.

We started with job growth, not only looking at performance over the past decade but also focusing on growth in the past two years, to account for the possible long-term effects of the Great Recession. That accounted for roughly one-third of the score. The other two-thirds were made up of a a broad range of demographic factors, all weighted equally. These included rates of family formation (percentage growth in children 5-17), growth in educated migration, population growth and, finally, a broad measurement of attractiveness to immigrants — as places to settle, make money and start businesses.

We focused on these demographic factors because college-educated migrants (who also tend to be under 30), new families and immigrants will be critical in shaping the future. Areas that are rapidly losing young families and low rates of migration among educated migrants are the American equivalents of rapidly aging countries like Japan; those with more sprightly demographics are akin to up and coming countries such as Vietnam.

Many of our top performers are not surprising. No. 1 Austin, Texas, and No. 2 Raleigh, N.C., have it all demographically: high rates of immigration and migration of educated workers and healthy increases in population and number of children. They are also economic superstars, with job-creation records among the best in the nation.

Perhaps less expected is the No. 3 ranking for Nashville, Tenn. The country music capital, with its low housing prices and pro-business environment, has experienced rapid growth in educated migrants, where it ranks an impressive fourth in terms of percentage growth. New ethnic groups, such as Latinos and Asians, have doubled in size over the past decade.

Two advantages Nashville and other rising Southern cities like No. 8 Charlotte, N.C., possess are a mild climate and smaller scale. Even with population growth, they do not suffer the persistent transportation bottlenecks that strangle the older growth hubs. At the same time, these cities are building the infrastructure — roads, cultural institutions and airports — critical to future growth. Charlotte’s bustling airport may never be as big as Atlanta’s Hartsfield, but it serves both major national and international routes.

Of course, Texas metropolitan areas feature prominently on our list of future boom towns, including No. 4 San Antonio, No. 5 Houston and No. 7 Dallas, which over the past years boasted the biggest jump in new jobs, over 83,000. Aided by relatively low housing prices and buoyant economies, these Lone Star cities have become major hubs for jobs and families.

And there’s more growth to come. With its strategically located airport, Dallas is emerging as the ideal place for corporate relocations. And Houston, with its burgeoning port and dominance of the world energy business, seems destined to become ever more influential in the coming decade. Both cities have emerged as major immigrant hubs, attracting on newcomers at a rate far higher than old immigrant hubs like Chicago, Boston and Seattle.

The three other regions in our top 10 represent radically different kinds of places. The Washington, D.C., area (No. 6) sprawls from the District of Columbia through parts of Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia. Its great competitive advantage lies in proximity to the federal government, which has helped it enjoy an almost shockingly ”good recession,” with continuing job growth, including in high-wage science- and technology-related fields, and an improving real estate market.

Our other two top ten, No. 9 Phoenix, Ariz., and No. 10 Orlando, Fla., have not done well in the recession, but both still have more jobs now than in 2000. Their demographics remain surprisingly robust. Despite some anti-immigrant agitation by local politicians, immigrants still seem to be flocking to both of these states. Known better s as retirement havens, their ranks of children and families have surged over the past decade. Warm weather, pro-business environments and, most critically, a large supply of affordable housing should allow these regions to grow, if not in the overheated fashion of the past, at rates both steadier and more sustainable.

Sadly, several of the nation’s premier economic regions sit toward the bottom of the list, notably former boom town Los Angeles (No. 47). Los Angeles’ once huge and vibrant industrial sector has shrunk rapidly, in large part the consequence of ever-tightening regulatory burdens. Its once magnetic appeal to educated migrants faded and families are fleeing from persistently high housing prices, poor educational choices and weak employment opportunities. Los Angeles lost over 180,000 children 5 to 17, the largest such drop in the nation.

Many of L.A.’s traditional rivals — such as Chicago (with which is tied at No. 47), New York City (No. 35) and San Francisco (No. 42) — also did poorly on our prospective list. To be sure, they will continue to reap the benefits of existing resources — financial institutions, universities and the presence of leading companies — but their future prospects will be limited by their generally sluggish job creation and aging demographics.

Of course, even the most exhaustive research cannot fully predict the future. A significant downsizing of the federal government, for example, would slow the D.C. region’s growth. A big fall in energy prices, or tough restrictions of carbon emissions, could hit the Texas cities, particularly Houston, hard. If housing prices stabilize in the Northeast or West Coast, less people will flock to places like Phoenix, Orlando or even Indianapolis (No.11) , Salt Lake City (No. 12) and Columbus (No. 13). One or more of our now lower ranked locales, like Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, might also decide to reform in order to become more attractive to small businesses and middle class families.

What is clear is that well-established patterns of job creation and vital demographics will drive future regional growth, not only in the next year, but over the coming decade. People create economies and they tend to vote with their feet when they choose to locate their families as well as their businesses. This will prove more decisive in shaping future growth than the hip imagery and big city-oriented PR flackery that dominate media coverage of America’s changing regions.

Cities of the Future Rankings
Rank	Metropolitan Area
1	Austin, TX
2	Raleigh, NC
3	Nashville, TN
4	San Antonio, TX
5	Houston, TX
6	Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV
7	Dallas-Fort Worth, TX
8	Charlotte, NC-SC
8	Phoenix, AZ
10	Orlando, FL
11	Indianapolis, IN
12	Salt Lake City, UT
13	Columbus, OH
14	Jacksonville, FL
15	Atlanta, GA
16	Las Vegas, NV
16	Riverside, CA
18	Portland, OR-WA
19	Denver, CO
20	Oklahoma City, OK
21	Baltimore, MD
22	Louisville, KY-IN
22	Richmond, VA
24	Seattle, WA
25	Kansas City, MO-KS
26	San Diego, CA
27	Miami, FL
28	Tampa, FL
29	Sacramento, CA
30	Birmingham, AL
31	New Orleans, LA
32	Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD
33	Minneapolis, MN-WI
34	St. Louis, MO-IL
35	Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN
35	New York, NY-NJ-PA
37	Boston, MA-NH
38	Memphis, TN-MS-AR
39	Pittsburgh, PA
40	Virginia Beach, VA-NC
41	Rochester, NY
42	Buffalo, NY
42	San Francisco, CA
44	Hartford, CT
45	Milwaukee, WI
45	San Jose, CA
47	Chicago, IL-IN-WI
47	Los Angeles, CA
49	Providence, RI-MA
50	Detroit, MI
51	Cleveland, OH

This piece originally appeared at Forbes.com.

Photo by Exothermic Photography

Listing the Best Places Lists: Perception Versus Reality

Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:50:00 -0400

Often best places lists reflect as much on what’s being measured, and who is being measured as on the inherent advantages of any locale. Some cities that have grown rapidly in jobs, for example, often do not do as well if the indicator has more to do with perceived “quality” of employment.

Take places like Denver and Seattle. Both do well on what may be considered high-tech measurements – bandwidth, educated migration, entrepreneurial start ups – but have trailed other places in terms of creating jobs. Others, such as Oklahoma City and Raleigh, do better in terms of overall job creation and cost competitiveness.

There are effectively few truly objective criteria, and the Area Development list does tend to weigh a bit heavy on the factors that help more expensive – although not necessarily the most costly – cities. If cost of doing business, or regulatory environments were given more weight, some of the high fliers would not do as well.

We prefer to focus less on atmospherics and more on how people, and businesses, are voting for their feet. San Francisco and New York have generally had slower job growth and greater outmigration, but do well on lists that focus on perceived qualitative factors.

But then there is Austin. Here is one region that has it all, the low costs and favorable regulatory climate of Texas along with the amenities associated with a high-tech region. The area creates a large number of jobs of varying types and is still inexpensive enough to attract young, upwardly mobile families. This gives it a critical advantage over places like Silicon Valley, Los Angeles or New York. Unlike those three centers, Austin performs extraordinarily well in quantitative measurements.

The region that most closely matches Austin in these respects is not Seattle and Denver, but Raleigh Durham. Recently a group of leaders from Raleigh made a visit to Denver to learn what makes that city successful. Speaking to the group, we pointed out that by objective measurement – job growth, educated migration, population growth – Raleigh beat Denver by a long shot, yet it was to Denver the group was looking for inspiration. In fact, over the past three years, Americans have moved to Raleigh at a rate more than three times that of Denver. Perception can be a funny thing which makes a winner feel inferior to a clear runner-up.

Another strange result is that New York and Houston had the same number of mentions. Yet looking at numbers --- from educated migration, job growth, population increase --- Houston slaughters New York. People, from the college educated on down are flocking to Houston while fleeing, in rather large numbers, from New York. One has to wonder where the rankers live and where they are coming from. Houston triumphs on performance, while New York, to a large extent, wins on perception.

Looking simply at job growth over the past ten years for the Leading Locations mentioned on at least five surveys, the 14 regions separate themselves into three groups. The top tier of places – Austin, Raleigh, San Antonio, and Houston – all have seen job growth of more than 12% and seem to be recovering from the recession faster than the others.

Salt Lake City and Charlotte were tracking with the top tier of places until 2007 but have since fallen to the second tier of cities. The remainder of the second tier includes steady growers Dallas and Lincoln, along with Oklahoma City, a region that has seen a boom in jobs since bottoming out in 2003.

The final job growth tier of places includes five regions that have fewer jobs than ten years ago. Seattle drops just below the zero line after being hit particularly hard by the 2001 and 2008 recessions, while New York and Denver finish near the national rate. Pittsburgh and Boston spent most of the decade below their 2000 employment levels, but each seem to be recovering from the recession faster than many of the other Leading Locations cities.

But perhaps the biggest problem with lists has to do with the size of regions. Much of the fastest growth in America, particularly in terms of jobs, has been in small metros, many with fewer than 1 million or 500,000 residents. Smaller dynamic areas such as Anchorage, Alaska; Bismarck, North Dakota; Dubuque, Iowa; or Elizabethtown, Kentucky – all in the top 25 of NewGeography’s Best Cities for Job Growth 2011 Rankings – are too small to show up on some lists yet may be a location of choice for expansion. This reflects not so much their relative desirability but the fact that, unlike larger regions, they simply are not included on many rankings.

Ultimately, a list of lists does tell us much, but perhaps only so much for a specific individual or business. For someone interested in the movie business, for example, Los Angeles – and increasingly places like New Orleans or Albuquerque – are great draws, but perhaps not so much for financial services. The lists of lists are useful to identify hotspots, but for most location decisions, it may be more imperative to drill down to more detailed industry sectors and workforce attributes. And most of all, take the perception factor into account and look instead at the real numbers to tell you where to go.

This piece first appeared at AreaDevelopment.com, as part of its Leading Locations series discussing best cities rankings.

Joel Kotkin is a Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in California, an adjunct fellow with the London-based Legatum Institute, and the author of The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. Mark Schill is Vice President of Research at Praxis Strategy Group, an economic research and community strategy firm. Both are editors at NewGeography.com, a provider of two surveys for Area Development’s Leading Locations list.

Photo by mclcbooks

Goodbye, New York State Residents are Rushing for the Exits

Fred Siegel — Sat, 28 May 2011 11:54:16 -0400

For more than 15 years, New York State has led the country in domestic outmigration: for every American who comes to New York, roughly two depart for other states. This outmigration slowed briefly following the onset of the Great Recession. But a new Marist poll released last week suggests that the rate is likely to increase: 36 percent of New Yorkers under 30 are planning to leave over the next five years. Why are all these people fleeing?

For one thing, according to a recent survey in Chief Executive, New York State has the second-worst business climate in the country. (Only California ranks lower.) People go where the jobs are, so when a state repels businesses, it repels residents, too. It’s also telling that in the Marist poll, 62 percent of New Yorkers planning to leave cited economic factors—including cost of living (30 percent), taxes (19 percent), and the job environment (10 percent)—as the primary reason.

In upstate New York, a big part of the problem is extraordinarily high property taxes. New York has the 15 highest-taxed counties in the country, including Nassau and Westchester, which rank first and second nationwide. Most of the property tax goes toward paying the state’s Medicaid bill—which is unlikely to diminish, since the state’s most powerful lobby, the political cartel created by the alliance of the hospital workers’ union and hospital management, has gone unchallenged by new governor Andrew Cuomo.

New York City doesn’t suffer from outmigration to the extent that the state does; in fact, the city grew slightly over the past decade, thanks to immigration. And there’s more work in Gotham than in the state as a whole. The problem is that the kind of work available shows that the city accommodates new immigrants much better than it supports middle-class aspirations. A recent report from the Drum Major Institute helps make sense of the Marist numbers: “The two fastest-growing industries in New York are also the lowest paid. More than half of the city’s employment growth over the past year has been in retail, hospitality, and food services, all of which pay their workers less than half of the city’s average wage.” Worse yet, more than 80 percent of the new jobs are in the city’s five lowest-paying sectors. Parts of the country are seeing a revival of manufacturing—traditionally a source of upward mobility for immigrants—but not New York City, whose manufacturing continues to decline. The culprits here include the city’s zoning policies, business taxes, and declining physical infrastructure.

Then there’s the cost of living in New York City. A 2009 report by the Center for an Urban Future found that “a New Yorker would have to make $123,322 a year to have the same standard of living as someone making $50,000 in Houston. In Manhattan, a $60,000 salary is equivalent to someone making $26,092 in Atlanta.” Even Queens, the report found, was the fifth most expensive urban area in the country.

The implications of Gotham’s hourglass economy—with all the action on the top and bottom, and not much in the middle—are daunting. The Drum Major report, which noted that 31 percent of the adults employed in New York work at low-wage labor, came with a political agenda. The institute wants the city to subsidize new categories of work by expanding the scope of “living-wage” laws, which require higher pay than minimum-wage laws do, to all businesses that receive city funds or contracts. But that would mean higher taxes for the middle class and a further narrowing of the hourglass’s midsection.

Governor Cuomo is calling for a property-tax cap, but without “mandate relief” for localities—for example, relaxing state laws that require localities to pay out exorbitant pension benefits. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has pledged not to increase local taxes, but even at their current level, city taxes and regulations will keep serving as an exit sign for aspiring twentysomething workers. In short, we can expect New York to lead the country in outmigration for the near future.

This piece first appeared in the City Journal.

Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.

Photo by Christopher Schoenbohm