Creative Class

I’m amazed actually at how many people still want to count NYC for dead. I see it the other way around: The crisis in the financial sector may end up being good for NY in the long. While the massively over-bloated NY financial industry certainly brought short-term income and tax revenues to the city’s economy, it can also be seen as badly distorting the city’s economy, creating real opportunity costs, and, in effect, crowding out other more inventive, creative, and entrepreneurial kinds of endeavors.

I’m still amazed at those who think of NYC primarily driven by the financial sector. Our team at the MPI has looked at the industry mix, the occupational mix, and all of the various measures, clusters, and LQs, and it is a big, diverse economy. It is among the most diverse in the U.S. and the world – more diverse than Chicago, or Washington, D.C., or even Silicon Valley for that matter – all places with solid futures.

NYC also has a very fast metabolism – perhaps the fastest in the world overall, as research by the Santa Fe Institute shows. Without it, it would not have been able to survive, at its scale. That metabolism means it is not only hyper-efficient, it means it has the underlying capability of generating lots of new ideas in leading edge industries – particularly content-based or even convergence industries, like Bloomberg.

The recent shift toward entrepreneurship and creativity by the Bloomberg administration does not surprise me. These ideas have been bubbling around the administration since its earliest days. Bloomberg, at the end of the day, is himself an entrepreneur, so he would naturally gravitate to this kind of response in a crisis period.

In the short run, NYC will certainly take a hit – losing an estimated 65,000 plus financial jobs and many, many more overall. The hit will be harder than in some cities and regions, like say Washington, D.C., but not nearly as hard as in most. In the long run, it has the scale, centrality, openness, creativity, and metabolism to come back.

Like I said: My hunch is the reset ends up being a good thing for NYC in the long-run, helping to correct the distortions the over-bloated financial sector brought to the city’s economy. And it’s good to see the Bloomberg administration acknowledging and trying to encourage the creativity and entrepreneurship that have long powered the NYC economy.

It’s become a veritable truism that cities are cold, lonely places and that small towns are the centers of a more connected, communal life.  This view is wrong, according to the growing field of “loneliness” research, which finds that the notion of urban alienation is more fiction then fact.

How many apartments in Manhattan would you have guessed have just one occupant? One of every eight? Every four? Every three? The number’s one of every two. Of all 3,141 counties in the United States, New York County is the unrivaled leader in single-individual households, at 50.6 percent. More than three-quarters of the people in them are below the age of 65. Fifty-seven percent are female. In Brooklyn, the overall number is considerably lower, at 29.5 percent, and Queens is 26.1. But on the whole, in New York City, one in three homes contains a single dweller, just one lone man or woman who flips on the coffeemaker in the morning and switches off the lights at night.

These numbers should tell an unambiguous story. They should confirm the common belief about our city, which is that New York is an isolating, coldhearted sort of place… In American lore, the small town is the archetypal community, a state of grace from which city dwellers have fallen… Yet the picture of cities—and New York in particular—that has been emerging from the work of social scientists is that the people living in them are actually less lonely. Rather than driving people apart, large population centers pull them together, and as a rule tend to possess greater community virtues than smaller ones. This, even though cities are consistently, overwhelmingly, places where people are more likely to live on their own.

Much more here (h/t: Brian Knudsen).

The New York Daily News reports (via Planetizen):

When Mayor Bloomberg took office in 2002, there were 12,542 acres in the city where manufacturers could set up shop. If the latest round of proposed zoning changes goes through, the Bloomberg administration will have rezoned 20% of that factory-friendly land.

Isn’t the real challenge to build a balanced city which harnesses the creative capacities of all – one which has room for innovative manufacturing, better paying and more innovatve service jobs, a thriving broad-based creative sector, and a place for factories as well as offices, retail and residential.

According to the New York Times, it takes a while for all those new young people to find their fit in the Big Apple.

But for many, the thrill of arrival is often tempered by the sinking realization of what an alienating place the city can be, especially for those who are not wealthy or who do not have a pre-existing network of friends. Nothing comes easily, even if one can get past the dauntingly high cost of living. The subway maze seems indecipherable. People are everywhere, but ignore each other on the street. Friends might live in distant neighborhoods, and seeing them often requires booking time, like an appointment, weeks in advance.

Money quote: “The city abuses you, and you just have to abuse it back.”

The Department of Transportation is making way for thousands of new bike racks around the city. Mr. Byrne’s will be the most visible, a fact that may position him as the symbol of the civic virtues of cycling. But soft-spoken, curious and culturally omnivorous, he’s never quite been the celebrity spokes-model type. Besides, he said, “I don’t think people are going to switch over to bikes because it’s good for them or because it’s politically correct. They’re going to do it because it gets them from A to B faster.”

He has a similarly plain-spoken explanation for his own riding. “It’s a little faster than walking,” he said. “It feels good if the weather’s O.K., and if you see something that interests you, you just stop.”

Mr. Byrne isn’t anticipating a revolution, but he does sense a shift in the wind. Riding a bicycle, “used to be completely uncool,” he said. “Now it’s cool in different ways: for some people it’s cool if you have an old junker. For other people it’s cool if you have a racing bike.

Anyway, it doesn’t immediately relegate you to nerd status anymore.”

Dale Anne Reiss, director of global real estate for Ernst & Young:

One of the fascinating things that I’m seeing is that with the price of the
dollar, the U.S. may become one of the outsourcing locations. I have heard
people in London say, anecdotally, that New York is a great place to put
financial positions because compared to London you can get great people at low
costs compared to the pound, low housing compared to the pound and low office
costs compared to the pound. And with all the firings on Wall Street, there’s an
availability of people.

The whole interview in the Wall Street Journal is here.