Since the pandemic began to wane, New York-watchers have stoked fears about an urban doom loop: Millennials like me — liberated from the chains of our desks — would abandon Midtown Manhattan and perhaps the city or state altogether in search of lower costs of living. The commercial tax base would be obliterated, leaving no funds to support essential services like the subway.
To prevent this dystopian future, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams convened an expert panel that I served on, and they released the “Making New York Work for Everyone” plan (also known as the “‘New’ New York” plan) in December, a sweeping set of 40 proposals to keep the economy humming. The goals of the plan, broadly, are to reimagine the city’s business districts, to make it easier for New Yorkers to get to work, and to generate inclusive growth that positions the city to “lead the emerging industries of the 21st century.”
But now, it is budget season in Albany. The proverbial “three men in a room” (thankfully, no longer all men) — Governor Hochul; Andrea Stewart-Cousins of Yonkers, the majority leader of the State Senate; and Carl Heastie of the Bronx, the speaker of the State Assembly — have until Saturday’s budget deadline to duke out which proposals have support from the State Legislature and get funding.
The three parties are aligned on a few important engines of post-Covid economic mobility, like making access to state-supported child care assistance easier. But the Legislature is opposing perhaps the most critical facet of New York’s pandemic recovery: a collaborative effort by the governor and the mayor to create 800,000 more housing units over the next decade. Of those, 500,000 would be in the city and the balance in the rest of the state — primarily in New York City’s commuter suburbs — near jobs and mass transit.
New York State has created 1.2 million jobs over the past 10 years, but only 400,000 new homes, contributing to inflation in rent and home prices, and despair among young workers. The new homes in the city are largely rental units in the boroughs outside of Manhattan, while homeowners in Manhattan and New York’s rail-connected suburbs have blocked attempts at new building.
So while millennials still overwhelmingly say they want to own, they are priced out of buying. Instead, they pay ever-escalating rents — now a whopping median of $3,400 per month in New York City — and are pushed into far-flung mass transit deserts, or out of the city entirely. At the same time, surplus office space in Midtown lies empty.
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