Miriam, yes it was a downward slide. My grandmother came from Italy through
Ellis Island in 1920 and worked as a seamstress in Manhattan and had a
reasonably good lifestyle; not affluent but safe and secure. She only had a
first grade education. Flash forward to the 1970s and and my mother, with her
masters degree could only provide us with an unheated shack in a shanty town
under the Whitestone bridge. The standard of living for the working class is
really in a tail spin.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2015 1:50 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Some history worth reviewing: The Tragical
History of New York
Carl,
Certainly, that was true for the immigrants who came in the early 1900's.
But the city also began providing supports for them, and there was rent
control and free college education. Much of the cultural life of the city
was affordable to working people. There was work to do. My father worked in
a factory in the millinary district. It was very hard work and it didn't pay
much. But we were able to live a pleasant life. We had a one bedroom
apartment. We couldn't afford a two bedroom apartment. We went to the movies
in the neighborhood and in Manhattan, We also ate out in restaurants in our
neighborhood and also, in some really fancy ones in Manhattan. We attended
Broadway shows. There were boat rides on the Hudson to the parks at Bear
Mountain and at Indian Point, before it had a nuclear plant. There were
annual summer vacations. Our streets were clean and safe. We had a library
on our block and we could walk to all of the resources that we needed. We
lived on only my father's salary until I was about thirteen, when my mother
got a part-time job as a salesperson in Bloomingdales, an upscale Manhattan
department store. We were also able to purchase a car when I was ten years
old. There were no credit cards, just a Macy's charge card, if I remember
correctly, so we saved money for every bill, every purchase, every vacation.
We had no debt. We had no checking account.Everything was paid in cash.
Everything in Manhattan was completely accessible to us. That way of life is
gone. The factory jobs are gone. The security for working people is gone.
The working people who live in the city now are poor.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2015 11:54 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Some history worth reviewing: The Tragical
History of New York
I know I run the risk of being called Simple Minded, but for me, the
writer sums it all up
n his statement, "...The reasons for New York City's economic decline
are complex..."
And of course he then continues making a complex case.
Perhaps the solutions, under our current love of Capitalism, is
complex or near on impossible, but the reasons are simple.
We have built a civilization based on an unsustainable model.
Expansionism. Continuous growth. Exploitation. And we have been
convinced that our only salvation is to continue worshiping the Golden
Calf. And if things are not going well, then it is our fault and we
must worship even harder.
Our so called civilization looks like a giant vacuum cleaner hovering
above our heads, sucking up everything, pulling it all to the top,
regardless of the impact on Mother Earth.
But the writer goes plowing on, even getting misty-eyed over the past
wonders of New York City as a Mecca for immigrants wanting to share in
the Great American Dream. New York City was ugly back then, so far as
life in the Sweat Shops was concerned. Multitudes of thread bare
women struggling to the factories, working for pennies, hoping to...to
just survive. It was only good times for the wealthy. Some many
months back Joe posted some writings by Nellie Bly. It's worth
looking her up and reading her first-hand accounts of life back in
those old Glory Days of the Garment Factories.
So, while I found the article interesting, it did not reflect what
life was like for those who were responsible for lining the pockets of
the rich.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/13/15, Alice Dampman Humel <alicedh@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I think those things were beyond the purpose and scope of the article.so
So we kind of don't know how the author feels about those things.
On Aug 13, 2015, at 9:17 AM, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Sylvie,
Yes, that certainly was very distressing. The other distressing trend was
how city planning was used to support real estate interests as opposed to
maintaining existing neighborhoods and industrial areas and how the
expressways were used in that respect. All of that was very informative.
It's hard for me to put my finger on what bothered me, but I think it was
the author's basic faith in Capitalism because all of the distressing
trends
that he describes are manifestations of unregulated capitalism and his
proposed solutions stay within our system, as it is. When he discusses
where
funds for the cities might come from, he never mentions decreasing our
military budget and changing our stance in the world.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of S. Kashdan
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2015 2:13 AM
To: Blind Democracy List
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Some history worth reviewing: The Tragical
History of New York
Miriam,
Could you be specific about the underlying assumptions you are referring
to?
What struck me was the description of the loss of blue-collar
manufacturing
and other such jobs from New York City along with the concentration of
high
wage financial and other such jobs, and the difficulties that posed for
longer
many families. I think that had a lot to do with spurring the
gentrification
process.
Sylvie
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 9:33 AM
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Some history worth reviewing: The Tragical
History of New York
There's a lot of fascinating information in this article. However, I
think
that I'm uncomfortable about much of what it says because of what seem to
be
the underlying assumptions and beliefs of the author.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of S. Kashdan
Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 1:13 AM
To: Blind Democracy List
Subject: [blind-democracy] Some history worth reviewing: The Tragical
History of New York
The Tragical History of New York
by Jason Epstein
The New York Review of Books, April 9, 1992, page 45-52
1.
One hot day in the summer of 1991 I lost my way in the middle of
Brooklyn.
Driving aimlessly along rutted Broadway under the elevated tracks, I soon
saw that I was heading for Bushwick, where I had not been for thirty
years
or more. But as I passed a stretch of burned-out stores and shattered
side
streets where only a few rotted and abandoned houses stood, nothing was
familiar to me. I remembered Bushwick as a self-satisfied Brooklyn
neighborhood, warm but not welcoming, a small city in its own right, with
three-story wooden houses along tree-lined streets, churches, ice cream
parlors, children on bicycles.
Bushwick, when I had known it, had its own minor league baseball team and
had made its money mostly from breweries. I remembered the sharp smell of
hops and yeast on clear mornings. Now it was a slum.
The sight of a devastated New York City neighborhood was nothing new, but
Bushwick, which lay in ruins along either side of Broadway, was different
from other New York City slums, most of which had shallow roots. The
Bushwick that I had known began as a Dutch village some three hundred
years
ago, and prospered well into the twentieth century as a largely German
and
Italian working-class neighborhood, the site not only of breweries but of
knitting factories and other small manufacturing plants, whose owners and
employees had once lived in mansions along Bushwick Avenue and in the
frame
houses along the now desolate side streets.
Bushwick's taxpayers had, in their day, contributed as much to New York's
prosperity and stability as the millionaires on Park Avenue, maybe more,
for
Bushwick was not one of those barracks neighborhoods like Brownsville,
thrown together along newly built subway lines by speculators before the
First World War to house immigrant factory workers, neighborhoods that
were
never more than temporary roosts on the road to something better or
worse.
Bushwick had a rooted culture and an economy of its own well before the
Civil War, when Park Avenue was still undreamed of. Now, after some three
centuries of more or less steady growth, it was, as I could see, no
anda
source of wealth, but a festering claim against the city's already
overburdened taxpayers and hell for those who had to live there.
When I first visited Bushwick in the late 1940s, returning veterans with
their GI loans and FHA mortgages were already leaving for the suburbs,
becomea
few ambitious black families from Bedford-Stuyvesant and other ghettos
had
begun to move in. Playing on the fear of white homeowners that these
blacks
were only the first of many and that their property would lose its value
as
Bushwick itself became a black ghetto, real estate speculators, hoping to
turn fear into panic, moved the most "boisterous, undesirable people"
they
could find into houses vacated by the departing whites. [1] Then they
distributed circulars saying, "Houses wanted. Cash waiting. Don't wait
until
it's too late." Buying cheap from panicked whites and selling dear to
incoming blacks, these blockbusters soon turned the neighborhood
predominantly black.
When the new owners could not meet the mortgage payments on their
overpriced
properties, other speculators took over and moved welfare families into
the
vacated buildings, at exorbitant rentals, which the city, with its long
tradition of generosity to the poor, had no choice but to pay. Where else
but in such deteriorating neighborhoods as Bushwick could it house such
people, many of whom were abandoned mothers with dependent children who
had
drifted, often with the encouragement of hometown politicians, to New
York
and other northern cities as part of a vast and ill-prepared migration
from
Puerto Rico and the rural South, where new technologies and old racial
hatreds had made them economically useless and politically expendable?
Partly because welfare regulations required that the father be absent
before
a mother of dependent children became eligible for public assistance,
family
life disintegrated further, and the familiar pathologies followed.
By the 1960s Bushwick, with its new welfare population, had already
anda
burden for the city's taxpayers. Banks would no longer grant mortgages,
and
"a cycle of disinvestment began which had a devastating effect on
Bushwick."
[2] During the city-wide blackout of 1977 Bushwick's embittered residents
looted the few businesses that remained, and the wreckage is still
visible
along Broadway today. Except for some public housing built across from
St.
Barbara's church after the blackout, the city government has largely
ignored
Bushwick's hundred thousand residents, now mostly Hispanic, few of whom
vote
or pay taxes.
But there is probably no longer much that the politicians can do for
Bushwick even if they wanted to, given the city's own budget problems, to
say nothing of the state, which faces a four billion dollar deficit in
the
coming year, while most of its bonds have recently been assigned the
second-lowest rating of any state bonds in the nation. Nor can the city
look
to the debt-ridden federal government, which under Reagan and Bush has
sharply cut its contributions to state and city treasuries while it
continues to promote tax policies favorable to the rich. All three of
these
governments, measured by their lack of ready cash, are hardly better off
than the hapless citizens of Bushwick themselves, a few of whom, on the
blazing hot day of my drive along Broadway, were sitting amid hovels that
they had built for themselves in the rubble of their burned-out
neighborhood, unrepaired some fifteen years after the riots that
accompanied
the blackout.
Nor is there much that the defeated residents of Bushwick seem likely to
do
on their own. New York's once booming industrial economy, based almost
entirely on small manufacturing plants exporting a bewildering variety of
goods to all corners of the world, had provided opportunity for
generations
of immigrants, some of them no more qualified than many of those who had
begun drifting north in the early Fifties to settle in neighborhoods like
Bushwick, and whose descendants are now stranded there. But since the
early
Fifties the city's industrial economy has been declining and in many city
neighborhoods where it once flourished is now all but dead.
What replaced these miscellaneous factory jobs is a concentrated service
economy, dominated by a few thousand highly paid mandarins--bankers,
corporate managers, advertising executives, designers, publishers, deal
makers, and their courtiers and staffs--lawyers, publicists,
psychiatrists,
jewelers, entertainers, writers, and so on. These producers of financial
and
other professional services and their thousands of employees have been
"largely responsible," according to an optimistic report issued last
summer
by the deputy mayor for finance and economic development, "for the city's
recovery and growth since [the fiscal crisis of] the mid-1970s." But
according to the more sober year-end report of the federal Bureau of
Labor
Statistics, Manhattan, where much of this work takes place, has lost
149,000
jobs since the downturn began in March 1989, equal to its entire gain
since
1980, and "has experienced steep cutbacks in its export oriented finance,
business and professional services complex...." In the past thirty-two
months the financial services sector, including insurance and real
estate,
has lost 60,000 jobs city-wide.
According to the usually sanguine Samuel M. Ehrenhalt, commissioner of
the
New York--New Jersey region for the BLS, the decline in business,
financial,
and professional services "preceded the onset of the national recession
by
seventeen months." This suggests to him that permanent structural changes
rather than temporary cyclical forces are primarily responsible for the
weakness of New York City's professional services economy, the result of
mergers and consolidations by banks, advertising agencies, and similar
businesses, and competition from firms in other, more congenial or less
expensive parts of the country or the world, as well as the contraction
of
certain troubled industries such as network broadcasting. This decline in
professional service jobs is "unprecedented in the post-war era and
suggests
that there is something different going on," and not merely the effect of
the national recession, Ehrenhalt told a reporter for The New York Times.
Despite its generally optimistic tone, the deputy mayor's report agrees:
"While New York City's producer services industries performed very well
during the 1980s, the sector now faces fierce competition in every
market,
whether regional, national or international and will increasingly look to
merge and relocate back office operations out of Manhattan in order to
reduce costs...technical change, primarily information technology, has
allowed for the decentralization of functions such as investment
management,
trading related activities and client servicing."
Meanwhile the tourist industry, with its theatrical producers, taxi
drivers,
chefs, museum curators, and chambermaids, though it is currently in
decline,
continues to be a major employer, especially since the weak dollar has
kept
American tourists from traveling abroad while attracting foreign tourists
here. New York's medical industry is another major source of jobs, but
only
fragments remain of the factory work to which millions of New Yorkers had
once gravitated.
Protecting, transporting, healing, educating, and cleaning up after these
providers of revenue-producing services are more than 450,000 unionized
municipal employees, [3] some of them skilled as teachers, firemen,
police
officers, transit workers, and bureaucrats. But the majority are less
skilled, serving mainly the poor in hospitals, jails, and other public
institutions. Some of these workers are paid by independent agencies such
as
the Transit and Housing Authorities or are funded partly by state and
federal grants, but whoever pays them, payroll costs now consume 53
percent
of the city's annual operating budget, compared to 50 percent in the
mid-Eighties, an expense that the city, with its welfare population once
more approaching a million (two thirds of whom are children), with its
professional services economy in decline, and with its industrial economy
greatly depleted, can no longer sustain. Further cuts in municipal
employment and city services are inevitable.
New York City now faces an operating deficit of $333 million in its $28.5
billion budget for the fiscal year that ends on June 30, 1992. [4] A
recent
bond prospectus issued to the city's lenders showed budget "gaps"
amounting
to a total of $7 billion that have to be closed over the next four years.
But these grim estimates are based on optimistic assumptions, including
the
end of the national recession in 1991, investment earnings of 9 percent
for
the city's pension fund assets, and continued strength in its
professional
services area. State officials have estimated that the cumulative "gap"
could be $3.2 billion greater. All such predictions are, of course,
highly
speculative since they depend on future economic circumstances and
political
choices which are unknowable, but they do suggest the extent to which the
city may have to raise taxes and reduce expenses unless economic
conditions
significantly improve.
New York City taxes, however, are already 80 percent higher as a
proportion
of gross city product than the national average, according to a report by
the city comptroller. [5] If taxes are raised further in response to the
projected "gaps," many of the 200,000 well-to-do families that now
contribute more than half the city's personal income tax [6] may join the
thousands of tax-paying families that have moved away in the past decade.
According to an astonishing New York Times poll taken in December, 60
percent of New Yorkers would like to leave within the next four years and
51
percent say they already plan to do so. The city's debt has grown from
$17.5
billion in 1989 to $22.5 billion as of June 1991. For 1992 the city will
pay
$2.5 billion in debt service or about $300 per citizen. Under Reagan and
Bush federal contributions to the city have fallen from 20 percent of the
budget to 9 percent, a loss to the city in 1991 of more than $3 billion,
nearly a tenth of the budget, [7] and only a major and unlikely
reorientation of federal policy will reverse this trend.
As of 1989 more than 200,000 of New York City's 800,000 drug addicts were
HIV positive, and both the city hospitals and the criminal justice system
are severely strained and may collapse under further pressure. The cost
of
intensive care for an addicted infant is $90,000. To maintain a city
prisoner costs $58,000 a year. In the 1980s the inmate population
increased
from 8,541 to 19,589, for whom the city hired an additional 8,608
correction
officers. In 1989 the city spent $500 million to enforce the drug laws
serveda
similar sum on health care for drug abusers. Despite costly federal
efforts
to interdict the drug supply, drugs are more plentiful than ever in
neighborhoods like Bushwick. There is little the police can do to
discourage
their use, and there are inadequate funds for treatment centers.
Nevertheless, declining city revenues make reductions in such already
underfunded centers inevitable, and the drug problem may worsen as a
result.
New York City's 450,000 or so unionized municipal employees have become
the
city's real source of organized political power and the chief beneficiary
of
the few rewards its politicians, most of whom rely on union support,
still
can offer. The number of municipal employees has increased by more than
23
percent [8] in the past ten years, while population grew by less than 4
percent and services such as sanitation, public education, and street
maintenance have deteriorated, and, according to a union leader, will
deteriorate further under the mayor's most recent austerity plan. [9]
By 1990, 41 percent of Bushwick's population depended on public
assistance.
Only 5,000 of the original white population were left. Like the rain
forest
or Florida's coral reef, Bushwick, which had been growing for three
hundred
years, is dying or already dead, its streets dominated by a dozen
teen-age
drug gangs. "It's a tug of war of drug dealers," a Bushwick pharmacist
told
a reporter for The New York Times through a bulletproof plexiglass panel
in
his shop. "This is the worst neighborhood in the whole United States. The
worst." But other New York neighborhoods are just as bad.
2.
As I waited at a stoplight beside a smoke shop, dark inside, and crowded
with teen-agers in expensive basketball shoes, some of them wearing gold
chains around their necks, many of them, I assumed, armed and dangerous,
I
contemplated the economic desert that Bushwick and much of the rest of
the
city had become. In 1890, Manhattan alone, with a population of 1.5
million,
employed 365,000 people in manufacturing jobs. This was some 50,000 more
than are employed now in manufacturing in all five boroughs with a
combined
population nearly five times greater than Manhattan's had been a century
ago, when, according to census figures cited by Baedeker's Guide to the
United States, "if we exclude the children of foreign born parents,
probably
not more than one-fourth or one-fifth of the inhabitants [of New York
City
could] be described as native Americans." [10]
It was mainly by means of these manufacturing jobs and jobs in shipping
and
wholesaling, many of them associated with the port, nearly all of whose
activity has now moved across the river to New Jersey, that most of the
city's newcomers supported their families, and through which many of them
accumulated bits and pieces of capital, set up businesses of their own,
and
educated their children. New York's manufacturing economy for years
facesa
double purpose. It turned immigrants into workers and workers into a
bourgeoisie, and it produced abundant public and private wealth.
By 1951, however, as Bushwick's sons and daughters were leaving for the
suburbs and thousands of unskilled migrants from Puerto Rico and the deep
South were trekking northward to replace them, the number of jobs in
manufacturing in the five boroughs peaked at just over a million and
commenced its long decline. For the next two decades New York would still
enjoy by far the greatest concentration of manufacturing jobs the world
had
ever known. Brooklyn had little heavy industry but it alone manufactured,
among countless other things, Brillo soap pads, Kirkman's laundry soap,
Eberhard-Faber pencils, and Topp's chewing gum with its famous baseball
cards. Its Merri-Lei factory in Bedford-Stuyvesant was the world's
largest
producer of leis, which it exported to Hawaii where they were sold for
fifteen cents each, perhaps in souvenir shops that also sold Brooklyn's
bubble gum and pencils and its Rockwell's chocolate bars. But one by one
such businesses as these disappeared, until today hardly any are left.
As New York City's manufacturing economy began its steep decline, the
black
and Hispanic immigrants of the 1950s and thereafter became the first
major
group of newcomers in New York City's history to confront a shrinking
industrial base. Today factory work is less than a third of what it was
some
forty years ago when New York City as yet had no trouble assimilating its
newcomers, financing its schools and hospitals, its public university,
its
generous welfare system, and the spectacular cultural life that only the
richest city on earth could afford. By the winter of 1991, the number of
manufacturing jobs in New York City had fallen by more than 70 percent to
just under 320,000, from 1,099,000 in 1951. Nearly half the manufacturing
jobs that remained were in the front office. The mechanism by which New
York
had converted previous immigrant generations into taxpaying citizens no
longer existed.
Since 1951, as New York was losing nearly 700,000 manufacturing jobs and
another 250,000 jobs in wholesale and retail trade, it was adding 200,000
jobs in state, local, and federal government and about 500,000
non-government service jobs, of which about a third were in finance,
insurance, and real estate, the industries that are now in decline for
structural reasons. By 1991 New York's mandarins were still
exporting--i.e.,
selling to people from outside the city--four times their proportionate
national share of public relations counseling and services provided by
psychiatric hospitals, [11] but with the financial services industry that
had replaced the old industrial economy in serious, perhaps permanent,
trouble, and with no replacement of its own in sight, New York City is
adrift on an uncharted sea, and its engine has begun to die. Meanwhile
the
officers on the bridge have yet to acknowledge, and often seem unaware
that,
with storms on the horizon, headway is essential.
Cities, unlike countries, do not keep track of their trading balances
with
the outside world, but this is not to say that such balances do not exist
or
are not a matter of life and death for cities and city neighborhoods,
just
as they are for families and individuals. Cities and city neighborhoods
flourish only as long as their residents produce more than they consume,
only as long as the value of their exports, whether of goods such as beer
or
services such as tourism and psychiatry, exceeds that of their imports.
When
this balance turns negative cities eventually consume their capital and
fall
into debt. Taxes rise, services decline, and middle-class taxpayers
leave.
Since 1980 New York City's white population has declined by 540,000, and
520,000 blacks and Hispanics along with 250,000 Asians have been added.
[12]
In all, 854,000 immigrants [13] settled in New York City in the 1980s. No
doubt most of them came with hope and energy, but unlike previous
generations of immigrants to New York they found an economy that no
longer
needed most of them to perform the routine manufacturing and entry-level
service jobs by which their predecessors had gained a foothold here. By
the
year 2000, 56 percent of New York City residents may be foreign born,
[14]
but by then, if current trends continue, one wonders how they will make
their livings at all.
Had New York's leadership nurtured its assets as if the city were a
corporation responsible for the profits of its subsidiaries, Bushwick's
factories would have been treasured, earning far more from their beer and
other exports to other city neighborhoods and beyond the city's
boundaries
than Bushwick paid for its imports. The evidence of these surpluses can
still be seen in what remains of the churches and mansions along Bushwick
and Central avenues. Had the city been solicitous of these assets it
would
at the very least have tried to discourage the real estate speculators
from
destroying in a few years a still prosperous neighborhood that had taken
three centuries to create. Had its leaders known that such solicitude is
a
matter of life and death, the greatest of civic duties, they might also
have
looked for ways to preserve or replace the vulnerable or obsolete
industries
that Bushwick and other neighborhoods were losing.
But what could even an enlightened city leadership have done to rescue an
economy which sustained more than seven million people largely by making
a
great many everyday products in competition with low-cost producers
elsewhere? Could an alert city leadership have planned in the 1950s for
the
kind of broad-based, low wage, high value added industrial development
[15]
that the governments of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore were at
that moment setting out to create, just as New York's industrial
employment
had crested and was starting its long decline? Could New York have
avoided
economic decline by replacing its pencil and chewing gum factories with
plants making such high value-added products as semiconductors and
microwave
ovens?
New York City's industrial economy declined not because the production of
goods had become inappropriate to city life, as some postindustrial
theorists believe, ignoring the example of highly industrialized Asian
cities and the few New York City neighborhoods where industrial work
still
flourishes. It faltered because of changing technologies over which the
city's leaders had no control, and whose significance most of them,
unlike
their Asian counterparts, ignored: more efficient machines were
displacing
many workers, and many more were losing their jobs to low-wage producers
who
were now only an overnight flight away from the New York market. Many New
York producers, as their businesses matured and grew, moved to less
expensive places, taking with them not only their own payrolls but often
those of their suppliers and other dependent enterprises, from accounting
firms to barber shops. Many manufacturers of low value added products
found
that New York's standard of living had risen too high, along with its
energy
costs, wages, and taxes. Such losses were inevitable, as capital sought
to
optimize its return and new technologies made manufacturers less
dependent
on a given location.
But many other New York industrial jobs were deliberately and needlessly
sacrificed to politically more powerful interests, mainly commercial real
estate development, and it was probably this concentration on high-rise
construction in the central city that distracted the city's leadership
from
what in retrospect was a more important task: creating the conditions, as
Asian governments were doing, for a competitive industrial economy based
on
high value added work to replace the traditional manufacturing jobs on
which
most New Yorkers depended. New York's high labor and other costs put the
city at a competitive disadvantage compared, say, to Singapore, which set
out after the war to create an electronics industry and is now the
world's
largest producer of disc drives for small computers. Today Singapore
onlya
labor shortage as its per capita annual income approaches $9,000, only
$1,400 less than Kuwait's before the Gulf War.
But forty years ago, when the authoritarian government of Singapore, for
years a British colony and still ravaged by the war, was imposing
sacrifices
upon its people in order to create a modern industrial economy, New York
City enjoyed important advantages that partly offset its high labor
costs,
including a competent work force and a strong school system, a tradition
of
industrial innovation, incomparable scientific and marketing skills, and
access to large sums of capital, the prerequisites for a high value added
economy. Billions of dollars in federal subsidies were available to
employ
New York's construction workers on highway projects, and the city offered
generous tax concessions to developers of high-rise buildings to
accompany
the federal tax benefits accorded developers in the form of depreciation
allowances. But it occurred to no one in New York or Washington that part
of
these subsidies might be diverted to reorienting New York City's fading
industrial economy rather than simply replacing it with office towers to
house an economy narrowly committed to financial, legal, and other
relatively specialized services. A political commitment to high-rise
development and highway construction was not, however, the only reason
for
this devastating error in which New York City's leaders joined a national
trend toward de-industrialization.
For more than a century New York City's industrial economy had grown more
or
less spontaneously, like an untended garden which miraculously produced
one
crop after another of viable hybrids, so that future crops had to be
planted
out of town in less precious soil. As a result, New Yorkers were not
accustomed to nurturing their miraculous industrial economy. Thus neither
the habits nor the institutional arrangements by which industrial life
was
deliberately cultivated elsewhere existed in New York, nor do they exist
yet. Not only did New York's business and political leadership agree with
Washington that there was no need to stimulate industrial work, as their
Asian competitors were attempting to do by enforcing high rates of saving
and investment, training their work forces, and mobilizing to seize world
markets for everything from microwave ovens to industrial robots. The
local
leaders opposed such strategies viscerally and elevated this distaste to
ideological principle. Thus New Yorkers, like Americans generally, failed
to
see that what they opposed as political interference with the free
pursuit
of profit was about to become a new and powerful form of capitalist
development, a form, however, uncongenial to the individualistic strain
within the American temper.
3.
This is not to say that New York was a free market in which all interests
competed without external hindrance in an unsupervised Darwinian soup.
Compared to Boston and Philadelphia, which were dominated by a few
leading
families whose bankers concentrated their local investments in a handful
of
favored industries for the sake of preserving a traditional social
hierarchy, New York had always been open to newcomers and competitive
innovation. But within this competitive anarchy a powerful convergence of
interests had nevertheless formed, and by the 1920s had begun to assert
itself under the auspices of the so-called Regional Plan Association, a
non-governmental but powerful group of well-meaning citizens--bankers,
real-estate men, architects, and foundation executives--who wanted to
rationalize New York's future growth and whose Regional Plan of New York
and its Environs became "the most ambitious planning effort ever carried
out
under private auspices," [16] and "the first fully comprehensive regional
plan ever undertaken by an American city." [17] Like Henry James a
generation earlier and Robert Moses a generation later, these planners
were
disturbed by the apparent mess of New York's pullulating industrial
economy
and the immigrants whom it employed. They were determined to replace both
the workers and their factories with something more orderly, less
congested,
and cleaner.
It was this narrowly aesthetic concern, a passion for the appearance of
order--for neatness--rather than the desire for profit, that appeared to
motivate the original authors of the master plan for New York's future
development, a plan that anticipated if it did not actually determine New
York's transformation from a polymorphous manufacturing center to a
highly
specialized and fragile world financial headquarters manned by people who
soon learned to speak, dress, and otherwise behave like the Regional
Planners themselves.
The degree to which the Plan shaped New York's future development or was
merely the by-product of this transformation--its embodiment as public
relations--is a matter of opinion. But by 1933,
"large-scale progress had been made in implementing many of the 470
specific
proposals advanced [by the Plan, including] park and road developments
that
could be paid for by the various Depression-era public spending
programs....Under the guidance of the RPA a...fundamental shift in
development had taken place...." [18]
"A stone's throw from the stock exchange the air is filled with the aroma
of
roasting coffee." one of these planners complained in 1929." [19]
"A few hundred feet from Times Square [there is] the stench of
slaughter-houses. In the very heart...of Manhattan Island south of 59th
Street...nearly 420,000 workers [are] employed in factories. Such a
situation outrages one's sense of order. Everything seems misplaced. One
yearns to rearrange the hodgepodge and to put things where they belong."
Perhaps because many of the real estate developers and financiers,
especially the Rockefellers, who supported the Regional Plan, shared this
squeamishness, the Plan would soon justify the destruction of entire
industrial areas, especially insofar as it became the inspiration, if not
literally the blueprint, which Robert Moses, the city's master planner
and
malign geometer, generally followed for the next three decades. But it
was
not Moses alone who transformed the Plan into a political force that made
large scale real estate development New York City's dominant postwar
industry and, so it seemed, the reason for its existence. The Plan would
eventually be supported by the city's entire institutional leadership,
including its newspaper publishers, its bankers, its politicians, and its
unions. To the extent that they thought about it, the taxpayers must also
have liked this plan to create the city of the future, since much of the
money for the transformation would come from federal programs and not
from
local taxes. For the politicians, high-rise construction meant greater
tax
revenues even if it also meant the displacement of the industrial economy
which employed the majority of the city's work force and which had been
the
engine of New York's spectacular growth for nearly a century.
The Regional Plan assumed that New York City's major asset was not its
industrial economy and the people who made their livings from it, but its
rentable land, a portentous assumption for the city's future development.
Accordingly the plan listed, in descending order of profitability, the
uses
to which the city's land should be put. On this list industrial work was
the
least profitable and office space in the financial district the most
profitable use, followed by the best retail businesses, the best
residences,
wholesaling and some industries, and finally other industries and
residences
for low-paid workers.
Not only were industrial workers scorned as the least profitable tenants
of
city real estate, they were personally obnoxious. According to a
spokesman
for the Fifth Avenue Association, a cultural ally of the men who would
soon
begin work on the Regional Plan,
"Hundreds of thousands of garment workers swarm down upon the Avenue for
the
lunch hour....They stand upon or move slowly along the sidewalks and
choke
them up...[in] a steady stream of humanity....Shopkeepers complain
bitterly
of financial loss (because) women shoppers tend to avoid the section."
The Fifth Avenue Association, which issued this complaint in 1913, wanted
merely to remove these garment workers from the vicinity of the great
department stores and the women who patronized them. The Regional Plan
would
soon propose to move them and other workers out of the city altogether.
Yet
by 1919 the garment industry, according to Robert Fitch, who has written
the
best study of the Regional Plan as an instrument of class warfare,
"ranked
second to steel in value added by manufacture and was the city's largest
employer with 125,000 workers in the ladies' garment industry alone."
Fitch goes so far as to compare the assault by the Regional Plan on New
York's industrial diversity to Stalin's Five Year Plans, but the same
could
be said for any master plan that attempts to impose itself upon the
random
and individualistic energies of an economy like New York's that for years
had been prospering spontaneously without any plan at all. In its attempt
to
impose a particular form of development upon the city's economy, the
Regional Plan was yet another instance of the unending conflict between
the
centralizing impulse and the spirit of individualism that had
characterized
American economic and political life from the beginning.
In its desire to remove these garment workers from the valuable land that
their workplaces occupied and disperse them to outlying areas in Long
Island
and-New Jersey, the Plan also reflected the utopian anti-urban bias of
the
time: "Whatever merit there might be in centralization, or in ...
relieving
congestion by decentralization," the Regional Plan announced in 1927,
[20]
"it did not consist in the mere transplanting of industries and
population
but in the opportunity this afforded for better planning. If
opportunities
given by the removal of industries and population to new areas were taken
advantage of, so as to plan such areas in advance and...avoid a
repetition
of the evils of congested areas, there would appear to be no question
regarding the advantages of a wider spreading of industry into suburban
or
rural areas....The advantage of concentration of industry and business
could
only be maintained if there was a proper balance kept between building
densities and the means of securing proper circulation."
This rationalization for the removal of city industry to outlying areas
in
keeping with the Plan's hierarchy of land use values was either dishonest
or
self-deluded. It must have been obvious to the planners that high-rise
construction would create the greatest urban congestion on earth, [21]
but
the desire to move industrial work out of town to make way for high-rise
construction was compelling and the pretext for its removal to strategic
hamlets in outlying areas would be traffic schemes and the creation of
open
space.
The urban critic Lewis Mumford and a few of his friends objected to the
disingenuousness at the heart of the Plan which would merely exchange one
kind of congestion for another. But Mumford, who wanted the central city
to
dissolve altogether, was dismissed by the planners as an "aesthete
sociologist who has a religion that is based on high ideals but is
unworkable." The Plan's Bonaparte would be Robert Moses, who believed
that
"when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis you have to hack your way
through with a meat axe." The federally funded Cross Bronx Expressway,
which
Moses later had built, ruined a vast industrial area together with
several
working-class neighborhoods, creating the great South Bronx slum. It
followed the route proposed by the Regional Plan and, as Mumford feared,
became a major artery bringing commuters into the congested central city
from Long Island and New Jersey.
Inevitably the reformers of the Regional Plan Association were joined by
developers and other promoters, and by the construction trades which, by
the
end of World War Two, were organized within a politically irresistible
Trades Union Council representing nearly 125,000 construction workers who
voted as a bloc. Soon Moses and a group of politically connected
contractors, engineering firms, and developers, encouraged by the press
and
various betterment groups, were rearranging "the hodgepodge" by replacing
one industrial or working-class neighborhood after another with federally
funded highways, housing projects, and other development schemes.
In the 1920s the Regional Plan proposed a cross-town highway linking the
Holland Tunnel and the Manhattan Bridge as a way to relieve traffic
created
by the newly built tunnel. The scheme to "relieve congestion on the lower
east side and provide more space...for parks and playgrounds ..." [22]
was
absurd on its face. No matter how broad the highway might be, it would be
choked at either end by the narrow entrances to the bridge and tunnel.
The
expressway and its access roads would, however, destroy the thriving and
diverse industrial neighborhood now known as Soho, as well as the Chinese
and Italian working-class neighborhoods to the east. A spur joining the
Williamsburg Bridge would uproot the largely Jewish working-class
neighborhood to the north. [23] The proposal languished until 1941, when
Moses presented it to Mayor La Guardia, to whose tidy instincts it
immediately appealed. But funds would not become available for the Lower
Manhattan Expressway until 1956, when the road became eligible for
federal
funding as an interstate highway under the National Defense Highway Act.
Washington would pay 90 percent of the costs. Since the other 10 percent
would come from the state, the city could demolish a major industrial
neighborhood free of charge.
As the Expressway was eventually conceived, it would extend for six lanes
with service roads at either edge and destroy much of the industrial and
working-class residential area between Houston and Canal streets, forming
a
barricade between lower Manhattan and the northern part of the island. It
would be the Manhattan counterpart to the disastrous Expressway that
Moses,
following the Regional Plan, had built in the Bronx. Moses claimed that
the
Expressway would create 2,000 construction jobs, but neighborhood
opponents
of the road said that it would destroy 10,000 existing jobs and displace
1,500 families. Had it been built, it would have done far greater damage.
The Expressway would also have destroyed what Moses's engineers called
old
"buildings constructed before the turn of the century [and] dangerous for
occupancy," but which the city's Landmarks Commission called some of "the
best cast iron architecture in the United States," and which now comprise
the expensive and fashionable loft buildings of Soho, a major tourist
attraction whose design studios and art galleries are a large component
of
New York's export economy.
Thirteen years after it was proposed, this scheme to destroy one of
Manhattan's great industrial neighborhoods--part of the same industrial
area
which the Regional Plan had compared to a fetid slaughterhouse--was
abandoned under pressure from the local residents. Today, like the
emigrants
from Bushwick forty years ago, most of the Italian families who had once
lived in the path of the proposed Expressway have moved away, leaving
givea
few old people and the tourist area known as Little Italy behind. But
some
100,000 Chinese immigrants have moved in, and their expanded Chinatown,
which embraces much of the old Italian neighborhood as well as the once
Jewish neighborhood to the east, is now a self-supporting industrial,
residential, and tourist area with hundreds of garment factories, food
wholesalers, metal fabricators, printers, and innumerable restaurants,
food
stores, and other retail businesses, a vibrant example of the hodgepodge
that the Regional Plan had yearned to rearrange. The prosperity of this
area
is reflected in several new banks that have recently been built along
Canal
Street. In 1990 their deposits totaled $3.2 billion, slightly more than
was
deposited in the thirty-four banks that serve the Asian population of
Flushing, the neighborhood in Queens to which Chinatown's immigrants move
as
soon as they can afford it.
But for all their enterprise and the stability of their family life, most
of
these Asians, like most of the West Indian and other third world
immigrants
who have also settled in New York, work in restaurants and garment
factories
for low wages, or sell vegetables and other neighborhood goods at retail
and
novelty goods at wholesale, much the same kind of work that New York's
immigrants were doing a century ago. So far few of them have found in New
York the fertile entrepreneurial soil upon which to create the products
and
enterprises of the future, as some of their ambitious counterparts in
Hong
Kong and elsewhere have been able to do or as earlier generations of New
York's immigrants did when the most enterprising of them moved up from
their
sweatshops and pushcarts to help build the industrial economy that has
now
all but disappeared. Despite their hard work, the educational success of
many of their children, and the formidable accounts on deposit in
Flushing
and along Canal Street, enhanced no doubt by flight capital from Hong
Kong
and drug money from Chinatown's wholesale heroin trade, most of these
immigrants have improved their incomes or their prospects little more
than
the southern blacks and Hispanics did who settled in Bushwick.
But if New York City has lost its capacity for industrial renewal, the
once
powerful forces that had for years frustrated this vitality are
themselves
now dying or dead. The construction trades unions, their numbers
depleted,
their industry moribund, and their leadership in disarray, have now lost
their political power. In the past thirty-two months 26,000 construction
jobs have disappeared, a 20 percent reduction. When a phalanx of
construction workers marched on City Hall in the winter of 1991 no one
listened to them.
Meanwhile the Regional Plan Association, along with the class that had
promoted it, has lost its political power to the largely black and
Hispanic
municipal unions and to community groups which, following the example of
the
coalition that defeated the Lower Manhattan Expressway, now successfully
oppose almost every scheme that threatens the integrity of existing
neighborhoods. When the Lower Manhattan Expressway was finally defeated,
its
backers, determined to find another use for the federal highway funds
which
they were now in danger of losing, proposed instead to build Westway, an
equally preposterous highway, along the Hudson River waterfront. [24] Its
estimated cost, to be provided mostly by the federal government, was $4
billion. It would be the most expensive highway, mile for mile, ever
built.
The ostensible purpose of Westway was to replace the existing West Side
Highway, a lightly traveled and usually uncongested road, with an
unnecessary multi-lane highway, much of it underground. The actual
purpose
was to use the construction debris as landfill to create several hundred
new
acres of Manhattan real estate along the Hudson for high-rise residential
and commercial construction. But Westway and its access roads would
devastate several existing middle and working-class neighborhoods. Though
Westway was supported by The New York Times, Governor Cuomo, Mayor Koch,
and
remnants of the old Regional Plan coalition, the absurdity of the project
was presumably evident to most New Yorkers, who offered no objection when
it
was defeated by a community group much like the one that had defeated the
Lower Manhattan Expressway. The old Regional Plan coalition that had done
such damage to the city began to die when Westway did.
4.
With the collapse of the high-rise ideology that once dominated the city
and
the sharp structural decline of its financial services economy, New York
City's leadership, if there is one, faces an opportunity and a dilemma of
the sort that only great emergencies provide. New York City is at risk of
becoming the fortified island of opulence within a sea of misery and
violence that many of its patricians now fear as they, along with the
majority of New Yorkers polled by the Times, contemplate their escape.
The usual response to an emergency is to deny that one exists, and when
denial fails, to hope that someone will think of what to do. This is what
happened during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, when Governor Carey,
Felix
Rohatyn, the investment banker, and the labor leader Victor Gotbaum
conceived a plan to restructure the city's debt and discipline its
politicians who had recklessly been borrowing to meet the city's
operating
costs. Their plan worked long enough for the artificial prosperity of the
Eighties, based largely on borrowed money, speculative profits, and
foreign
capital, to provide the illusion of recovery, provided one ignored the
homeless in their cardboard tents amid the glitter of Fifth and Madison
avenues.
Rohatyn's Municipal Asistance Corporation, or MAC, as it came to be
known,
might have been a permanent solution had New York's crisis in the 1970s
been
merely the result of temporary fiscal irregularities to compensate for a
cyclical dip and not the symptom of a long-term decline, measured by
hundreds of thousands of jobs permanently lost. But MAC was not designed
to
rebuild the city's shattered economy. Can New York City now create a new
industrial economy upon the wreckage of the old one? Can Bush-wick, for
example, regenerate the positive balance of payments that it lost forty
years ago? '
In the 1950s, when New York City's work force dominated world markets for
countless products including Hawaiian leis, world population was just
over
1.5 billion, much of it without capital, industrial skills, or access to
distant markets. World population now exceeds four billion people and in
thirty years may exceed eight billion. Most of this growth is
concentrated
in the southern hemisphere where many poor, overpopulated countries now
manufacture simple goods for themselves and for export. Some have learned
to
export sophisticated components and even finished products to world
markets.
Low-wage Filipino auditors in Manila, for example, now work by fax and
satellite for New York accounting firms. Unemployed New York City
computer
programmers drive cabs, while programmers in Calcutta, who earn less than
cabdrivers in New York, transmit their programs back to the New York
firms
for which the cabbies once worked.
But most of this third world population is unemployable at home and
armies
of them will continue to drift northward to the great cities of the
developed world, as New York City has already begun to see. Like their
predecessors, many of these immigrants will be eager to work for low
wages.
But no matter how low their wages, they will never be as low as the wages
at
home. Can New York City's entrepreneurs create a competitive economy in
which these immigrants and the existing populations of places like
Bushwick
can earn their livings, raise their children,' and pay their taxes?
The creative spirit of capitalism, especially in America, is notoriously
ego-driven, rebellious, and often childishly resistant to discipline.
Attempts to create master plans for American industry either come to
nothing
or depress economic development, as the Regional Plan's attempt to move
New
York's industry to the suburbs did, because they tend to encourage a
particular form of growth at the expense of all others. A new Regional
Plan
for New York, devoted this time to industrial development within the five
boroughs, would probably complete the destruction that the original one
had
begun.
Meanwhile a mayoral commission has recently proposed a fund for economic
development which would invest $500 million a year, raised partly by a
new
bond issue, in large public projects such as industrial parks and supply
additional sums to small businesses and cultural institutions. Since
political factors invariably influence the distribution of such largesse,
the chances are poor that this plan, if it is ever implemented, will
succeed. Investments shaped by the political interests of democratic
governments are as likely to fail as those sponsored by Marxist
governments.
But this does not mean that government can do nothing to revive
industrial
work in New York, provided the primary goal, as in Asian economics, is
the
success of the enterprise and not the political advantage of a particular
administration.
The flourishing Asian economies that have largely surpassed New York and
other American cities as world production and commercial centers--as
American cities a century ago surpassed the cities of Great Britain--did
so
mainly on their own. After infusions of foreign aid in the postwar years,
they grew without the help or hindrance of larger political units.
Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and even South Korea, isolated at
the
end of its peninsula, are self-contained, insular economies, in charge of
their own affairs, jealous of their autonomy, and more interested in
making
money than in propagating ideologies, becoming superpowers, or convincing
other countries to follow their moral example. Before the 1930s Manhattan
itself had been such a secular island economy. Then it became the
beneficiary or victim of federal largesse and would later be fully
integrated within federally designed and funded programs governing
everything from monetary, defense, and trade policy to day care centers
and
medical treatment of the elderly, whether or not these programs furthered
New York's own interests or reflected its cultural style.
The reasons for New York City's economic decline are complex, and it may
be
only coincidental that chronologically the city's deterioration
accompanied
its increasing integration within an ever expanding federal system with
costly worldwide commitments. But it is a commonplace to observe that the
postwar economies of West Germany and Japan have flourished, compared to
America's, perhaps because they are not subservient to large, militarized
systems motivated more by ideological than by commercial interests.
This is not to say that New York City would necessarily be better off
economically as a separate country--an Atlantic Hong Kong--though perhaps
it
would be if secession were possible. But recent federal policy can be
reversed so as to return a larger share of federal revenues to the cities
and towns, from whose taxpayers these revenues had been extracted in the
first place. Though some New Yorkers may eventually benefit from the
exploration of Mars, a more urgent need is funding for technical training
as
an alternative or supplement to the present public school system. Of the
930,000 students served by the city's public schools from kindergarten to
twelfth grade, only 6,337 in 1990 met the statewide standard for
graduation
with a Regents' diploma. On the assumption that New York City's teenagers
need usable skills more than a voyage in space, a reduction in the
federal
space program might release funds to provide technical training for those
students who failed to graduate but who want to try again, or for young
convicts and parolees who might want to acquire legitimate skills rather
than commit further crimes.
A prudent federal government, looking for ways to shorten the current
recession by investing in public works, might leave the costly defense of
prosperous South Korea to the Koreans themselves and spend the money thus
saved to repair bridges and roads and rehabilitate housing in cities like
New York: projects that might employ these technically trained graduates
and
parolees as well as the able-bodied homeless and veterans returning from
garrison duty in South Korea and elsewhere, if the unions agreed. The
political mechanisms by which such resources might be reallocated are no
doubt complicated and slow, but if the federal government can contemplate
costly loan guarantees and outright grants to foreign governments,
perhaps
this or a future administration will eventually consider some such
arrangement for New York and other American cities, following the example
of
Japan, which, like the United States a century ago, has no interest in
supplying foreign aid but invests heavily where its own economic
advantage
is at stake.
Until such a reallocation occurs, New York will have to find its own
solutions without Washington's help. This will not be easy, especially if
the Times poll is correct and most New Yorkers have already decided to
move
away rather than put up further with their beleaguered city. Yet New York
retains some of the advantages that it neglected to exploit forty years
ago
when Asian entrepreneurs were first planning their successful attack on
American markets. Though the public school system performs poorly,
despite
the addition of some 16,000 employees since 1980, there are still some
superior high schools in New York and it may not be impossible even for a
child born in Bushwick to find his or her way, with luck and talent, into
such a school and beyond. This year students from a single New York City
high school won four of the forty national Westinghouse Fellowships.
Rockefeller University, Columbia, and NYU attract and train superior
scientists, especially in microbiology, presumably the science of the
future, as physics and electrical engineering had been a century ago. New
York's investment banks still assemble large amounts of capital and
generate
enormous profits. The partners of Goldman, Sachs, for example, earned one
billion dollars in 1991. New York is still a world center of innovation
in
marketing and design.
It would be contrary to the spirit of capitalism as well as common sense
to
expect a handful of civic-minded Goldman, Sachs partners to form a
partnership with Columbia, Rockefeller, and NYU to sell shares in a
biotechnology company intended to operate mainly in New York City. No one
would buy shares in a company bound by such a foolish geographical
restriction. But if the city government agreed to meet or exceed the
benefits provided to new industries by other areas, and assuming that New
York City is not intrinsically inappropriate as the site of a
biotechnology
industry, perhaps a well-promoted stock offering would find a few buyers,
especially if the universities, which are in need of money, confirmed
their
commitment to the success of the business by buying some shares
themselves,
and identifying a few promising students and teachers with likely
products
in mind who might be looking for capital.
Such arrangements may raise legal questions, but New York is not without
lawyers to solve them. According to the Deputy Mayor's Report, [25] New
York
City has failed "to generate a vibrant biotechnology industry, despite
the...presence of...the necessary elements, [because] market forces alone
are not enough to generate successful startups," and state and city
economic
development policies, "particularly in the area of financing programs,
are
geared to established firms...with a substantial history and available
collateral." This suggests that an opportunity may exist for private
investors to create a new and profitable industry in New York if the
state
and city change their development policies, a remote possibility but
perhaps
less remote than the prospect of greater fiscal autonomy for American
cities.
The Genzyme Corporation, which makes two widely used biogenetic drugs,
recently chose to build a new plant in Boston rather than Cambridge.
Though
both these cities are nearly as run down as New York, both have
"international reputations as scientific centers," the president of
Genzyme
said, but Boston "could offer a larger, state owned parcel that could be
quickly developed." According to a report in The New York Times, Boston
also
agreed to supply all necessary approvals by April, to help prepare the
site
and provide discounted utility rates as well as an agreement on property
taxes. Genzyme, whose sales have risen from $9.7 million in 1985 to $110
million in 1991 and which expects to double these sales by 1995, also
liked
Boston's proximity to highways and the Logan International Airport. If
Genzyme can grow in Boston presumably a similar business can grow in New
York, which also has highways, an international airport, and great or
greater universities.
If the hypothetical venture of the Goldman, Sachs partners with the three
universities were to succeed miraculously and create the greatest
concentration of biotechnological employment in the world, the effect on
Bushwick and similar neighborhoods would still be negligible, for New
York
may soon be a city of eight million people, as new waves of immigrants
arrive and technically skilled workers in developing countries continue
to
produce routine goods more cheaply than New York City workers.
Nevertheless,
if one high value added industry can be made to flourish here, so can
others, as yet undreamed of, for in a developing economy one product
leads
to another. The Japanese entrepreneurs who saw the commercial
possibilities
of transistorized circuits forty years ago could hardly have foreseen
camcorders and walkmen, but had they not taken the first step, they could
never have taken the subsequent ones. With its anti-industrial ideology
exhausted and with markets in the former Soviet Union and Asia still
unexplored, New York City, for all its current misery, may now be facing
even greater opportunities than Japanese and other Asian entrepreneurs
saw
when they rose up from their own rubble forty-five years ago to plan the
industries of the future, and to capture what were for them at the time
great but unexplored and mysterious markets in the United States.
Meanwhile, if New York fails to retrieve a larger share of federal
revenues
to invest in its own needs and should its entrepreneurs do nothing to
revive
its industrial economy, then there is probably nothing left to do but
join
the majority of New Yorkers who are already planning to leave. For in the
absence of countervailing pressure from a growing economy, Bushwick and
similar neighborhoods will expand until there is nothing else left.
Notes
1. Elliot Yablon, director of the Bush-wick Neighborhood Preservation
Office
of the Housing and Urban Development Administration, quoted in the New
York
Daily News, August 2,1977.
2. Yablon, Daily News.
3. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, New York City had
472,500
municipal employees in 1990. The city claims to have cut 14,000 jobs in
1991.
4. According to the State Financial Control Board staff, The New York
Times,
December 14, 1991.
5. New York City Comptroller's Report on the impact of the local tax
burden,
April 1991, cited by the deputy mayor for finance and economic
development.
6. According to former deputy mayor Kenneth Lipper, New York Post, July
18,
1991.
7. According to Ruth Messinger, Manhattan borough president, The New York
Times, May 7, 1991.
8. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows an increase from 380,800 in 1980
to
467,500 in 1991. The city acknowledges an increase of 51,221 from 1981 to
1991, but excludes certain categories which are funded wholly or in part
by
separate agencies not under the mayor's jurisdiction. The BLS figures
a
more realistic picture of how New Yorkers are employed and of the
political
power available to the municipal unions.
9. The New York Times, January 31, 1991.
10. Baedeker's United States (Scribner's, 1893).
11. The value of this curious fact should be judged by its source. An
export
industry, according to the Report of the Deputy Mayor for Finance and
Development, is "one that has a presence in the local economy which is
greater than the city's share of national employment." In proportion to
its
share of total US employment, New York City employs four times as many
providers of psychiatric services working in hospitals as the rest of the
country does. Statistically this means that New York City sells those
psychiatric services that exceed its own needs to non-New Yorkers who
come
here for treatment, just as Akron once exported tires made by those of
its
rubber workers who exceeded Akron's proportionate national share of tire
makers. This assumes that the psychiatric needs of New Yorkers are as
typically American as the need of Akronites for tires. But statistical
judgments are narrow. New Yorkers may produce more psychiatric services
than
other places because New Yorkers consume more of them. It is unlikely,
however, that New York's consumption is four times the national average.
Thus a significant share of these services is probably sold to people who
come here from other places for treatment, though perhaps not as great a
share as the deputy mayor's statistical analysis leads her to believe.
From
an economic point of view, psychiatric and other services which are paid
for
with dollars earned elsewhere are exports just as if the doctors and
their
drugs had been put on a truck and shipped out of town.
12. Community District Needs, fiscal year 1993, Brooklyn, issued by the
Department of City Planning, City of New York.
13. Report of the Deputy Mayor for Finance and Development, p. 37.
14. Report of the Deputy Mayor for Finance and Development, p. 37.
15. The term "high value added" refers to certain products--computers,
designer clothing, jet fighters--whose design, manufacture, and marketing
add more value to their component materials and overheads than that of
such
commonplace products as pencils and bread add to theirs, and can thus
create
and attract more capital for further investment and eventually raise the
standard of living.
16. Robert Fitch, "Planning New York," in The Fiscal Crisis of American
Cities, edited by Roger E. Alcady and David Marmelstein (Vintage, 1977).
17. Robert A. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, and Thomas Mellins, New York
1930:
Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars (Rizzoli, 1987).
18. Stern, et al., New York 1930.
19. Regional Survey, Vol. 1, page 31, quoted by Fitch, Planning the New
York
Region.
20. Thomas Adams, Planning the New York Region, Regional Plan of New York
and its Environs, 1927.
21. Congestion resulting from high-rise construction was much debated at
the
time. See Stern et al, p. 39 ff.
22. Adams, Planning the New York Region, p. 54.
23. The engineering drawings prepared for Robert Moses and showing the
proposed routes are reproduced in Rebecca Shandor's The City that Never
Was
(Penguin, 1988).
24. The Regional Plan had opposed the West Side Highway for which
West-way
was to be a more elaborate replacement because it would obstruct access
to
the Hudson River waterfront. The original planners would probably have
opposed Westway too. But by now the aesthetic goals of the Plan had long
been forgotten.
25. p. 108.
