Where Did NYC's Jobs Go?

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Well, here's a stat. While the country overall has regained 100% of the jobs lost at the beginning of the COVID era, New York City has only gained back about 82% of them. The local economy is struggling to recuperate to pre-pandemic levels, as is obvious from that stat, and two new stories from the nonprofit news organization THE CITY offer a look into the incomplete job recovery, the industry's most impacted, and why, as writer Greg David puts it, New York just can't get its groove back.

There's another stat here which Greg says makes this a story about gender. The overall New York City unemployment rate of 6.1% remains almost double the national rate of 3.5%, but unemployment is falling for New York City women but rising for New York City men. We will get to that as part of this. Both stories are by Greg David, who covers financial and economic issues for THE CITY and directs the business and economics reporting program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. He joins us now. Hi, Greg. Always great to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Greg: Thank you. It's great to be back.

Brian Lehrer: You want to start this by talking about what industries haven't recovered in New York compared to the country? Is that a good way in?

Greg: It's a good way in because there are three. The first one is leisure and hospitality. That's hotels, restaurants, entertainment venues, et cetera. Of course, this was a great growth sector of the last boom. We had 474,000 jobs before the pandemic, now we got a little over 400,000 jobs. What's the why here? Why number one is while tourists are back, not all the right tourists are back. The Chinese aren't back. They were supposed to be the number one visitors to New York by now. They're not. They're not traveling here at all because of the coronavirus restrictions in China. They were very free-spending tourists.

The other group that's causing some difficulty are suburban visitors to the city. They seem to be somewhat deterred by crime, and that's one of the reasons that Broadway hasn't rebounded. The Independent Budget Office looked at major tourism centers like Washington, Orlando, South Florida. You know what it found? It found that New York has the weakest leisure and hospitality recovery of any place other than San Francisco. That's the first key industry that is hamstringing our recovery.

The second one is retail, and retail is a story of three parts. Obviously, tourism is a part. Herald Square, for example, is doing very poorly. Almost half the stores in Herald Square are empty at the moment. That's also about office workers. Only about 40% of offices are occupied on most days. That's not enough for restaurants, for limited service places where people would pick up bagels, et cetera.

The third part is somewhat surprising. That's construction, down about 20,000 jobs. There's no increase in sight. It looks like we are completing the buildings that were underway before the pandemic and where construction was interrupted, but we don't have much new in the pipeline. Those are the three reasons for our 82% figure as opposed to 100% for the rest of the country.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you want to help Greg David from the nonprofit news organization THE CITY report this story and help us report it, obviously, call in and talk about your industry, whatever it is in this respect, if you're in New York City or anywhere else in terms of it recovering or not recovering 100%. Again, the headline stat here. While the US as a whole has recovered 100% of the jobs now lost at the beginning of the pandemic, New York City has only recovered 82% of its jobs. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer.

On the performance industries aspect, you probably saw The New York Times story yesterday, "Live Performance Is Back. But Audiences Have Been Slow To Return." I want to read about a paragraph from that article and get your take on how much of a generational difference you think there is here and with respect to COVID.

It says "The concert industry, which attracts younger patrons than many other performing arts sectors, has been a real bright spot. Live Nation, the global concert giant, recently reported that it had sold 100 million tickets for the full year, more than in 2019. But scattered hits and crowded concerts can distract from the reality that, for most classical and theatrical institutions and shows, attendance is down, ticket prices are depressed, productions are fewer, and memberships or subscriptions have fallen.

The initial post-shutdown optimism - bolstered by pent-up demand - was tempered by wave after wave of new virus variants that raised health concerns and led to numerous performer absences and performance cancellations."

Greg, I wonder if you take from that or from your own reporting that older people are staying away from live venues at a greater rate than younger people because COVID concerns have not gone away.

Greg: Well, I think COVID is part of it, but I think there's another part of it. I heard Fred Dixon, who runs NYC & Company, our tourism agency, about two months ago say that what his survey show is that it's just as much fear of crime, and that one of the key components that's missing on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera are suburbanites who are less likely to come into the city. I talked to a restaurateur who actually has a couple of eateries in the 30s on the West Side, 30s and low 40s, and he's from Nassau County.

He told me that lots of his friends not only won't come into the city, they won't let their kids come into the city. Not because of COVID but because of crime concerns. I think COVID's part of it, but I think it's pretty clear that fear of crime in New York City is also playing a role.

Brian Lehrer: In another piece about the job recovery you wrote, I cited this in the intro, "The overall city unemployment rate of 6.1% remains almost double the national rate of 3.5%, but that masks a story about gender." Tell us the story about gender.

Greg: Well, women are returning to the workforce in large numbers. Their participation in the workforce in New York City has matched pre-pandemic levels. Men are not, and their unemployment rate is much higher. This is the reverse of what's happening nationally, where men are doing better than women. What do we think about why this is? Well, I think in part, one reason is that childcare seems to have stabilized in New York, so it's more accessible. New York has a lot of jobs, professional and government jobs, for women that we think they are bringing them back. Those are good reasons.

There's also the possibility that this is an inflation story where rising prices, and maybe especially the end of the expanded child tax credit, which made a huge difference in areas of New York which were poor and expired, that these two factors are pushing women off the fence and they say, "You know, I have to go back to work because that's how I have to make ends meet."

Brian Lehrer: That is really a story of pressure on women more than men to deal with the conflict that women more than men have between their professional careers and child rearing because we saw so much need for parents to stay at home more at the height of the pandemic. Even in this last school semester in the spring, if you were exposed as a kid to another kid who had COVID you might have to be required to stay home for a few days even if you didn't test positive yourself. A lot of those rules are going to go away in the fall, but let's face it, that still falls to women disproportionately, and yet women are returning to the workforce in greater percentages than men. I mean, that's a lot of pressure.

Greg: I think that is a lot of pressure. Let's hope that the new rules will make navigating all this much easier, where you will be able to go to school even if you've been exposed as long as you don't test positive. Even if you test positive you can come back in five days. We'll have to see if we have a much more normal school year. I think we'd all like that, and I think that it would be very crucial to seeing some improvement in the economy.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Chris in Glen Ridge, you're on WNYC. Hi, Chris.

Chris: Hey, Brian. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. You have an economic report for us?

Chris: Yes. This is a good one. Some people will probably appreciate that the bed bug situation in New York City has actually gotten a lot better for a lot of different reasons. The tourism that you mentioned, the coming in from other countries, international tourism, even the fact that kids weren't going to school where that stuff is transferred and people not going to work and riding the subways, all of that stuff has contributed to a decrease in our bed bug problem in New York City. It has affected all the industry and the sub-industries around the exterminating, getting people ready for extermination, even the laundry that they have to do to get ready to be treated by exterminators. It's not all bad news.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. In that respect less employment or less demand for services is good news, but did you also mention to our screener laundry services as a separate category?

Chris: Oh yes. That's actually our main focus. People don't realize when someone tests positive for bed bugs every piece of clothing, fabric, textile that they own, it all has to be sent out to be treated. Yes, there's a heck of a lot less laundry going out to be treated, to be washed clean.

Brian Lehrer: I see, but again in relation to the bed bugs issue. Chris, thank you for that report from the front. Michael in Rockaway Park, you're on WNYC. Hi, Michael.

Michael: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. Hi, Greg. I have a question. Just to clarify the statistics, I'm wondering how the employment figures account for gig work and self-employment, and maybe even undocumented workers who are being paid cash who might not be accounted for otherwise. Just as a personal anecdote, I am a teacher, and the second job I used to wait tables, [cat meowing] but since-- Sorry, my cat's going a little crazy here, but since COVID I picked up work with DoorDash and also started my own embroidery business. I don't know if my former job in a restaurant would be considered employment loss since I'm doing work with DoorDash now and then my own business.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, we've had dogs that have made their radio debuts on this show, but I don't think we've ever had a cat before, so Michael, you're a first.

Michael: Yes. This is my little kitty. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: What's your cat's name?

Michael: Her name is Tina.

Brian Lehrer: Hello, Tina. You're on the radio, Tina. Okay, that's lost on a cat. Greg, what about his question about gig workers? Are they counted as getting their jobs back?

Greg: That's a very interesting point. As a gig worker you're not counted in the job numbers, but the fact you are working shows up in the unemployment numbers because the job numbers come from a survey of 600,000 employers nationally, and then there's our slice here in New York City. The unemployment numbers are derived from a telephone survey of 400,000 households around the country.

The gig work thing is very important here because another couple of stats that I'm going to write about in a story to be published tonight is that we have two really significant demographic groups that have really been badly hurt in the pandemic recession. The first one are Black New Yorkers. The official unemployment rate is a little over 10%. The official unemployment rate for whites in New York City is a little over 3%. I wrote about this extensively in February, and while the numbers have come down for both, the gap has not changed. I think that's clearly one group.

The second group which is getting a lot of attention these days are young men aged 18 to 24. Only a third of young men, 18 to 24, in New York City are working, or show up as working on these surveys. What are they doing? Some of them are doing gig work, and that's one part of it, but many of them are being disconnected from the labor force. We really run the risk of losing a whole cohort of people from the workforce. This is a very significant issue that we need to watch. The Adams administration is focused on it and does understand it to be a very serious issue, and is taking steps to do something about it.

Brian Lehrer: A few more minutes with Greg David who covers fiscal and economic issues for the nonprofit news organization THE CITY, and directs the business and economics reporting program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. 212-433 WNYC if you want to get in on this with an anecdote or a question in our remaining time as we talk about how the country has recovered 100% of the jobs now lost at the beginning of the pandemic but New York City only 82%, and have that somewhat a story about race as he was just describing.

Somewhat a story about gender as we touched on before. Somewhat a story about post-pandemic lifestyles, or I should say this stage pandemic lifestyles in New York as opposed to some other places.

Greg, just to put a pin in that last caller's question about the gig economy, when those stats say 82% or 100% of jobs have returned, does it tell us anything about the quality of the jobs compared to the jobs that were lost at the beginning of the pandemic in terms of pay or benefits or anything else?

Greg: Yes, it does tell us a lot about that. What do we know? We know that the pandemic recession was almost unique. Well, I shouldn't say almost - was unique. Most economic downturns affect every strata of the economy. Some high-paying workers lose their job, office workers lose their jobs, retail workers lose their jobs. In this pandemic, basically only people who had face-to-face jobs, mostly lower paying, mostly in the service sector, lost their jobs. People who could work from home, had professional jobs, did not lose their jobs. That's one of the reasons state and local budgets stayed in such good shape, and income tax collections were in such good shape.

Really the issue that we have is that we have to find a way to add back and probably improve the face-to-face jobs that we lost. This is also a factor because one of the most surprising things I found out is that there's very little optimism for improvement in the fall. The reason there's very little optimism for improvement in the fall is that we do not expect a flood of office workers back. Both the New York City Comptroller and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had research reports out in the last week which basically said that they can find no reason to believe that office occupancy will get much higher in the fall.

As a matter of fact, the title of the New York Fed survey was "Remote Work Is Sticking." I think that that's both a change in what we would have thought and another thing to worry about. If we don't get substantially more office workers back we are going to have a lagging economy and face a pretty wrenching transformation of retail space and of eventually city revenues and state tax revenues.

Brian Lehrer: Why wouldn't that be a wash economically, at least in terms of the region? Like for all the people who were going to offices in the Central Business District who are now working from home, they may not be patronizing the retail businesses that were near their former offices, but they're patronizing more the equivalent kinds of businesses that are near where they live.

Greg: You're exactly right, Brian. The question is do you want to worry about the region or the city? Remember New York City's workforce is composed of almost a third of commuters. We are not getting the benefit of those commuters who are spending those dollars in the suburbs. As a matter of fact, the City Comptroller tracked in this recent report activity in the suburbs and correlated it to the occupancy rate. As the occupancy rate in Manhattan office buildings went up, activity in the suburbs went down. You're absolutely right, and the question is do we care about the region or do we care about the city?

Brian Lehrer: Deborah in Hudson Valley, you're on WNYC. Hi, Deborah.

Deborah: Hi. I live in Hudson Valley. We're just a quick train ride from the city.

Brian Lehrer: How high up are you, if you don't mind saying?

Deborah: We're in Cortlandt.

Brian Lehrer: Okay. Very easy ride on the Hudson Line. Go ahead.

Deborah: It's a very easy ride. I have to say we're going to the city very infrequently because we broke the habit, and we've sort of spent the last few years digging in. Having friends over onto our deck, cooking, reaping the benefit of our neighbors' gardens and produce. It's just much easier and it's a lovely community, so we're just digging in a lot more. My kids who are teenagers are going into the city more. They're just making their habits and discovering their habits and I'm delighted to see them going in, but I think it's just habit for us.

Brian Lehrer: Deborah, thank you very much. Alexis in Red Bank, you're on WNYC. Hi there. I think you're going to give us another living outside the city and not coming in as much story, right?

Alexis: Yes, I am and I feel badly to say so, but I agree with Greg David that crime is a deterrent. A lot of my friends, we all come in for a Broadway show. Even my neighbor, her young daughter right behind me just graduated college. She has decided not to work in the city. It is intimidating and it's a sad thing. Obviously, it goes back to taking care of the mentally ill, but night after night when you see the violence. In concurrence with what the last caller just said, to stay home is so easy it seems scary to come in sometimes.

Brian Lehrer: Alexis, thank you very much.

Alexis: I feel sad to say that.

Brian Lehrer: We have one or two callers, who we're not going to have time for, who also say it's because of crime, reinforcing that survey result that you referenced before, Greg. You've been in the media long enough to know that crime rates today are not what they were in the '80s and the '90s and the '70s, even though they're up from what they were in the immediate few years before the pandemic. People then - the tourism industries, the performance industries - were booming anyway. Why do you think it's different?

Greg: I think it's different because of the relative change. I think we've gotten very used to and felt comfortable with the very low crime rates that we had. I can tell another part of the Fred Dixon anecdote. He actually told it because he had taken a press tour of Europe, and it had come just after the subway shooting in Brooklyn. He expected endless questions about crime in New York as he went from England to France to Germany. He didn't get a single question about crime in Europe.

The reason is that they're now watching New York media, and if you're watching and I'm watching the six o'clock news most nights, it is filled with crime the way it was in the years you're talking about. I can see-

Brian Lehrer: It's also selective.

Greg: -how it would make people very uncomfortable.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and we could get into a media critique conversation that we don't have time to do well here. Whether that's the thing now, in a way that gives people an unrepresented sample of what it's really like to be in Midtown, to go to the theater, to be on the subways because it seems to be the thing now to focus on these individual crimes, and people take it as more representative than it is, in my opinion anyway. One more call. Evan in--

Greg: I'm coming into the city four days a week to my office here in Times Square. I feel safe. I've gone to the theater. I've gone to the Philharmonic. The restaurateur I talked to before told me that he actually sees a great divide. People who are commuting into the city understand it's not quite as nice as it was, I think that's true, but they don't feel the fear. People who are not coming into the city that much are watching news and deciding, "Oh well, I don't want to go."

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Evan in Toms River, you're on WNYC. Hi, Evan.

Evan: Hi, Brian. I'm very happy to say this is my second time calling this summer and my second time being on the show, so I'm very happy about that. Earlier I heard a comment about the younger generation and the working model. That it seems to be going along with 18 to 24-year-olds and things like that, but since we've moved past that I'll make a comment about going into the city where I do actually have friends that live there.

I will say that personally, even as a boy from the suburbs, I still feel like going into the city really isn't a very big deal. For me, it's just if you want to find trouble, then trouble will find you. If you don't go near those areas then everything is going to be safe. That's personally how I feel. I don't know if that's also because I've done a lot of traveling throughout my life and I've been to a lot of different places, but I have to be completely honest. I really do not feel any danger going to the city whatsoever.

Brian Lehrer: Evan, thank you very much. Keep calling the show. There maybe is a little reflection of the generational divide too, Greg. Obviously, it's a tiny sample of the few older callers that we got before and Evan as a younger caller, but it reflects some of what you were reporting on as well.

We're going to leave it there. Provocative. Two new articles by Greg David, who covers fiscal and economic issues for the nonprofit news organization THE CITY, and directs the business and economics reporting program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Thanks as always, Greg. Appreciate it a lot.

Greg: Thank you, Brian.

 

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