My latest article is now online in City Journal, and is about the need for New York to start thinking like a growth city again. It’s interesting to contrast NYC with the case of Atlanta I recently wrote about. Atlanta has seen decelerating growth indicating it may be nearing maturity. New York long ago transitioned to maturity. But then the city started to experience growth once again, entering, if not its historic boom era growth, at least a much higher demand phase. But it has been unable to respond to the problem. In part I argue that comes because it forgot what it means to think like a growth city over the many decades it existed as a mature city.
For most of its history, New York was one of America’s great boomtowns, growing at a rate comparable with metro Dallas or Houston today. From America’s first census until 1930, the city’s population expanded by double-digit percentages every decade—and by more than 20 percent in every decade but one. Then, with the Great Depression and World War II, growth slowed, followed by stagnation and then by decline and abandonment, particularly in the 1970s. The greater metro region continued to grow for longer but then it, too, flatlined.
When the boom days ended, New York forgot how to grow. It took on a mindset of stasis and stagnation, adopting a zoning code in 1961 that put a de facto population cap on the city. In the half century since Robert Moses was dethroned as the region’s master builder, the city has built little infrastructure. What incremental expansions have occurred required herculean effort and obscenely high expenditures. Housing has expanded slowly.
These restrictions weren’t a problem when the city began a moderate rebound in the 1980s because there was plenty of slack to take up—land and buildings ready for redevelopment and room on the subways for more riders. A generation later, though, the city has reached the limits of incremental development.
Click through to read the whole thing.
Once the growth dynamic fades, few American cities seem to have found a way to reinvent themselves. Vested interested developed to entrench control of mature cities necessarily stand in opposition to the interests of growth. I think that NYC has actually done a good job pulling it off by American standards, even if it’s a special case in many ways. Chicago and Boston seem to have pulled it off, too. Seattle and Portland had actually lost their initial economic rationale as centers for the northwestern logging, mining, and shipping economy and reinvented themselves as branch operations of the Bay Area tech economy in the last 15 years. But, I don’t really see anything other than very modest beginnings to the reinvention of other American metros.
On the one hand, I agree with everything Mr. Renn wrote about what NY should do. On the other hand, NYC has been a closed city for 20 years or so, and I suspect that most of the residents who actually have decision making power view rising lack of affordability as a feature, not a bug. They would rather that those without money not live in the metro area. As has been said many times in recent years, “living in (NYC, Boston, Seattle, Portland, DC, LA, SF, etc.) is a privilege, not a right, and those proles should go live somewhere in flyover country where they can afford the rent.” (Paraphrased).
Unfortunately, even world-bestriding master of the universe Vampire Squids still need the proles to provide goods and services. Although this may be less the case as automation, centralization, and the vicious efficiencies of the gig economy dig deeper.
The hostility to NYC and other coastal metros here is intense. Whatever happened to “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em?” …and I cannot imagine any way on earth in which you ‘beat’ nyc.
My hostility to those metros stems from them repeatedly making policy decisions that limit the amount of housing that can be built in those metros. This predictably makes rents very expensive, especially relative to incomes of those working in service sector occupations. Also, if you believe the estimates produced by economists like Edward Glaeser, those decisions make the US economy smaller by $1.3 trillion each and every year. That is an enormous amount of money, and if those metros built adequate supplies of housing, it would raise wages not just in those metros, but probably throughout the entire country as well as more people moved to the coastal metros for higher wages, forcing employers in other metros to pay higher wages to keep their workers from leaving.
The cities in the interior of the country simply don’t have available to them that kind of power to change the country for the good, as most all of those non-coastal metros build enough housing to meet demand. There are things they could do better, like city-county mergers of municipalities and school districts, or hiring enough police officers to keep the peace. But the coastal cities also need to desegregate their schools as well, though they do seem to be pretty good at fighting crime (Philadelphia and Baltimore being the two big exceptions).
Maybe this has something to do with it. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/business/economy/winston-salem-convergence.html
The NY Times has upgraded their paywall. Do you know how to get around it?
No, I’m a subscriber. The article describes the growing gap in income and economic growth, not population growth, between the largest cities and the rest. Simply put, it makes the point that you need to follow the money, instead of the people, to see how economic power is shifting in America.
Isn’t the high cost of housing in coastal metros a limiting force on their growth and an opportunity for cheap metros to lure some with cheaper housing…IF they can get their act together on job growth, that is. This is something Columbus seems to have figured out but that The City That Shall Not Be Named hasn’t.
P Burgos: While I 100% agree, some of these barriers are, as noted above, initiated by existing populations. “We can’t build apartments on a long vacant commercial site because the architecture looks different than our banal 1985 tract houses…and pedophiles might rent the apartments because a child care center is nearby”.
But…I would agree with Matt. I would also ask if it is good broader public policy to facilitate even more rapid population growth in, for example, a state whose major cities are built on major earthquake faults overdue for a “big one”, that suffers from repeated droughts, that has air quality issues. Given market preference for the precious “single family home”, a New York City or San Francisco cannot meet the market demand without even more sprawl and all of the social and economic costs thereof.
The market will, a la Matt, somewhat sort itself out anyway. Driving around my relatively affordable outer suburb, it is disturbing how many “Help Wanted” signs there are. And this is NOT Silicon Valley.
It’ll sort itself out if people let it through regulation and tax structures that don’t privilege certain interests over others.
Well…it IS sorting itself out. As has been noted here, jobs and population ARE flowing to places like Austin and Nashville and even Columbus. But yes, of course.
New York fell on hard times in the 70s and rebounded nicely. I mean yeah, most legacy cities struggled on some level in the 70s, but clearly it was a tough for the city.
I lived in Philadelphia in the 70s…hard times there, too, exacerbated by a very high city wage tax.
“rebounded nicely” is the understatement of the century. NYC transformed itself into a white hot hub for the global elite. It’s transformation is profound any way you want to look at it.
“NYC transformed itself BACK into a white hot hub for the global elite.”
There. Fixed it for you. History matters.
In 1912, the RMS Titanic’s destination was…NYC. I’m pretty sure its passengers included many of the “global elite” of its day.
History DOES matter. NYC built itself into a financial center for America through the 19th and early 20th centuries. It had relationships with London as did many places in the world, but it was not a global financial center. London was the center of global capitalism in that period.The interwar period destroyed the previous era of globalization that had been built on the latter British Empire and there was no global economy which NYC could have dominated. NYC was an American financial center and had only made limited moves toward operating beyond America. After WWII, NYC rode the wave of postwar American expansion and made it’s money coordinating American capitalism’s boom decades. The destruction of the war and the Cold War meant much of the world was beyond the reach of capital markets and it took decades for them to increase their participation in global capital markets. The next era of globalization only became possible in the early 90s and therefore only provided the opportunity for a city or cities to dominate financial globalization at that point. It is true that no other american city had the combination of characteristics to fill that role that NYC had, but when NYC did assume the role of a joint center of global finance along with London from the 90s onward, it was reinventing itself every bit as much as Seattle did when it became a tech center with the fall of it’s previous role as a center of the mining, logging, and shipping industries that had built it before. The people on the Titanic had made their money in America, and were using it to visit the center of global capitalism. There were not a global elite.
There, Fixed if for you.
Chris is correct: NYC represented a larger proportion of the US’ economic output and corporate HQs in 1900 than it does today. NYC problems of the 70s were the exception and represented the effect of idiotic local policies starting in the 60s. Koch started undoing them in the late 70s; Giuliani/Bratton built on Koch. Today’s prosperity is a reversion to NYC’s pattern since the 1790s (the time of Hamilton, interestingly enough) of being the single most important economic center in North America.
Telling factoid: from the 70s to as late as the 90s, NYC had to bribe investment banks not to locate trading jobs in New Jersey. Not anymore.
NYC wasn’t the only city to pursue those policies – they were quite popular in the 60s/70s. Its recovery had a lot to do with its legacy assets from pre-WWII (Wall Street, museums, Central Park, etc), which are still magnets to the global elite. Cities that pursued the same policies in the 70s as NYC (lax on crime, unrealistic budgets, etc) without those legacy assets have not necessarily recovered – think of Detroit, St Louis, Cleveland and others. Chicago, as usual, is a compound of both.
I should have added “public housing” to the list of idiotic policies from the 60s-70s. Public housing projects, and the destruction of pre-existing neighborhoods to build them, did enormous damage to many cities.