The Resilient City

By Alex Marshall

In 1981, Kurt Russell did his best to escape from New York, in John Carpenter's film of the same name. Manhattan had been turned into a maximum security prison, and Russell's character, a killer himself, had to go in, find a kidnapped American president, and bring him out. Set in 1997, the movie epitomized what people thought New York City would become and to a large extent was: a place of crime, dirt, poverty, and chaos.

Flash forward to 2017, and New York City is a place people escape to, not from. Gotham can seem a veritable paradise of clean parks, low crime, busy public plazas, good public transit, and even pretty good public schools. The only thing not so great about the city is the high price of admission.

Everyone loves New York now, it seems. Conservative senators no longer hold up the city as an example of liberals' failings. Indeed, the politician's children are likely to live in the city's Williamsburg or Bushwick neighborhoods.

At any one time, about 50 TV and movie productions are being filmed in New York, says one city official. It's hard to walk around without bumping into film trucks. We are in a New York moment, an urban moment. Few who saw Escape from New York would have predicted the 90-story condominiums ringing Central Park, and a resplendent Times Square stuffed with families at 3 a.m. Culture both reflects and magnifies societal trends. While New York once struggled to overcome its bad reputation, it now coasts on its good one.

A few stats tell the story of New York City's journey from darkness into light. The city has never been safer — Portland, Sacramento, and Charlotte had slightly higher murder rates in 2014 than New York City. Population is estimated at 8.6 million, the most ever and a million and a half more than 1980. It may eventually reach nine million without expanding its borders.

Turning from people to dollars, the metropolitan area's economy is estimated to be $1.3 trillion, the same as Australia, and many times what it was a generation ago. Fifty-six million people visited the city in 2014, up from 36 million in 2000.

Manhattan is even more a place of superlatives. The skinny island has 500 million square feet of office space, with 400 million of it in Midtown Manhattan south of Central Park. This is 100 times more than the downtown of my birthplace, Norfolk, Virginia, and 10 times more than downtown Houston.

Manhattan's Financial District. Photo by Rafael Ben-Ari /Alamy Stock Photo.

Ever resilient

The city has proven its resilience as a metropolis, coming back better than anyone had predicted from its 1970s and '80s funk of track fires, graffiti-covered subways, random muggings, overgrown parks, and armies of homeless. No longer does one see "No Radio" signs in cars, something common in the 1980s to advise crooks not to smash in your windows.

And just how did the metropolis do it? Well, a rising stock market helped. From 1965 to 1982, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was flat, and adjusted for inflation, actually went downhill.

But starting in 1983, the stock market began its long ascent, even allowing for some crashes, including the Great Recession of 2008. Along with the rising stock market came the increased role financial services played in the American economy. There are those who argue this is bad for the country as a whole, but most of these new financial products, from hedge funds to private equity groups, are centered in and around New York City.

But good planning played a part, an essential one. It's easy to forget that at the city's nadir there was talk of the New York Stock Exchange moving away.

"There should be a shrine somewhere to Gerald Ford, because his dismissal of the city gave everyone a kick in the pants," says Robert Yaro, recently retired head of the Regional Plan Association, the urban planning group where I'm a senior fellow. Yaro referred to President Ford's famous refusal to bail out the city financially when it teetered on bankruptcy, summarized by the Daily News in its famous headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead."

"No one was going to take care of us," Yaro said. "We had to take care of ourselves."

A series of governors, mayors, and business and civic leaders did just that. The state worked out a refinancing plan for the city's debt, and perhaps more importantly, an expensive long-range renovation plan for the city's broken-down subway system. The riders who today complain of a broken tile or a delayed train usually have no idea how bad the system once was. Construction of new highways, which had diverted resources from transit, largely stopped. Civic groups organized to clean up and fund parks and libraries. Schools were overhauled in a variety of ways, culminating in Mayor Michael Bloomberg returning them to direct city control in 2002.

Mayor David Dinkins and then Rudolph Giuliani hired more police and practiced community and "broken windows" policing. The crime rate came down. Construction began on the long-delayed 2nd Avenue subway, the Long Island Rail terminal under Grand Central. Bloomberg extended the number 7 subway line to the Far West Side and Hudson Yards, where giant new skyscrapers now bloom around the termination point of the city's hottest new linear park, the elevated High Line. Tourists and even most natives can't remember when Union Square at 14th Street was a "needle park," or when Bryant Park on 42nd Street was a place few would venture.

And the city, which many thought ungovernable, had proved more resilient than many expected. It had come back.

"I had in my office the death of New York bookshelf," says Yaro, filled with volumes describing the city as ungovernable and unfixable. "Then a funny thing happened on the way to the funeral. The patient revived. We addressed all or nearly all of our existential challenges."

Mayor de Blasio said he would create or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing. These brick apartment buildings are in Manhattan's East Village neighborhood. Photo by Ryan DeBerardinis/Thinkstock.

So what now?

Just as Escape from New York did not accurately predict the city's trajectory, so too the city's future is probably not one of simply rising wealth and better restaurants. Few predicted the attacks of 9/11, the Recession of 2008, and Superstorm Sandy in 2012, all of which greatly shaped the agenda for the current city.

But among planners, politicians, and civic and business leaders there is a fair amount of agreement about what the city and region need to do to turn this urban moment into a longer lasting one. They want to update an aging and overburdened transit system; moderate soaring wealth inequality; expand housing in the face of neighborhood resistance; maintain clean parks, safe streets, and good schools; embrace the possibilities of the digital revolution; and find a long-term strategy to handle rising sea levels and storms.

Much of this list is an avenue to create places for the next half-million people that many say will want to live here. A rising economy will draw these people, and making homes for these people will make a rising economy more likely.

"Creating more affordable housing is priority number one," says Alicia Glen, deputy mayor for Housing and Economic Development under Mayor Bill de Blasio, leading more than 40 city agencies and authorities. "Priority number two, or almost equal, is having a city that can rapidly deal with climate change."

Seas and the city

It's fair to say that when the sea waters of the Atlantic slipped over the stacks of riprap and into the South Street subway station in lower Manhattan, more was destroyed than a brand-new, half-billion-dollar subway station.

Five years before the storm, in 2007, the city had released PlaNYC under Mayor Bloomberg. It was an ambitious effort that wrapped the city's future and that of more than 25 city agencies under the rubric of "Green" and "Sustainability." More parks were justified as a way to lower the city's already low carbon emissions. PlaNYC did have a section called "Climate Change," but overall, the plan focused on how to lower the city's carbon emissions, not how to prepare for storms and flooding.

Then came Sandy. Out went "Sustainability." In came "Resilience." Mayor de Blasio renamed the plan OneNYC and moved it from the Mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability (something created under Bloomberg) to a new agency, the Mayor's Office of Recovery and Resilience.

Rohit Aggarwala, who led development of PlaNYC under Bloomberg and is now chief policy officer at Sidewalk Labs, says that given the benefit of hindsight, the team today would have focused more on immediate resilience measures rather than long-term measures like lowering carbon emissions. But before Sandy many were skeptical of doing anything.

"The main thing that would have been different if Sandy had come earlier is that we would have had the political will to actually do something," he says. "We had to convince people there was a problem."

Currently in and around New York, the only debate is how the region should prepare for storms and climate change, not whether. The federal program Rebuild by Design has funded the beginning stages of "The Big U," a planned set of walls and berms around Manhattan below Central Park. But although design work has begun, actual construction is not funded or assured. Building codes have been changed to raise essential equipment off ground floors, and institutional plans modified.

The larger debate is between water-inners and water-outers. Malcolm Bowman, a civil engineer at Stony Brook University on Long Island, has been leading a working group that is studying building a five-mile series of gates across New York Harbor. These could be closed in the event of a storm as well as used against rising sea levels. Although ambitious, it's modeled on existing systems in Rotterdam, Saint Petersburg, and New Orleans. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which would almost certainly be the builder of such a system, is currently examining this idea as part of a broader study. Bowman argues that big, regional, infrastructure intensive solutions are still possible. While expensive at an estimated $10 billion, in the end it would cost less and protect more than piecemeal solutions like the Big U.

"Notwithstanding our desire to cooperate, we have to take steps we know we can take now," said Glen in an interview, noting the "jurisdictional mosh pit" that occurs when broader projects are tackled. "We can't be dependent on a region that may not come together."

Typical Rent Burdens Across New York City

Manhattan's astronomical rental rates attract the most attention, but Brooklyn actually has the most residents of all the boroughs (65.4 percent) who pay more than 30 percent of their income on rent. Queens is expected to see the biggest jump in rents in the near future, though as of 2016 it ranked third. Low vacancy rates and lagging incomes add to the problem.

Source: StreetEasy: The State of New York City Rent Affordability, April 2016.

Housing and the city

Important as resilience is, it's clear that housing is the current mayor's top priority, particularly for those on the bottom half of the income scale. Mayor de Blasio began his term by saying he would create or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing, enough to accommodate half a million people. Officials recently stated they are already a quarter of the way to that goal.

The city is using a variety of strategies, some not immediately obvious. They include reducing parking requirements (yes, even New York City has them), which will lower the cost of development and make denser housing possible. The administration is also modestly bumping up height limits in neighborhoods, and updating regulations, so the amount of housing currently allowed in codes can actually be built.

A large portion of the city's lower-cost housing is controlled or overseen by the New York City Housing Authority. About 600,000 people live in public or Section 8 housing, 10 times as many as any other cities, and largely without fuss. NYCHA owns 175,000 apartments directly, many times that of any other city. The city is working to keep and improve this housing, officials say.

The push for affordable housing is part of an overall package of more robust planning for growth under the current mayor. In East New York, an area in Brooklyn where development is eventually expected to take off thanks to great subway access, you can see the city's strategy in miniature. It has already budgeted for new schools, parks, repaved streets, and a community center, drawing funding from a new $1 billion neighborhood development fund the City Council approved. Secondly, about 1,200 new apartments for low-income New Yorkers are being built, thanks to direct city subsidies. And third, if and when the shiny new condominiums go up in the years ahead, new laws will require 20 to 30 percent of them be affordable. The end result, city officials say, will be a neighborhood that is both more equitable and more livable.

With more lower-cost housing, the city can then focus on other remedies to make the city work for those without multimillion-dollar incomes. They include a $15 minimum wage, paid parental leave, better retirement plans for more workers, more after-school programs, and universal prekindergarten — which alone saves a family $10,000 to $15,000 in child care costs, the mayor said.

Some have been surprised at how closely the left-wing mayor has been allied with the development community. Others say his plan doesn't go far enough. "While I know the mayor must deal with political realities, he should find a way to make more comprehensive zoning changes, so the market can produce more of the housing he desires," said economist Jason Barr in an interview. The Rutgers professor is the author of a book about Manhattan real estate development, Building the Skyline (Oxford University Press 2016), and wrote an article criticizing de Blasio's housing plan as merely tinkering with the underlying zoning codes.

City officials actually share Barr's frustration and want New Yorkers to accept more density. "The very things that make New York City so vibrant and attractive are exactly the things that you need density to support," says Vicki Been, commissioner of New York City Housing Preservation & Development. "I cringe when I hear antigrowth sentiment. I think it's very odd for people to come to New York because they love its vibrancy and zillion restaurants, and then say this is where should we stop."

Coastal wetlands, like this one in Brooklyn Bridge Park, bring nature closer to city dwellers and protect them by absorbing flood water and minimizing the effect of wave power during storms. Photo courtesy ©TNC.

Transportation and the city

New York City is still the only American city built in its modern form by trains and even more dependent on them. About 1,200 trains a day stop at Pennsylvania Station on 34th Street, several times The number in the 1960s, when it was expected that train travel would decline. The region has the largest intercity train system, Amtrak, and its Northeast corridor lines south to Washington, D.C. and north to Boston. It has the largest commuter rail lines. They snake out from Manhattan to New Jersey, Connecticut, and Long Island respectively on NJ Transit, Metro-North, and the Long Island Railroad. And it has the hemisphere's largest subway, whose riders use it an astonishing 5.5 million times a day.

The region's rail system makes the economy hum and gives the cities, from New York City to smaller towns up the Hudson River, their urban character. But the politics of the region make its sustainability difficult.

Governors and mayors have been unwilling to extend the budgets much. Important things like capital maintenance; service modernizations like widespread Wi-Fi service, radio-controlled lines, platform screen doors, and bathrooms; and new lines like a complete 2nd Avenue subway are repeatedly delayed or not scheduled.

Mayor de Blasio has bumped up the city's annual contribution and leveraged rezonings for improvements. The developer of One Vanderbilt, a skyscraper next to Grand Central Station, has agreed to put in $220 million to renovate and expand capacity of the subway station at the historic train terminal. But the governor controls the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and he is not seen as a transit guy.

Across the Hudson River, NJ Transit, which runs most of the trains in New Jersey including the 300- plus that travel to Manhattan, has fared particularly poorly. Service and safety have fallen, while prices have risen during the two terms of Republican Gov. Chris Christie. He canceled a long-anticipated new tunnel under the Hudson River, shifting the money into road maintenance budgets. After a fatal accident in October 2016, the state faces a rebuilding challenge under Christie's successor, who will be elected in November 2017.

Riders, meanwhile, compare their system to the sleek systems they see in Paris, London, Seoul, and Shanghai. "We are disinvesting in our mass transit system," says Alex Garvin, a prominent architect and planner who is author most recently of What Makes a Great City (Island Press, 2016). Garvin has long experience in New York, including overseeing efforts to rebuild Lower Manhattan after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. "We are allowing it to deteriorate, especially New York City transit."

Hurricane Sandy, which in 2012 poured ocean water into half a dozen subway and commuter rail tunnels, may ultimately be a blessing because it made repairing and renovating the tunnels and lines essential.

The top priorities for most planners is the so-called Gateway project, which would build a new tunnel under the Hudson River with accompanying track and station work in New Jersey and New York city. This would allow the current hundred-year-old tunnel (damaged by Sandy) to be repaired, and would expand capacity for both commuter rail, handled by NJ Transit, and intercity travel, handled by Amtrak. Beyond this there is continuing construction of the 2nd Avenue subway, whose first phase is scheduled to open in 2017.

Work also continues on the deep tunnel for direct train service from Long Island to Grand Central Station, dubbed East Side Access.

Although the city's trains are important, a different but complementary set of changes is occurring at street level. The city continues what many call a revolution begun under former Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, appointed by Mayor Bloomberg, of turning sections of streets into pedestrian plazas and bike lanes.

The most dramatic transformation is Times Square, where hundreds of thousands of people daily congregate on spaces formerly dominated by honking yellow taxis. The city's public bike program, known as Citi Bike for its current advertiser, continues to expand.

The city and the future

All in all, even considering its many challenges, the New York metropolis's urban moment continues.

Yea-sayers see it becoming even more walkable and urban, if the city and region grow their transit systems, expand biking and walking options, and use digital technologies in creative ways. Through LinkNYC, the city is turning old phone booths into high-speed wireless stations. The program is being carried out by Sidewalk Labs, a new company led by Dan Doctoroff, the number two under Mayor Bloomberg. The company aims to profit by using digital technologies to improve cities.

Will the city in, say, 2050 still be enjoying another New York moment a generation from now? Some fictional depiction of the city, perhaps now on a screen large or small, may have the answer.

Alex Marshall is a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association in New York City and the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken (Texas, 2000), Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities (Perseus, 2006), and The Surprising Design of Market Economies (Texas, 2012). He lives in Brooklyn.