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Weekly UpdatesDo all of America's cities have something to learn from New York? Does New York have something to learn from places like Los Angeles and Houston?
"Yes!" says a groundbreaking report on New York's shaky post-9/11 future, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and written by a New York nonprofit, the Center for an Urban Future (www.nycfuture.org).
New York, says the report, needs to shake its preoccupation with Manhattan and "giantism"--its signature economic development strategy of multimillion-dollar tax incentive packages to induce (i.e., bribe) large corporations not to relocate to the suburbs.
The New York Stock Exchange wanted a staggering $1 billion not to migrate to New Jersey. That deal was never consummated, but between 1988 and 2000 the city did offer about $2 billion to roughly 80 large firms. In "thanks," roughly half the companies--among them Merrill Lynch, Dillon Read, Kidder Peabody, Ziff Davis, Chase Manhattan, and Citicorp--reduced their work force in New York or moved jobs out of the city anyway.
No one doubts that New York's globally leading collection of great corporations has been a massive asset. But their appetite for subsidies depletes the city's treasury and threatens basic services. Why continue payoffs, the new report asserts, when the big firms, once bedrocks of stability, are gobbling each other up, restructuring, sometimes going bankrupt, all at a time when technology makes it easier to move skilled jobs to the suburbs?
New York needs a better vision than being "Capital of the World," argue authors of the report. Instead, first priority should be on its grass-roots economy--thousands of smaller businesses, neighborhoods, and ordinary people including the city's millions of modern-day immigrants.
Or in Jane Jacobs' words, "a metropolitan economy, if it is working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middle class people, greenhorns into competent citizens.... Cities don't lure the middle class, they create it."
At long last that line of argument favoring gritty neighborhoods and ordinary peoples' advancement over flashy high towers and insider deals is getting some top-drawer attention in New York.
Just as surprising, the new report--which officials of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration claim reflects the way they're heading anyway--performs the very un-New York-like act of lauding other cities. Houston, for example, gets kudos for its '90s success in focusing services on unheralded neighborhoods like the once-forlorn Harwin corridor a few miles outside of downtown, now transformed by Chinese, Korean, and Indian merchants into a thriving market for off-price goods.
Los Angeles is lauded for turning large sections of its central core into a bustling immigrant-dominated mix of warehousing, manufacturing, and specialized services, driven by a melange of Persians, Israelis, Koreans, Chinese, Iraqis, North Africans, and Mexicans.
How can New York, with 50-year-old policies of ignoring most neighborhoods outside of Manhattan, reverse course and return to its early 20th-century culture of entrepreneurial workshops in the outer boroughs, building income and chances for the masses?
The proposed new formula is to stop direct business subsidies, stress basic services (police, sanitation, public education, transportation, parks), and be aware of the needs of smaller firms, diverse industries, entrepreneurs, and immigrants.
Plus, New York needs to fix its daunting regulatory culture in which firms have to get licenses and permits from a maze of agencies and deal with overzealous and unsympathetic inspectors. (The report doesn't say so, but how about a City Common Sense Czar--an ombudsman for straggling firms?)
Ideally, New York (land other creative cities) should aim to be entrepreneurial hot spots fusing new immigrant energy with the input of thousands of interacting young creatives--graphic and film artists, designers, actors, Internet Web site creators. Why not, for example, bring together high-tech entrepreneurs with university researchers and venture capital firms to aggressively market the city's ethnic food production or crafts-oriented furniture sector?
For far less money than its payouts to big Manhattan firms, New York could view all its boroughs as an opportunity-rich field of myriad smaller "urban villages" the city helps along with sound infrastructure and services, good subway connections, and, on request, some targeted counsel. Entrepreneurs would have a clear alternative to what authors of the Urban Future report label Manhattan's "absurdly expensive" costs.
"Instead of a distinct hierarchy of place," they write, "New York could transform itself into a model archipelago of varied, thriving and diverse places--once again a city, as a writer of the 1940s put it, of 'a thousand cities.'"
That may be a very romantic vision for a New York now plagued by government red ink and worrisome losses of firms and population in the wake of the 2001 attacks. But it's basic and feasible. And not a bad formula, when you think about it, for major cities across America.
NEAL PEIRCE is a syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C. His weekly column, which appears in more than 50 newspapers nationwide, examines trends and innovations in state and local government. E-mail: nrp@citistates.com.
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