Well, my problem was that I thought they were implicit in what he said. For
example, one of the things he worried about was wealthier New Yorkers moving
to other locations where their taxes would be lower. That's an excuse that
people in power use in order not to raise taxes appropriately on the very
wealthy. When you think about who it is who purchases all those incredibly
expensive apartments in the new high rise buildings that have been going up,
it is billionaire foreigners and some of the apartments are actually owned
by foreign corporations which involves some sort of tax deal as a way to
keep the actual residents annonymus. Now if I know that, little old blind
me, living in my middle income condo in Nassau County, I'm sure the author
knows that. And it's obvious that whoever it is who owns all that multi
billion dollar real estate, isn't going to leave Manhattan because of taxes.
What is basically happening, is that Manhattan is being turned into a living
space and entertainment venue for the very wealthy. The only problem is,
where the people who serve them will live and how do you fund the living
space and necessary services for those people. Of course, there are the
outter boroughs. The author doesn't talk about the issue of the upper middle
class who, at the moment, are living in certain parts of Brooklyn and Queens
and also, parts of Manhattan. They are the ones who will have to leave. The
poorer people have to stay in order to take care of the multi billionaires.
The problem for the planners is how to maintain them without giving them too
much.
Miriam
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Alice Dampman
Humel
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2015 10:00 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Some history worth reviewing: The Tragical
History of New York
I think those things were beyond the purpose and scope of the article.
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 so
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
longer a
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, and a
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
become a
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 and a
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
served a
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
faces a
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 only a
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 give 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.
