Head of New York Fed Gets Scoop on the Bronx Economy

Poverty rates in the Bronx average about 10 percent higher than the rest of the city. For Makan Ceesay, a 17-year-old Bronx lab student, economic instability is a visible phenomenon.

“On my block there's been tons of businesses going in and out of this one property. It's been hair salons, grocery stores, electronics stores,” he said. “In a matter of two years [I’ve] seen the whole community changing.”

“Rents are rising,” he told John Williams, the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank in a meeting last week organized by HERE to HERE, a Bronx-based career pathways nonprofit. “There’s no small businesses staying in one place accumulating money.”

Ceesay also raised concerns about whether the arrival of Amazon would be an economic boon or bust for local families.

Williams, who arrived in New York in June, after heading up the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, told Ceesay and other students that he saw technology companies drive up rent prices and the overall cost of living.

“The problem is that when you have this [gentrification], it can move so quickly, that it can be like a tsunami that local leaders are not prepared for that,” he said. “So one of the things here is to think ahead. What are the things that we can do proactively in our community?”

Williams said his role is to try to strike “the right balance” between the economic growth that comes from big corporations and community needs for small businesses and affordable rent prices.  

That’s something that spoke to Ceesay, who said he feels “iffy” about the displacement that might ripple out to his community in the Bronx after Amazon lands in Queens, even though he’s interested in a career in technology for himself and would like to see more higher paying jobs closer to home.

Right now, Ceesay said, he commutes two hours to Brooklyn where he regularly shadows an employee at a tech company as part of a career development program with HERE to HERE.