Old values for a renewed New York

The Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort docks in New York, Monday, March 30, 2020 (AP)

Recently I was on my sofa at home, reading the latest doomsday prognostications about the future of Manhattan in The New York Times.  The article I was reading, on the potential implosion of the local commercial real estate market, really sent me down a bit of a dark rabbit hole of my own thoughts.  After reflecting a bit I turned to Alex, seated on the other edge of the sofa, and asked him “If things get a lot worse here in New York, would you want to move?”

I already knew my own answer to that question, and was greatly relieved when he replied just as I would have – “Of course not.  This is our home.”  A few weeks later, we renewed our lease for another two years.

The mere fact that somebody like me, as enamored with this city as I am, was even contemplating that question reflects a simple fact:  New York City finds itself at a defining crossroads today.  Framed starkly, one might say that we are either slowly drifting back to something akin to the city’s malaise period running from the late 1970’s to early 1990’s, or that we will be led courageously to a new, more prosperous future.  My usage of “drift” to describe the former scenario, contrasted with the “courageous leadership” needed to effectuate the latter, is intentional.  If this city continues down the path we are on now, in our current vacuum of leadership and attached to self-destructive values, our municipal vessel is indeed drifting to very dark waters ahead.

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The story of modern New York City, since the 1990’s, might be summarized as a collective project of heroic civic restoration, a push from all quarters of society to save this great city from its own worst excesses.

Some of the heavy lifting required for this project was provided organically, furnished by strong societal tailwinds which increased the absolute and relative demand for urban living.  My own New York story, of course, fits neatly into that narrative.  Born into conservative small town America, I came of age and rejected top-to-bottom the value system and lifestyle which characterize most of the bucolic corners of this nation; and values aside, the type of corporate STEM career which I envisioned made this city an ideal, invigorating location to call home (Alex’s life story and arrival in New York fit a similar, though not identical, narrative.)  As America’s political system and economy have continued their polarization along rural-urban lines, my adoption of New York as my hometown – barely into my 20’s at the time – has proven time and time again to be a wise decision.

Since this area was a Dutch settlement, that has always been the core promise of New York:  a city which provides a platform for the unfettered attainment of human potential, rooted in a symbiotic, self-reinforcing mesh of the core values of commercialism, pluralism, and human liberty.  It was only in relatively recent history, starting in the 1960’s, that this entire framework of values came under existential stress.
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After decades of civic renaissance and urban improvement, quality of life in New York has been headed in the wrong direction for some time now, years before the novel coronavirus arrived at our airports.  Many of the adverse macro factors driving this gradual deterioration are unfortunately beyond the direct control of anybody in this city:  we currently have a Federal government which is viciously hostile to the interests of large cities, immigrants, and minorities, even including the Trump tax cuts which have helped to destabilize everything from Albany’s financial posture to the Manhattan real estate market;  massive income inequality remains a problem which we have chosen to not seriously address as a nation, even as the ranks of the homeless and precariously housed swell in expensive coastal cities like New York; large corporations and small businesses alike are under increasing pressure to squeeze out productivity and profit in the Era of Automation, causing many to question the value of expensive real estate in places like Manhattan; and as my generation, the Millennials, age and start families, many are indeed following the historic pathway from city to suburb, further buffeting our growth rate and tax base given our size as a generational cohort.

All of that was underway before COVID-19.  The only difference is that what was a few years ago a slowly approaching urban crisis has now been transformed into a five-alarm fire.

It is increasingly clear that Mayor Bill de Blasio is utterly unfit to lead this city through the current perilous moment.   His leadership has proven to be so derelict and incoherent that even his most ardent allies are now turning against him.  My vote against him in the 2013 Mayoral election was likely the last time in my life that I will ever vote for a Republican, but it is absolutely not a vote that I regret.

It strikes me that de Blasio is a failure who is unable to unite and lead New York City in this moment, precisely because he is so out of touch with the fundamental values – pluralism, commercialism, liberty – which define this city and have long made it great.  While New York has long been a city of optimism and a “grow the pie” mentality, de Blasio frames the world through the critical race theory lens of power struggle:  there is only so much “stuff” to go around, and the entirety of human history can be summarized around patterns of certain groups taking more “stuff” than they deserve from other groups.  In that worldview all that matters is your tribal identity, and the tally of grievances which your tribe has accumulated relative to other groups; your treatment by the government is determined based on your respective tribe.

That philosophy as a governance strategy might be cynically effective in, say, a small monolithic Southern town with an 80/20-percent split between whites and blacks, and no other groups at the table – but in a complex city like New York peopled by diverse groups from every corner of the world, it is a recipe for endless internecine strife, quid pro quo gamesmanship, and mutually assured destruction once the pie runs out.  Historically great New York Mayors like La Guardia, Koch, and Bloomberg innately understood this; one can think of Koch’s famous “How’m I doing?” campaign as much as an invitation to a shared, universal dialogue about improving our city as New Yorkers, as much as it was a crudely effective feedback mechanism.

To move forward as a city facing unprecedented crises on multiple fronts, the grievance, critical theory philosophy of tribal warfare, and the us-versus-them politics inextricably linked to it, must both be soundly rejected.  And to reject those ideals, a particularly useful place to start is by standing against those who claim that this city “belongs” to certain groups, while others are suspect at best and actively not welcome at worst.  This enemy rears its heads in many ways, but most visible right now is the “Woke” energy around NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”) thinking, particularly as it relates to gentrification and the claim that native New Yorkers have a claim to this city which the rest of us do not.
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Of all the rights and protections enumerated in the United States Constitution, conspicuously missing is the guarantee that the neighborhood in which you are born will never change throughout the course of your life.  In our founding creed, there is no “life, liberty, and protection against the implications of new people moving into your city.”  Yet a concerning number of New Yorkers who by no act of their own were born here seem to believe that they alone are entitled to preserve the city as they prefer it, whether from 1970 or 1990, in some sort of a bizarre protectionist time capsule.

What has long been fascinating to me is that not only is this NIMBY instinct antithetical to the values which have made New York such an unparalleled global city, it is a cultural mindset borrowed A-to-Z from the small, isolated towns of America from which so many of us fled to live and thrive here.

In the mid-1980’s when my mom was a regional planner in rural Northwest Florida, she was involved in an effort to bring an industrial plant to that long-impoverished area where good jobs were (and still are) in short supply.  As she recounted to me years later, the community’s reaction was knee-jerk, scorched earth opposition.  Local NIMBY activists placed skull and crossbones signs on stakes near the planned area of the plant, and local politicians quickly aligned with this prevalent sentiment.  The plant and its associated jobs never materialized.

That experience from my mom’s career was on my mind as I watched the activist-grievance artists kill the Amazon HQ expansion in Queens, ostensibly out of concern for the welfare of local residents.  What these full-time activists conveniently never coherently explained was how the mere absence of additional jobs would be ameliorative to anybody in the area, particularly the most socially downtrodden residents.  The chief potential harm cited by the activists, rent increases, continued unabated across this city sans HQ2, up until COVID-19 arrived.  One wonders – are these activists happy with COVID for finally bringing about rent decreases?

The core tenets of this destructive NIMBY sentiment were spelled out best in a screed by Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, who borrowed language directly from the most conservative and backwards pockets of Red America to tell newcomers to New York that they should “go back to where they came from.”  Mr. Adams, who as a Borough President earns an annual $160,000 salary for a job which has been largely ceremonial and do-nothing since the demise of the Board of Estimate in 1990, perhaps did not fully think through the logical implications of his remarks in that moment of heated rhetoric – but he later largely stood by his statement.  In any event, he speaks to a deeply entrenched mentality in certain circles of this city.  Some long-term New Yorkers even seem to forlornly long for a return to the city’s darkest days in the 1970’s.  It’s like a bizarre civic murder porn fetish is now trendy amongst old native New Yorkers and their children on the Upper West Side.  One can almost forgive their children – my age or younger – for wanting to experience a “sexier, edgier” New York, even if but for a day, but one has to wonder if their parents, who actually lived through that period, might have lost their marbles.

To be clear, there are some legitimate grievances and emotions behind this NIMBY sentiment.  Even people like me, who are pro-growth and arrived in New York after the transformational 1990’s, feel the pangs of that sentiment sometimes.  It irks me that the historic Roseland Ballroom, where I used to attend events and by which I used to walk by almost every day en route to my office, is now home to yet another luxury high-rise apartment building featuring $3,500 studios.  I miss VLADA, Splash, the culturally insignificant sushi place from which I always used to order delivery when I lived on Riverside, and so many other establishments which ultimately could not survive in this ever-changing city.  And far more seriously, I can imagine that if I were a low-income renter being displaced from my longtime home due to the rising cost of living, I might feel like every single level of government had failed me; because notwithstanding the role of personal responsibility, in some ways they have.

But when you cut through the emotions, rational or irrational as they may be, a simple universal truth emerges:  great cities either adapt and thrive, or stagnate and die.  On this question there is no middle ground, even if we must aid those who need assistance in times of great economic transformation.  New York will either rise to the challenges now before us and continue to grow, or we will retreat into a “divide the pie” mentality and decline.

The path forward will be unsteady and riddled with uncertainty – simply on the topic of commercial real estate I’ve seen some projections that Manhattan is entering into an apocalyptic period of permanently reduced demand, while other more sanguine prognosticators have called for a long-term increase in demand, as the open office falls out of fashion and is replaced by more traditional office layouts, which will require far more space even if fewer people might be in an office on any given day.  But whatever the next 10 years may hold for us in the city, our path forward must be guided by those core values and core strengths which are intrinsic to New York’s identity:

• Pluralism and openness to all who wish to call this city home and contribute to our society, whether they be Chinese grad students moving to Morningside Heights, Muslim refugees fleeing their war-torn homelands for The Bronx, or white professionals from the Midwest moving to Bed-Stuy
• A thriving and diversified commercial sector which continues to generate enough wealth to both enrich those who fruitfully participate in the market economy, and to fund the strong social safety net which shields those who cannot from the negative side effects of market capitalism
• A high-performing, competent New York City government which promulgates a policy agenda focused on enabling and extending human liberty, while also constructively fixing problems in the city as opposed to actively exacerbating them
• The embrace of urban density as an asset, continuing to foster a vibrant pedestrian culture and supported by a robust subway and public transportation system

If we lose those values and strengths, we will lose New York as we know it.  In the Mayoral election next year and beyond, I am committed to doing everything within my power to defend and promote them.
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In my global travels I nearly always fly with Delta Airlines and prefer seat 2A, in first class.  It’s a window seat on the left side of the plane directly behind the first row of the cabin (providing more privacy) and in the 1-2-1 business class cabin layout which I love, it also provides direct aisle access.  I have been blessed to see much of the world looking through the window in 2A.

On many domestic flights into LaGuardia, the approach takes you over Middletown, New Jersey and Sandy Hook Bay, then along the eastern edge of Staten Island, and finally across New York Harbor.  If you’re on the left side of the plane – as 2A is – on a clear day you get a stunning view during landing of the Statue of Liberty and the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

For a long time now, especially if I’ve had a few glasses of wine in flight and find myself in a pensive mood, the sight of the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan spontaneously causes me to tear up.  I don’t weep, but I find myself smiling as I glance out the window at my city and a few tears roll down my cheeks.  Nearby passengers who observe this more than likely assume that I’m simply overwhelmed with happiness to be home after a long trip, but that is not what I am thinking in those moments.  Those tears might be triggered by the tangible sight of New York approaching below me, but what is invariably passing through my mind in those moments is a fidelity to and adoration of the abstract values which have made this city the greatest in the world.

I think of LGBTQ Iranian and Nigerian asylum seekers who arrive in this city penniless and friendless, gathering up the courage to walk into their first gay bar and be embraced for the fullness of their humanity, perhaps for the first time in their lives.

I think of all the kids with a dream from the small towns of America who show up here, hopelessly naïve, and go on to do great things – or who fail and end up back in their hometowns, but learn so much about themselves and human nature in doing so.

I think of the huddled masses passing through Ellis Island, yearning to and in that moment becoming free.

I think of the African American slaves who arrived here after emancipation and became a core part of the city’s narrative;  even as they were still denied their full humanity and equal rights, they pressed on and helped insure the place of their progeny in this city’s future.

And, of course, I think of my own life story.  I think of how statistically improbable it is that a kid who 22 years ago on a hot Saturday like today might have been found barefoot, crossing the rutted dirt road in his trailer park to go visit a neighbor, now looks out on Manhattan from a high-rise apartment.

Statistically improbable, yes, all those narratives perhaps are – but nothing is ever impossible in New York.

As a city we have been down before, and we will be down again in the future.  But so long as we hold firm to our core values, first instilled into the DNA of this city by the Dutch and passed down through generations of dreamers and achievers since then, there is nothing we cannot do together.

This is my city and, no matter how dark or glorious the days ahead may be, I am not going anywhere.

Excelsior. 

E Pluribus Unum. 

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

New York, always and forever.

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