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- [00:00]
A
You.
- [00:05]
B
Hi, I'm Ben Max from Gotham Gazette.
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A
And I'm Jarrett Murphy from City Limits. And today, as part of our ongoing look at the big issues shaping the 2021 race, we're focusing on the economy.
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B
It's an essential issue, obviously related to how people can work or get to work or what kind of work they have, what options. Unemployment has obviously skyrocketed during the pandemic, making this issue of utmost importance here as the 2021 elections unfold.
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A
And, you know, it's obviously important to, like, family survival that the economy is working correctly. It shapes inequality in terms of where the benefits from the economy are flowing. It also has huge social impact. You know, having a job is a key part to staying out of poverty, and, you know, for younger people, staying connected. And it feeds into city in a very direct way, covering all other issue areas, because the economy is essential to generating taxes through property taxes on the value of our real estate. You know, sales taxes play a role, business taxes, of course. And then New York City depends to a great degree on the income tax, as, of course, does the state and federal government. So economic activity and jobs feed into basically every other policy issue we could be talking about, right?
- [01:27]
B
Absolutely. And, of course, there's direct relation going in both directions between sort of public safety, crime, and the economy. And it doesn't take a long memory to know that Mayor Michael Bloomberg was, of course, very focused on the health of the city's economy from a certain perspective, of course. And Mayor Bill de Blasio has also known that it's obviously key to keep people working to keep the city's economy healthy. He's come from a different perspective. He has often sort of, of course, talked about trying to make the city more equal. His campaign in 2012 into 13 was very focused on income inequality and larger issues of equality. And he has sort of eschewed a lot of the big business leaders and criticized, you know, the wealthy often and talked about trying to make a more equal city in a way that I think a lot of candidates in the 2021 election are actually trying to get away from, and talking in some of the same terms about equality, but also trying to get away from what they've seen as sort of a divisive way that de Blasio has done it. So I think that's sort of an interesting theme so far in terms of how folks are talking about creating a more fair, more equal city, but definitely not trying to go to the same sort of talking points that de Blasio's had that seem to have alienated some people.
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A
One of the things that makes talking about this issue interesting for me, Ben, is that it's not like talking about parks, where you're just talking about parks. It's really like a bundle of a lot of different policy areas and issues. I mean, when you talk about the economy, you're obviously talking about job creation and entrepreneurship and small businesses with the city. Taxes, poverty and inequality, as you mentioned, are in their direct efforts to do economic development, whether that's large scale or small scale. Even things like the cost of living, the affordability crunch, which was a big part of de Blasio's 2013 campaign. And I think it also is one of those issues that kind of spreads into and is affected by and affects lots of other issues, too. When candidates talk about public safety, that has an economic impact. When we talk about the transit system, the education system, obviously that has an impact too. Maybe not as direct or as immediate, but there's certainly a connection there.
- [03:55]
B
Right? And as you know, as candidates are running for office, whether it's mayor or city comptroller or city council seats or others, you know, one of the most important pressing matters for voters and other residents of the city is, of course, what's the economic health of the city? What kind of jobs are available? What are the quality of those jobs, where the wages? Where are the benefits? And as you get at, how do I get to work? Is it easy to get to work? What's my quality of life around my job? You know, there's so many different factors that go into sort of the economic health of the city and then also people's individual experiences with the economy. And that's also where, as you mentioned, we get into schools and the really under discussed issue of the city's public university system, cuny, which really needs to be a part of the discussion in these elections. And part of the reason that it sometimes I think, gets left out of the discussion is because it is this sort of quasi state city independent entity. And it's not directly at all under the control of the mayor. It's not really under the control of the governor per se. And so it sort of gets left out of the discussion sometimes, but especially as the city is going through such difficult economic times, you know, CUNY is a very important piece of the puzzle as well as the Pre K through 12 system that the mayor has much more control over and that, you know, the city Council has oversight, power of, et cetera, and whether people are graduating from New York City schools ready to go to college ready to then use that experience to enter the workforce for good paying jobs. Those are big questions for all the candidates.
- [05:37]
A
And you know, this is one of those issues that people have talked about since they began having elections, right? I mean, you could go down an issue list in any mayoral campaign dating back to the 1898 consolidation of the city and the economy would be there. But I think obviously, as you mentioned at the outset, things are much more fraught this year. This is a chart I pulled from federal labor stats showing employment in the city. And you can see, you know, basically the history of the city as we understand it is partly written in some of these numbers. The fiscal crisis in the 70s, growth in the 80s, recession that affected David Dinkins. You can see the dip after September 11, you can see the dip after the financial crisis, a very impressive gain in the years since then for which Mary de Blasio took some credit. And we'll talk in a second about whether that was appropriate or not. And then just an incredible fall off in the past year. I think one of the questions is obviously what happens beyond that chart and, and whether the tremendous challenge of COVID is just a devastating one time blip, like the worst blip of all time, or if it has fundamentally changed the landscape of the economy. And I think that's one of the difficult questions people to deal with is, is the population going to come back? Are people going to return to offices? Is retail ever going to look like it used to? Is dining, tourism, are those things ever going to come back? And I think this goes to another point that we have to keep in mind as we talk about this discussion. And obviously our focus, as always, is on the Merrill race. Other people in the mix affect the economy, too. The council, the comptrollers, certainly others have a hand too. But anyone on the city level is obviously, no one has a lever controlling the economy at any level of power, but especially here in the city, a mayor is subject to the rises and falls of the larger economic sea and also economic policy that he or she doesn't set. What the Fed does with with interest rates and what the president and Congress do with the stimulus, with tax policy. You know, one of Trump's big slights against the city was changing how local and state income taxes are deducted or not deducted against your tax liability. So you're dealing with an issue that's both massive and important, a huge part of the neuro conversation and other campaign conversations in a very fraught state now, and also one where any local politician is all going to have partial control over having some influence on it.
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B
Well, we don't have to. A couple of things you said, you know, remind me of a few recent issues. You know, again, our focus is of course on the mayoral race. The mayor still has so much power in the city, but we don't have to look too far back to see how city council decisions around land use or even just sort of the use of the bully pulpit and, you know, coalitions opposing certain projects can have an impact on the city's economic picture. Obviously there was the Amazon HQ2 deal that went down. There was an industry city rezoning proposal that was supposed to be adding jobs. That was opposed and withdrawn. Those are a couple of big recent examples. But the city council through its land use decisions, but also just how the local political atmosphere is. There's been a lot of discussion around whether there's too much of an anti development, anti growth mentality when it comes to housing, which we can't separate from jobs, when it comes to issues related to transit and transit policy and then some of these big land use decisions. The other thing I wanted to mention though, to frame some of this and then get into more of what city policy around the economy really is all about, is that we had before COVID historically low unemployment in the city, just under 4% and it jumped to well over 20% and then came back down to the low teens. But it's also really important to note that even when unemployment was under 4%, the poverty rate in the city was extremely high. And that's because very often so many of the jobs in the city, and again, it's better that there's more jobs than fewer, of course, but we're in lower paying sectors, retail, hospitality, restaurants, of course, and just a number of different sectors that weren't paying enough for people to really get by. And that also relates to another thing you were saying, which is the different levels of government. One of the biggest ways that people have come out of poverty in recent years is the minimum wage increase. That was passed at the state level, but a lot of that was pushed by de Blasio and many others at the city level. So obviously a lot of parts moving together in this discussion. But I think it is important to note that one thing we are seeing people say people in government now and running for government is that we don't really want to return to the economy from before COVID We want to bring jobs back, but we want to figure out how they can be better paying jobs with Better benefits and not have 4% unemployment and 20% of the new York City population still living in below poverty.
- [10:47]
A
And the unemployment rate itself kind of gets to a different issue, which is that you have the city economy writ large, and then you have many people who don't participate in it, maybe don't participate in a formal way. They work in the gray economy. They are paid under the table, they are unlicensed vendors, something like that. And also people who just are not in the economy. One of the tricky things about the unemployment rate, of course, is that it only counts people who are actively looking for work but don't have it. People who have never entered the workforce, who dropped out, who are totally disconnected, don't count. That's always been kind of the other number to look at in the city and a big concern because obviously the number of jobs in the city can involve, especially now, people who don't actually live or pay taxes here or raise their families here. So, yeah, it's a complex issue with a lot of different layers and a lot of different power that the city can use. We've mentioned a few already. The bully pulpit, land use policies, obviously city tax policy, and frankly, city hiring is a huge part of the economy. 300,000 or so city employees obviously are a major part of the workforce. What they are paid, what city contractors have paid, these have been some of the levers used in the past. And obviously there are. There are plenty of others, too.
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B
Well, and many, many thousands, as you just got at, many, many thousands more who are not directly on the city government payroll, but are part of city contracted services. You know, the human nonprofit services sector is a huge one that the city contracts with for things like, you know, homeless shelters and. And food services and so many others. And so there's a lot of people that rely on city spending, city government programs for work. There's a lot of discussion, at least in the mayoral race early on, about city tax policy and how it could be used to help small businesses. There's also obviously related to the economy, city policy related to things like business fines, business, business regulations. You know, there's a lot that's not under the city government control, but there is a lot that is. And we've seen Mayor de Blasio take some steps to try to reduce fines on small businesses, but there's a lot of discussion that that could go further. There's discussion about trying to remove, of course, as always, the red tape that's in the way for businesses. You got at this idea of street vending we're seeing the number of street vending permits drastically expand. It looks like that's part of the picture. And there's also some very interesting discussion, the mayoral race. A couple of candidates especially have been talking about this, including Maya Wiley, about better using the city's massive capital budget spending to create jobs, and especially to create good paying jobs for low income communities, for communities of color, for people living in the city to have more opportunity for jobs that are, that are really funded by city spending.
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A
Yeah. And I think that gets to one of the kind of tricky dilemmas for whoever's going to be the next mayor is that if the tax environment, the economic environment lends itself, at least in some people's eyes, to a more austere approach to spending, that has a macroeconomic effect. If the city cuts funding, if it cuts spending on capital, if it cuts jobs, that might have an effect to clean up the city's balance sheet, but it will have a broader economic impact as well as. And I think, you know, when we come to questions that we want the candidates to answer, Merrill and otherwise, now and over the next few months, this campaign, that's one of the big ones for me is do they think the economy has fundamentally changed? You know, is the new normal going to look different from the pre Covid normal in terms of people coming to the office, people living in the city, retail existing like we used to. And if it has changed, how do we adapt to that? Right.
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B
I think that's a really important one. And you know, the reliance of the city, as you said early on in this conversation on, you know, commuters coming into midtown Manhattan, it's not the only piece, but it's a huge piece. And how Midtown has been so hollowed out. And that isn't just about those office jobs all over Manhattan, but also the jobs that then rely on those jobs. And those are jobs, of course, in service and food and other sectors of the economy. And so, so important about, you know, what the future of work looks like and how and how city government is trying to talk with business leaders, work with small businesses and do so many other things to try to make sure that jobs return and that they, that they're safe. One of the biggest questions that I want mayoral candidates and others to answer is to really dig into the specifics of leveraging city policy for job growth. What does that look like in terms of tax policy, land use policy, a number of other policies, use of the capital budget that we got at, use of the city's economic Development Corporation and other city entities. You mentioned health and hospitals. There's of course, others using those to create jobs and foster economic growth. Not necessarily just city government jobs, of course, but private sector jobs and how the city can leverage its assets, its money, its spending and its policy to create jobs. What does that look like in specific?
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A
We'll be asking those questions and more at City Limits at Gotham Gazette on WBAI every Wednesday at 5. So please stay tuned to those resources. And please, if you want to find out whether you are registered, find out where you're supposed to vote. Other information about the all important 2021 races, please go to vote NY.