Is New York Over? Part 1 - The Subway
Dan invites Reihan Salam and Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute to discuss the hotly debated question: "Is New York over?" On this episode of Post Corona, Dan and his guests explore how subways play a role in the city's future.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] I believe that New York City is going to come back ferociously and with a vengeance. When you have this generation of people my age and younger get it through their thick skulls that New York City can't take for granted, that it's always going to be a luxury product, that people are always going to pay an enormous premium to be here.
Coronavirus does not mean that the city is doomed. What we need are leaders. of that generation who appreciate that we need to compete. We need to fight. We need to scrap. And if we do that, we have a great story to tell. Welcome to Post Corona, where we try to understand COVID 19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics.
I'm Dan Senor.
On this episode, we're going to be talking about the future of New York, but before we do just a little bit of housekeeping, [00:01:00] we got an enormous response from last week's episode on the future of sports with Billy Beane. Lots of very specific questions about Billy Beane and the future of sports. I'm going to try and tackle some of those questions in next week's episode.
And we're actually going to try and get Billy back. Billy, if you're listening, you may recall that you committed to do more than one episode. Well, we're not letting you off the hook. We may turn this into like. Bill Simmons multi episode, iconic multi episode series with Kevin Durant from a few years ago.
This will be the, the, the Billy episodes. We just scratched the surface. A lot of other topics to hit. A lot of questions came in that, that raise topics that were not even on our radar. So, so we'll get Billy back. Now onto today's episode. Is New York Over. It's a question that's hotly debated these days.
Strong views on all sides. We will return to this question from time to time in a number of episodes in the months ahead. On each episode, we'll unpack a specific part of New York life and what it could [00:02:00] look like post corona. Today, we're looking at subways. Public transport is the heart of almost every city's economy.
Without it, many cities simply stop functioning. New York City's subway ridership was down as much as 90%. Earlier this year, and while we're focused on New York City, this topic matters to everyone living or working in any mega city around the world. New York City is a microcosm. We have two guests today.
Nicole Gelinas joins us, who's the Senior Fellow for the Infrastructure Economy at the Manhattan Institute. She's also a contributing editor at City Journal and a columnist for the New York Post. Nicole's number is on the speed dial of just about every public transportation official at every level of government.
And she wrote earlier this year for the New York Post, quote, If New York can't get people to flock back to mass transit, then New York City is dead. It's that simple. We're also joined by Raihan Salam, who's the president of the Manhattan Institute, the most [00:03:00] important think tank figuring out the future of cities and states.
Raihan is also a best selling author and contributing editor at the Atlantic and National Affairs. What's the state of our subways? Will they come back? And what will they look like after the pandemic? What do we need to save and transform public transportation? This is Post Corona.
I am pleased to welcome Nicole Gelinas and Reiham Salam to this conversation. Uh, both friends, both serious thinkers, both provocative in their own ways in the debate over ideas, not just ideas, but like practical implications of some of these public policy issues. We're going to talk about the subway system in a minute, but before we do, I want to just open the conversation with a quote from a gentleman by the name of James Altucher, who's [00:04:00] a podcaster, who's a former hedge fund investor and trader, who wrote a very Uh, provocative piece for Medium in the summer, in which he basically said New York is done forever, is never coming back.
And I just, I want to start, Raihan, with a quote from Altucher's piece, in which he says, quote, New York City has never been locked down for five months. He, keep in mind, he wrote this a few months ago. New York has never been locked down for five months, not in any pandemic, war. Financial crisis? Never. In the middle of the polio epidemic, when little kids, including my mother, were going paralyzed or dying, my mother ended up with a bad leg, he says, New York City didn't go through this.
Close quote didn't go through this because I hear from my New York friends all the time, you know This time is not different. We've been through this before we'll bounce back and altitude saying no. No, this time is different [00:05:00] We've never done anything like this before we've never gone through something like this before.
What is the this that's different? The this is the incredible disruption to the relationships that are the reason New York City is a magnet for talent. People don't move to New York City for the natural beauty. They don't move here for the hikes. They don't move here for the weather, uh, as Nicole and I are experiencing right now because it's incredibly cold.
I'm experiencing it too. I should say all three of us are in New York City right now. Yeah. What, uh, they come for is the prospect of forming relationships, gaining skills, gaining know how from other people. being cheek by jowl with other people, getting that kind of texture, uh, that grit that you only get from in person interaction.
And when you're shut down for that period of time, it creates this incredible disruption to all of those relationships. The conventional wisdom about New York City in recent years has been that, [00:06:00] yes, the taxes are high. Yes, the cost of living is obscenely high. All of these things are huge problems. But guess what?
It's all overwhelmed by the fact that people love being with other people. They love consuming together. They love the arts, the culture, just the vitality of a big, great, dynamic city that's a mecca for culture and commerce and everything else. But then when you have a moment like this, when you have Shutdowns of this kind of this magnitude of this duration that disruption shakes the kaleidoscope The inertia that was there that made you think okay, it's expensive, but all of my friends are here You know, my spouse loves being here.
There are all these great amenities. So you don't really think about the comparison You don't think about the fact that You know, maybe Austin, Texas is cheaper. Maybe Miami, Florida is cheaper and offers a lot of the same great things. But then once you shake people out of that routine, once you see large numbers of people relocate for a [00:07:00] period of time, they start to reassess those things in a way that they wouldn't necessarily when they're enmeshed in all of those relationships, all of that excitement that is so central to New York.
Looking back at past crises where you could have had the onset of that same isolation post 9 11 mass terror attack I know plenty of New Yorkers in the immediate aftermath of 9 11 who said I'm not gonna go to a restaurant I'm not gonna go to a sporting event. I'm not gonna go to the theater. I'm not gonna ride the subways That was a big thing people were worried about riding the subways wasn't that gonna be where the next attack was?
People were concerned about these anthrax attacks these envelopes showing up at New York City office buildings, you know after Hurricane Sandy big parts of the city were shut down. So there was this isolation in other periods. No comparison, Dan. Absolutely no comparison. Tell me. If you think about 9 11, uh, you know, part of it is that there was this amazing solidarity.
This was something that happened to [00:08:00] New York City. It happened to a small slice of Northern Virginia. We were attacked. But then the entire country. Rallyed around New York City in an incredible way that wound up being the beginning of this incredible boom in tourism that really deepened, actually, New York City wound up becoming a more attractive destination, not just for visitors, but also for people who wanted to make their lives here.
So partly it's because it was localized and specific. It wasn't a big systemic change that happened around the country. Um, and also, you know, it was discreet. Uh, it was something that, you know, had a miserable effect on a slice of downtown New York, but also you saw Midtown thriving in the wake of that.
Uh, you saw some office space, uh, you know, that was It was demolished, but it didn't attack that basis of life, which were those relationships. And you're right that some people might have left. There were some people who were really rattled by Hurricane Sandy, too. But I [00:09:00] remember Hurricane Sandy, and I remember how much life there was uptown.
I remember, you know, I had to vacate my apartment. at the time, but you know, I just, uh, you know, stayed with friends, you know, about a 10 minute subway ride uptown. And I just remember there was still a buzz. There was energy. There was excitement. Uh, yes, there were long term issues there, but it wasn't this disruption of the relationships.
The relationship simply moved somewhere else. And that's what's changed here. And Nicole, even, even. I'm pretty sure you've said on 9 11, within days of 9 11, there were many subways that were up. I think there were even subways running that day. Yeah, actually, Dan, it was within hours that the New York City subway system was back up and running.
It was a key part of getting people out of Manhattan and back to their homes that afternoon. Of course, many people walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, many people took the ferries, but the subways, except for A few [00:10:00] subway stops in lower Manhattan were pretty much back to normal the week of 9 11. And, you know, we're going into the holiday season here.
I was thinking to myself the other day, it's striking today that after 9 11, We had a very normal holiday season, and I worked 500 feet away from the World Trade Center back then. I was back to work by Halloween. Everyone downtown pretty much was back to work by Christmas season. If you didn't know about 9 11 and you were walking around Midtown that holiday season, things might have seemed a little subdued.
Of course, people were, were very, uh, sad and some people were traumatized by the tragedy. But, lights were up, people were out and about, people were shopping, people were visiting. It was nothing like what we see today, where if you walk over, uh, you know, just a couple blocks away from me, walk over to Core Midtown right now, on a good day, maybe [00:11:00] you have 15 to 20 percent of the normal foot traffic.
So this is a very different event in hollowing out the core of Midtown, at least temporarily or indefinitely. So I want to come back to Midtown in a second. Jason Gay, who's one of my favorite sports writers, he's a writer for the Wall Street Journal, but he also often writes about life in New York City, and he wrote a piece at the early stage of the pandemic in which he talked about living, life in New York City is meant to be lived outside of your home.
Right? Everyone in New York City basically spends too much money for too small of a home because the understanding is most of the living happens outside of our homes and what is so unique about this moment is we were told to basically get out of Uh, public settings, get in your, get in our homes and be alone or be alone with at least with our loved ones, but still be alone.
And that is what is so unique and to your, both of your points in each of these crises you described, there were precautions that needed to be taken, but no one [00:12:00] was saying, stay at home. Don't talk to anyone. Don't socialize with anyone. Don't interact with anyone. Don't transact with anyone. Just be alone.
Um, so Nicole, you talked about Midtown. Okay. So before we. get into subways. Can you just explain the sort of the economic model of the city that was shaped really since about the 1960s? Largely white collar, concentrated New York City economy is about in terms of how, how it, the city's organized around it.
Sure, Dan. So I'll give you a potted history of New York City economic development. In In the 1950s and 1960s, New York had a very balanced economy in terms of white collar workers in Manhattan, factory workers in lower Manhattan, in Greenwich Village, in the Outer Boroughs, longshoremen working on the docks of the Hudson River, and a core working class [00:13:00] economy, where the white collar economy was just a very small sliver of that, both in terms of jobs and in terms of the tax revenue.
In the 1960s, factory jobs started to leave, first left New York City for suburbs, later left for the south of southern regions of the United States, and then later many of them went overseas. New York City's answer To losing its factory jobs was to really place a huge bet on the white collar economy and starting in the late 1960s, multiple mayoral administrations and gubernatorial administration said, we are going to concentrate on building up a core of midtown, make a far denser environment for white collar work.
And that's what they did. So if you think about the towers along 6th Avenue, you think about the newer towers along Madison Avenue, 5th Avenue, all of this started to come into being in the late [00:14:00] 1960s. And so, before the pandemic, this This strategy had more or less succeeded, and this has powered New York City's economy for 50 years.
More so since the early 1980s, when the financial industry, information industry, really started taking off. And New York City started regaining power. population after two and a half decades of population loss in the early 1980s. So before the pandemic, on an average day, New York City would bring almost 4 million people into core Manhattan, Manhattan below 60th street, including lower Manhattan.
And then at the end of the day, send these nearly four million people home, going home to the outer boroughs, going home to New Jersey, going home to Westchester and Long Island suburbs, going home to Connecticut. In other words, for the white collar, uh, New York economy to work, New York needs both dense Manhattan and it needs its [00:15:00] outlying outer boroughs and suburbs.
But most importantly, it needs the transit system to connect these two things, bringing 4 million people into Manhattan. Three quarters of them come on mass transit. Subways, buses, commuter rail, ferries. Without a functional and crowded mass transit system, there is no way to bring almost four million people into core Manhattan.
You can't do it in private cars. You can't do it in shared car rides. Just the density is not there. It's just a matter of physics. I mean, yes, exactly right and you're looking at a subway that can bring 2000 people eight square blocks within a two minute time frame. You cannot do that on any other form of transportation.
So right now, numbers include also. The 1. 5 million residents of Manhattan who are commuting within, within Manhattan. Sure, yes, uh, you know, 20 percent of Hell's Kitchen, of, of lower [00:16:00] Manhattan walk to work. So walking to work has actually been, you know, a point of resilience in the pandemic. But, without the transit system, you just cannot bring very many people into core Manhattan.
So we're looking at An environment where previous to the pandemic, we had 150, 000 jobs per square mile within Manhattan, some of the densest concentration of high paying white collar jobs in the developed world. And right now, with the subway ridership struggling to get even to 3, 000, 30 percent of normal with only 15 to 20 percent of white collar workers who have come back to their offices.
The biggest change that the pandemic has revealed is that white collar workers can work at home indefinitely. They may not like to do it. Their employers may not like it in the longterm. They may not be as. be as happy. All of those things remain to be seen, but [00:17:00] they have proven that they can do it. And that is an enormous change.
If you think about the three subway strikes that we've had in modern history, there was a subway strike in 1912. In 1980, there was a subway strike in 1966, and then we had our most recent subway strike in, in 2005. All those subway strikes, people took heroic measures to try to get to their offices to work.
They, they walked for miles on end, they rode bicycles, they carpooled, they took, uh, whatever was whatever was available in mass transportation, like things like taking New Jersey transit, if they had previously relied on the New York City subway system. But they, they got to work. They could not work even a day at home without feeling like they would lose their standing at the work, at the workplace.
And that's, that will never be true again. So right, right now, The corporate world [00:18:00] has enormous leverage over the political world when it comes to things like raising New York City taxes or, or taking other, uh, measures that companies would perceive as negative because their workforces have proven They do not need to be here, but that is something that the political class does not seem to have noticed yet with many of their ideas for trying to plug the budget gaps that have arisen during the pandemic.
So that's a that's a big change. And I do think No, people will not work at home forever, but will they start to work two days a week at home, three days at an office? Will many corporations decide that they don't need to have as many people in Manhattan? I think those things could certainly be long term changes.
Ryan. So, Dan, this podcast is about the world post corona, and I think that a lot of people through the current crisis have been making some bets that are pretty short [00:19:00] sighted. One of them is the idea of saying, okay, you know, I'm going to get out of New York City. I'm going to move to a close in suburb of New York City.
I'm going to relocate there, you know, got a little more room, got a yard for the dog, maybe some more room for the kids. A lot of those people, by the way, are people who were going to move at some point in the next several years. But part of the thing everyone needs to understand is that those suburban communities have a very unique tight symbiotic relationship with Midtown.
Uh, and this is something that Nicole has talked about brilliantly, but basically the kind of hyper density that you have in Midtown during those daylight hours, the fact that the population swells by millions of people means, and also not to mention the tourists who are a big part of the story as well, means that there are certain kinds of entertainment experiences, certain kinds of retail experiences that simply will not exist without that kind of volume.
You know, maybe you could get it [00:20:00] through virtual reality. Maybe you could get it by ordering things from a distance, but there's a certain kind of experience that cannot be sustained without that kind of density. And the reason people live in Scarsdale, the reason people live in summit, the reason people live in these affluent leafy towns is actually because of that access.
to that midtown core that is sustained by that enormous daytime population. So it actually matters to everyone, and it's going to affect those suburban communities as well. So you can't, you can't escape, so to speak, and get the benefits of being part of the tri state area if there's no thriving core. Um, Michael Wilson from the New York Times wrote a very daunting, uh, somewhat depressing piece in this late summer, early fall for the New York Times in which he profiled 1271 Avenue of the Americas.
So it's the Time Life building there in Midtown. You both know it well, which on a normal day pre pandemic has about [00:21:00] 7, 500, 7, 500. people coming in and out of it, working there. That doesn't count meetings. That's just people at desks working. And over the last few months, at most, there have been four to five hundred people coming in and out a day.
So just the ripple effects, you know, they interviewed the guy at this, the hot dog stand right out front, who normally sells hundreds of hot dogs a day, and he was saying, I sell now ten hot dogs a day. And you know, you can come up with a hundred anecdotes that illustrate the ripple effects of what happens when a building that normally Has 7500 people coming in and out of it suddenly has four or five hundred if that just to reiterate one point that Nicole had raised before, you know, it's also important to note that these workers are not going to come back out of a spirit of charity.
You know, I see some people, I see some CEOs. Who I'm sympathetic to, uh, you know, I, myself as a native New Yorker care deeply about the survival and success of the city, but that's not going to happen because people are pitching in, they're doing [00:22:00] their part. They're buying a hot dog from, from the guy from the halal cart because, you know, they want to be good citizens.
They're going to do it because it makes sense for them, because it's attractive and appealing for them to be here. That's the reason New York City had that Renaissance. It's because New York City was offering experiences you couldn't get anywhere else. So that's just one thing. To a lot of my fellow New Yorkers, a lot of other people who wish the city well, who want the city to come back, as I very much do, you're not going to do it through charity.
So that's just one thing that I think we all need to underscore. So I want to, so the New York City Subways is a big part of that, because part of the attraction of it being, it was historically the biggest, the safest big city in the world, and it had all these incredible public shared experiences, all these amenities as you called them, including Public transportation and to listen to Nicole talk about the core and how the subways underneath the core were key to the success of the economic court in Nicole.
It's almost like you're saying that [00:23:00] Midtown is the is the heart of the New York City economy and the subway tunnels are the arteries. You could, you know, extend the metaphor and say the subway cars are the blood cells and If the subways aren't working, or aren't functioning in any reliable way, the economy can go into some version of cardiac arrest.
Right. If we think about life before the pandemic, we had five and a half million people riding the New York subways every single day. Right now, the MTA has struggled to get even 1. 7 million people riding the subways on a good day, and so ridership is still 25 to 30 percent of what would be normal, but it's also plateaued.
We had a little bit of a jump up in july when the governor opened up offices to limited capacity office workers But it has not gone up again since then and in fact, it's dipped over the past few weeks so Right now the subways and buses are functioning if you want to [00:24:00] take them They actually work quite well, except for the crime situation, which we'll get to in a second.
The big risk is that with the MTA facing the biggest fiscal crisis in its 52 year existence, they get about half of their revenues from fares and tolls and the other half From dedicated state taxes, so they've effectively lost 70% of half their revenue. So they're looking at $6 billion deficit on a 17, $18 billion budget, same deficit persisting next year and even into future years.
So, the big risk for New York right now is that in response to these deficits, the MTA starts to cut back service and cut back service quite drastically. They're contemplating 40 to 50 percent cuts in service. So, if people do start to gingerly say, well, maybe I'll go try to work at the office one day and say what it's like, if they're met [00:25:00] by, uh, An hour wait for a commuter rail train, or a 20 minute wait for a subway train, or unreliable service, or a crowded subway, even though there are not that many people riding the subway, they'll have a bad experience, and then they'll say, I'm just gonna go back and work at home for a while and ride this out and see if it's better in a couple of months.
So, right now, We, we could potentially see a fiscal crisis turn into a service crisis that prolongs the very difficult work of trying to get people back into core Manhattan. But Nicole, even if, to Raihan's point, residents of New York could be convinced that it is in their interest, not out of charity, but it is in their self interest to get back to the office.
They still may have concerns from here to the office about how safe the trains are, the subways are during, before we have a widely available, widely distributed vaccine. So what is the MTA [00:26:00] saying about the safety of riding the subways? While this virus is floating around. Yeah, and I think that's certainly an understandable concern What we know right now or at least what we think we know is multiple studies have not shown a correlation between transit ridership and virus transmission.
So for example, Sam Schwartz, he has an engineering firm named after him. He was New York's traffic commissioner back in the 1980s. He did a study mapping out where has transit ridership gone up around the world and where has virus transmission gone up. So no correlation at all that he found between people getting back on the trains in Paris and more of a more coronavirus cases in Paris.
Similarly, no correlation in South Korea, no correlation in Japan. Now, people should be wearing masks, and they are wearing masks. I mean, it's striking the mass compliance on the New York City [00:27:00] subways and the air is well ventilated. The trains are cleaned quite frequently. There does not appear to be a significant risk of transmission on the subway.
Still, though, it is understandable why people wouldn't want to take the risk as long as they have the option of working at home. And nobody is saying. You have to come back to work right now. The MTA's task is to try to get through at least a few more months and potentially even, even another year or more than a year of people not wanting to ride the subway without having to make the drastic service cuts that would make that a foregone conclusion not temporarily but on a permanent basis in terms of service cuts that they just cannot recover from because they cannot Recovered their ridership with a much lower, less reliable level of service, you know, six months from now.
Nicole, one step the MTA took, I think over the summer was to, [00:28:00] for the first time in the history of New York's public transit system, is to shut down the subways from 1 to 5 a. m. every night. So we used to be very proud of the fact that we had one of the only, I think, 24 hour 24 7 subway operating subway systems in the world, and they shut it down for four hours a night to clean it thoroughly, which they argued would make it safer.
And if it's safer from a pandemic standpoint, it'll be. You know, people will be more likely to return. You, I know, have written quite extensively about why shutting down the subway system from 1 to 5 a. m. every night is terrible public policy. Please tell us why. The problem with a temporary shutdown is that it easily becomes a permanent shutdown.
That as the MTA looks to save money, it is very, very easy. To just forget about the fact that they ever offered 24 hour service and this is bad [00:29:00] from a few perspectives First of all, it doesn't actually save any money if you look at subway ridership overnight There's 60 000 people on the trains in the overnight hours Sixty six zero?
Mm hmm. Sixty thousand people ride the subways overnight. Yep, and the rump hours, you know, 4 to 5 a. m., uh, 1 to 2 a. m., these are actually quite busy hours. A lot of people are going home from work at 1 a. m., a lot of people are leaving clubs, leaving nighttime events at 1 a. m., and a lot of people are going to work at 4 a.
m. I mean, I've taken the E train at 4 a. m. to get to the airport. It's actually quite busy, so when you factor in those rump hours in normal times, not during pandemic times, and think about how are you going to get those people from point A to point B, actually replicating reliable frequent bus service, we requires more, uh, personnel than running the subways.
And actually, the subway trains are still running underground right now [00:30:00] because there's not enough place to store them. Only relatively few trains run at night, even when the subways are open. And they need to reposition trains. You know, the longest route on the subway is more than an hour and a half.
long so by the time you shut the subway down it's almost time to reopen it. That's not to say that the MTA shouldn't have a policy of when it's doing major work on one subway line saying we're going to shut this one line down overnight for the next nine months and replace it with bus service but shutting down the entire system from 1am it doesn't make sense from a ridership perspective.
Doesn't make sense from economic perspective in supporting nightlife and supporting working class jobs. Also doesn't make sense from a security perspective because you, you actually can't really shut the subway. You cannot stop people from entering the system without the eyes and ears in the subway system on those overnight hours.
There are bigger security risks to people entering the subway [00:31:00] system and doing nefarious things to subway infrastructure during those, those closed hours. Some cities like Paris, I'm pretty sure, closes their subway at night. Many European, major European cities close their subways at night, but they, to your point, they, I know, Paris has an overnight bus system.
So a lot of these cities, I think London might too, There are, there are vibrant bus systems that compensate. Yeah, in, in London, uh, until the pandemic, they were, uh, piloting overnight subway service on a couple of lines. They were trying to build up a nightlife industry that New York had built up for a hundred years.
I mean, London tube shuts down, sure, but try going out to dinner in London at 10 p. m. Very difficult. I mean, London shuts down on a normal non pandemic. basis much, much earlier than New York shuts down. So this is an issue of what do we want our city to look like when the pandemic is over? Do we want to continue to support a vibrant [00:32:00] night life?
Very difficult to do that when people are looking at their phone at midnight saying, I need to get the last subway because if I miss it, I have to pay 40 for a car. And by the way, that's, that's the final issue, shutting the subways and the overnight hours. will result in more traffic deaths, more pedestrian deaths, and more bicyclist deaths.
If you, if you look at many of the traffic fatalities that we see, it is someone walking to work or bicycling to work at four or five in the morning and hit by a high speed vehicle. Um, Raihan, you've talked a lot about the, the need to to service or the need to advocate for private sector working class jobs in the city.
The city's too, too, too much of the city's economy and labor force are too dependent on public sector jobs. And there's, there's gotta be more thought put into how to empower, strengthen, expand private sector working class jobs. So do you think many of the workers that Nicole's talking about [00:33:00] are the ones that would get hit that you're worried about?
Absolutely. Without question. Nicole earlier on was talking about how the city's labor market had changed on what you have in New York City, and it's not unique to New York City, but it's a very polarized labor market in which you have a significant number of people on high wage. High scale professional jobs, and you have a large number of people in low wage scales that don't necessarily require a ton of education, but this is really the source of an enormous number of private sector jobs.
People are on the starting rungs of the economic ladder, and they depend on consumption. They depend on this kind of flexibility. And they depend on transit. Uh, when you're looking at numerous studies of the New York economy, what you'll find is that the reason the city is quite attractive to a lot of working class people is that you do not need to own a private vehicle.
That is a game changer for people. When you're thinking about [00:34:00] anyone starting out in the labor market, a big question is, How many jobs could I potentially take on that are within some realistic commuting distance? So if you're in a place where it takes you an hour to get anywhere that is really limiting your economic opportunities that's limiting the number of employers who can compete for your labor and that's really going to kind of Constrain your ability to earn more over time to build your skills.
The beauty of New York City is that it's not just for affluent, skilled people. It's also for people with more modest skills, people who are really just starting out. They have a range of different employers who are competing for their services because of the availability of a great transit system. Take away that transit system and you'll see what you see in a number of other American cities.
Think about Chicago. Now Chicago has a decent transit system, but in many swaths of the west side and south side of the city, they just don't have the density they need to [00:35:00] sustain the kind of transit system we have. And what that means is that huge numbers of poor Chicagoans. live in what are in effect job deserts.
And by the way, Chicago is better than many, many other cities on this front. You know, you're seeing a lot of low income folks moving to suburban communities. Now, you know, that can make sense. You go where the jobs are. So if you're someone in a service job, it makes sense. If there are affluent consumers out there, you do that.
But the density of jobs available is also much lower in those regions. The number of employers who are potentially competing for your services. If you're not happy in one establishment, you have fewer other establishments that you can potentially go to. That is why this is so damaging to the prospects of those people who come to New York City to really get their start in the labor market.
So Nicole, I want to pivot off that because the issue of crime on the subways. Poses equally very difficult challenges for the exact [00:36:00] reasons Raihan is saying. Um, historically, what is, it's been about, you know, over the last 10, 20 years, about two murders per year on the New York City subways. And Can you talk a little bit about the crime situation today, compared to last year or two years ago?
Yeah, you're absolutely right. Up until 1990, there was a sort of permanent subway crime crisis, where in 1990, for example, 26 people were murdered on the New York City subway system, including Brian Watkins, a tourist from Utah, that his death was the precipitating event. for time magazine with the big rotten apple on the cover.
Basically that that that era's version of New York is over. Uh, that was when police commissioner or or rather trip transit police commissioner bill bratton Was brought in to Experiment with broken windows policing on the subway and [00:37:00] in reaped Tremendous results in just a few months time I mean you can read New York Times articles before Bratton took his his post saying We'll never get subway crime down This is as low as it can go and as long as you avoid isolated areas and isolated hours You probably won't be murdered on the subway to a few months later the New York Times saying hey This is a huge success crime is down by So, fast forward to the late 1990s, New York City consistently got the number of murders on the subway system down to one or two every year.
Of course, you want no murders, but on a system that sees two billion passengers a year, One or two was probably the best that we were going to do. So 2020, we have now had six murders on the subway system. All of the victims have been minority men. Uh, and this is something that we, we haven't seen [00:38:00] in more than two decades and not a very, uh, good situation for the essential workers who do have to take the subway because they cannot work at home.
per capita they and just in the raw numbers they are at much greater risk of being a murder victim on the subway this year And also at much greater risk of being robbed being assaulted And why is this happening? There's fewer people to deter deter violent crime on the subway if you're tempted to rob someone There's no one to grab you and and hold you as you as you run out fellow commuters People just around fewer eyes.
Yep And also, there's virtually no, uh, enforcement of minor crimes on the subway system. The number of people given civil summonses for jumping over the turnstile and avoiding the fare has plummeted by [00:39:00] 86 97%, depending on what month you're looking at. And the number of arrests For turnstile jumping in the subway, which is done only if you have a long history of doing this or You're committing some other crime in the process, like the police catch you jumping the turnstile But you're also carrying a gun.
That has plummeted by 99%. So in, in an environment where there's no There's no natural enforcement against subway crime That's when you would want more police in the subway, not fewer, but we've essentially had almost, uh, minimal policing in, in the subways for, for the past few months. And Raihan, how much is that, what Nicole just described, a microcosm for what's going on citywide?
It's a huge problem. Uh, when you're looking at shootings. They have increased drastically 2020 relative to 2019, uh, over 100 percent increase in shootings. You've also seen an increase in [00:40:00] homicides. We're on track to see just shy of 500 homicides this year, which is a significant increase. But one thing that's worth noting Is that actually when you're comparing shootings and homicides in a way, a lot of those shootings we have would have been homicides in an earlier era if we weren't so great at dealing with trauma.
And the reason we're good at it is because New York City is a world class center of excellence when it comes to medical practice, but bigger picture, just the dynamic that Nicole is describing in the subways, having eyes on the street. having a presence, having a large number of people who are just law abiding ordinary citizens, that can have a big deterrent effect.
And what you're seeing in New York City, when it comes to shootings and homicides, is that this is not a phenomenon that you're seeing in every single neighborhood. Rather, it is hyper concentrated in a very small number of communities. Uh, I'm from Brooklyn, and in Brooklyn, murders are up 72%, which sounds dramatic.
In my part of Brooklyn, you are not seeing a [00:41:00] significant uptick in crime. You're seeing it in literally just four precincts, uh, East Flatbush, Brownsville, East New York, Crown Heights. That accounts for over half of, uh, the homicides that you're seeing in the borough as a whole. And what you're seeing in those communities is that those communities are the ones that really came back to life.
Because you had density, because people felt safe to be out and about, and now when that recedes, lo and behold, you're seeing those neighborhoods come to feel dangerous again. And that's having a really negative effect. I've, I'm experiencing the same thing in lower Manhattan. Ray Kelly. Many years ago told me that we lived in the safest, one of the safest neighborhoods in New York City, because post 9 11, the concentration of uniformed police officers was so high, just doing patrols around here, plus there was surveillance and cameras, it was just a very safe part of the city.
Now, with, with pedestrians gone, there's just no pedestrians, there's no, people aren't walking around. Sure, [00:42:00] there are patrols, but it doesn't feel as safe because there aren't just as many fellow New Yorkers walking the streets. So I'm not comfortable having my kids walk around in the dark, walk around at night, walking the dog, going to play a sport, going to do whatever.
That is a big difference that the lack of, of foot traffic has, and eyes and ears has changed the whole dynamic. Let me ask you, Nicole, about I want to come back to the budget issues because I know there's, there's a big debate right now in City Hall and Albany are trying to get funding from Congress to, for, for the MTA, for the subways.
Um, you have, you have argued in the past that if there's going to be any funding coming in from Washington to save our subways, there, it should be tied to some kind of conditions to incentivize reform. Can you explain? Yeah, I do think we need more congressional aid, that these changes, [00:43:00] which should have been implemented decades and years ago, they are not going to be implemented in the course of the just a few months in an environment of double digit unemployment.
So, you know, contrary to Rahm Emanuel's dictum that you should never let a crisis go to waste, sort of the worst time to implement changes is during crisis. You should do this during the good times, but they didn't. So that's where we are. So yes, I think they will need a significant transit aid package, not only New York, if you think about a place like Detroit, as Ryan was saying, in many cities.
without a reliable transit system, you either have to buy a car or you don't have a job. And if you are, if you are trying to get your first job, a 6, 000 annual cost of maintaining a used car is a huge marginal tax against getting a minimum wage job. So if you look at the city of Detroit, for example, you don't really think of Detroit as a [00:44:00] transit city, but 7 percent of people in Detroit.
take the bus to work. These are poorer Detroit workers. Without the bus, they will have to leave the labor force. So we will need a national transit aid package. But yes, I think it should be tied to cost reforms as is sort of common knowledge in transit circles now. A place like New York City, the cost of building, uh, A new piece of transit infrastructure or just providing the day to day service is multiple times the cost of doing the same thing in Europe or in developed Asia.
So we should tie this aid to benchmarks to be met. Some within a six month time frame, some within a one year, and some within a five year. But the first thing is opening up these union contracts, particularly the commuter rail contracts. I mean, the commuter rail contracts in New York They, they are vestiges of private railroads that [00:45:00] went bankrupt in the 1940s and the 1950s.
One of the reasons they went bankrupt was because of their labor agreements. The MTA has never seriously opened up these contracts and got changes to work rules to improve productivity. So congressional aid should certainly hinge on doing those things. You don't want to do those things, fine, but you don't get the aid.
This is a Nicole touches on a really challenging problem with our national politics, which is that folks on the center right folks who are market oriented, who are fiscal conservatives, they ought to care deeply about this. This kind of a crisis. is an opportunity to really rethink how we do things. New York City literally has two person crews on our subways when every other system, every other transit system in the world gets by with one person if they're not automated completely.
That's crazy! That's something that this overstaffing is a huge, persistent problem. This is an [00:46:00] opportunity for us to take a close, careful look at these things and put these systems on a more sustainable basis. The problem nationally is that the kind of folks who ought to care about this issue, they tend not to care as much about the fate of our cities.
And folks on the left who represent urban areas, they oftentimes care more about public employees and their interests and what they're demanding in the short term than about long run sustainability, than in doing what makes the most sense for growth and putting these transit systems in a position for long run success.
What we need, in my opinion, are fiscal conservatives people who are smart and thoughtful about these issues to actually engage and say that these cities are engines of prosperity and growth for the country as a whole. We need to care about what's happening in these cities, in these transit systems, because caring about that is caring about upward mobility.
It's caring about growth. Um, and you need people to roll up their sleeves and actually do something about it. Thinking post [00:47:00] Corona, in addition to these reforms, you're, you're, you're prescribing Nicole. Is there any Real innovations that could be done in terms of public transportation. I mean, I know Andy Byford when he was.
When he was head of the MTA, he was looking at a number of innovations. There are things we could be doing with buses, with open air buses, with, I mean, I'm sure there's a bunch of ideas being batted around that would look far into the future in terms of how to, how to innovate in public transportation.
Sure, certainly on the labor issues, yes, the two person subway cruise, you don't have to lay off thousands of people. You can do this through attrition over a multi year period. If we had started doing it ten years ago, we would be in a much better position than we are today. But for example, We could restart 1 to 5 a.
m. service with one person on the train, on the two lines that are already automated, and then go from there. Incremental steps. On the, uh, on the management [00:48:00] side, things like a much more aggressive rollout of Bus lanes so that people's bus trips are much faster that can go along with a wide bus lane That has a bike lane on the side of it because the bus drivers are professional drivers They will learn more quickly to look for the bicyclists.
It works well in in paris works well in other cities uh, so certainly Uh, labor costs, and also much more aggressive understanding on the part of the, the governments and the political class that we need faster ways for people to get around on buses, on bikes, and on foot to alleviate any potential crowding in the subways for, you know, the next few months or potentially more than another year.
Uh, just in wrapping, Raihan, when I read that quote, By, uh, James Altucher, where he basically said New York is dead forever, it's never coming back, you winced. [00:49:00] I guess you don't entirely agree with him. But, so I, I guess I have two questions for you. One is, what do you disagree with? And then two, there must be some changes.
That are going to outlive this pandemic to the New York economic model that Nicole described at the beginning this, this Midtown Manhattan, this Midtown Manhattan, high population, dense, high work, white collar worker, dense economic core, that model may not survive the pandemic, it may not be gone, it may, it may not be dramatically reduced, but it may die.
It just doesn't seem like it's going to look exactly the same post corona. So how do you respond to all of that? Fundamentally, I believe that people long to be around other people. They crave social connections. They crave face to face interactions. And the beauty of New York City is simply. It's size.
It's simply [00:50:00] it's density. The fact that you have labor market depth. Think about this very straightforwardly. Now, Dan, not to get personal here, but you happen to have a wife who is a very talented woman. I'll put it that way. You know, she, she is a dynamo. So are you. I agree. You guys are both busy people.
Now, you need to think about where are places where both members of a couple can thrive. can do things that allow them to climb the ladder, that allow them to really reach the zenith of their talent. So partly it's about those people who are going to be at the top of their game. People who are not necessarily New York natives like me.
People who are seeking out the place to be in the arena, to win the tournament, to be the best of the best of the best. And New York City is going to be that place. Now, again, it's a little bit easier at the margin for you to go somewhere else, and you can enjoy Netflix, and you can enjoy your Amazon deliveries, and you can have a pretty decent quality of life.
So that's going to look different at the margin, but fundamentally, those superstars, those killers, are going to want to be in the place where they can rub [00:51:00] shoulders with other people who are killers, who are competitive, who are doing great things and building great things. So that's going to be a very, very big strength for the city long term, provided the city doesn't screw it up.
The other part of the story is that New York City revived because of the foreign born population. I was born, uh, in December 1979. 1980 census, New York City had 5. 4 million native born people living in the five boroughs, and the city had a shade over 7 million people. If you're looking at now, the city has 5.
3 million native born people, but the city has 8. 3 million citizens overall. The difference was made up by immigrants, scrappy immigrants, who are, by the way, willing to live in apartments that if you grew up anywhere else in the country, you might not tolerate. These are people who are willing to do that because this was their foothold to make it an American life.
This is the [00:52:00] place where you don't necessarily have to have a college degree or a graduate degree in order to. Actually make something of yourself, build a small business perhaps, and also get a service sector job on those kind of lower rungs of the economic ladder. New York City thrives when it's open to migrants.
And the truth is that the last few years have seen a big downturn in the number of net international migrants to the country as a whole, but also to New York City. So, I believe that New York City is going to come back ferociously and with a vengeance when you start seeing that restoration of net international migration.
That's going to be a part of it. And also, when you have this generation of people my age and younger. Get it through their thick skulls, that New York City can't take for granted, that it's always going to be a luxury product. That people are always going to pay an enormous premium to be here. What's happened is that New York City's renaissance was [00:53:00] so big, was so successful, that people decided that we could defy the laws of gravity.
We decided that we could offer high taxes and crappy services and people would eat it forever. What's going to happen is that, you know, there are going to be young people who want to date. They want to find a spouse. They want to be in the very opening levels of their professional careers. This is still going to be a city for them.
What we need to worry about is when people are in their 30s and their 40s and their 50s, when they start having kids, thinking about whether or not they're gonna stick around and become the kind of civic foundation of the city. That's what we're in danger of losing, but it's not inevitable. It's not foreordained.
Coronavirus does not mean that the city is doomed. What we need are leaders of that generation who appreciate that we need to compete. We need to fight. We need to scrap. And if we do that, we have a great story to tell. Well, that's quite, uh, uh, an upbeat note to end on, uh, that was a [00:54:00] terrific conversation, I want to thank you both, uh, not only for allowing me to nerd out on transport, public transportation policy, which I like to do, and I typically can only do with Nicole, but, uh, but also just the, the bigger picture, really, for having me.
allowing us to think about the New York City public transportation system and how it fits in, how it is like this artery system in the, in the lifeblood of the, of the New York City economy. And without subways, we don't have a New York City and we need a New York City. So thank you both. I hope to have you back again.
We are going to be revisiting this issue about the future of New York City and the future of cities generally on future episodes. Until then, Nicole Raihan. Thank you. Thank you.
That's our show for today. If you want to follow Nicole and Raihan's work, start by visiting the Manhattan [00:55:00] Institute website, manhattan institute. org. And also be sure to check out City Journal, which is really the premier Journal on all public policy issues related to cities, states, the future of our economy, the future of policing, the future of transportation.
They can both be found at city journal. org. And of course, follow Raihan and Nicole on Twitter. Raihan is at Raihan. R E I H A N. And Nicole is at Nicole Gelinas. N I C O L E G E L I N A S. Before we wrap, I want to invite you, our listeners, to send in your thoughts, your suggestions, any questions about what the post corona world might look like.
Please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to dan at unlocked dot F M. That's dan at unlocked dot F M. So I can share it on future episodes. Post Corona was produced by Ilan Benatar. Our [00:56:00] researcher is Sophie Pollack. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.