The Awl

New York City: Is It Always Getting Poorer? Or Just Getting Poorer Now?

Choire Sicha — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:14:05 +0000

So this new study by the Empire Center for New York State Policy is totally fascinating. Their agenda is anti-tax, so their framing for the exodus of 1.5 million New York residents from 2000 to 2008 is about tax burdens. So their point is mostly that rich people are leaving and poor foreign people are coming in. In real fact, the population of New York state grew 2.7% from 2000 to 2008; Manhattan's migration zeroed out in that time period (someone's always ready to take your apartment!), although New York City overall had 1.1 million people leave. (Is this atypical? No idea!) And also notably, departures from New York state for other states slowed radically in 2007 and 2008. But! Here is the most captivating thing.

The average adjusted gross income of taxpaying households leaving New York between 2006 and 2007 was $57,144, while the average income of households moving into New York was $50,533-a difference of 13 percent. Non-migrating New York households as of 2007 had an average income of $63,277.

Wow. So poorer people-most likely skewed poorer by being younger and/or foreign, but also possibly by virtue of not being New Yorkers, who are usually richer than the rest of the country-are moving in, while really richer people are definitely going. But the people in the middle are staying put?

There's also this issue with Manhattan itself, "where the average out-migrant income of $93,264 was 28 percent higher than the in-migrant average of $72,726." And 35,000 total people left Manhattan in 2006 and 2007.

And, of course, almost a third of New York state leavers went to Florida.

But isn't New York City chronically in a condition where people move here poorer, and depart richer? How atypical could this be of previous decades? (Like, why do you think there are suburbs!)

This is not what the New York Post is straightforwardly billing it as: "New Yorkers are fleeing the state and city in alarming numbers-and costing a fortune in lost tax dollars, a new study shows." Because you know what? I'd sure like to see how this corresponds to the 70s and 80s, know what I'm saying?

Still, I will be up all night thinking about this! Please call me if you have any insight.

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The Great Lies of New York City's Affordable Housing

Choire Sicha — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:25:58 +0000

The last two administrations of New York City government have done a unbelievably poor job with their contracts for affordable housing. Back in 2000, Battery Park City, then 25 years old, was to have provided, on-site or off, 60,000 units of affordable housing, but had only provided a bit more than 1500. That has not improved much! More recently, buildings like 10 Barclay St., a 58-story residential building in lower Manhattan, with 451 units, and a cost of around $185 million, which was recently renting 3-bedrooms for 9+ grand per month, was to have 15 apartments set aside as "affordable housing." In exchange for those units, in 2005, the developers received $135 million in Liberty Bonds. These crazy scams-yes, they are actual scams- are not the aberration; they are business as usual. Now, sometime today comes a report tracking the Bloomberg administration's Cornerstone program.

Says the Daily News:

The Cornerstone Program was supposed to transfer vacant city-owned land to private developers who promised to build 2,191 homes there, with 1,510 units designated for low-or middle-income New Yorkers.

Yet the Department of Housing Preservation and Development has not followed up to see whether developers complied with those terms, an audit obtained by The News found.

Now, this report is being put out by the sad man who is running against Bloomberg in the next election. But that doesn't make it any less accurate. Nearly every provision enacted under either Giuliani or Bloomberg to retain or create affordable housing in New York City-just like the financial incentives to retain corporations in Manhattan-has actually been a pro-corporation, pro-developer scam. They actually don't have to care if the program did what it set out to do. In the eyes of our last two mega-rich mayors, poor people just don't figure in their plans for the city.

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Global Warming Allegedly Kills Poor People

Choire Sicha — Fri, 29 May 2009 09:47:57 +0000

Global warming is killing 300,000 people a year, says liberal conspiracy theorist Kofi Annan, who hates God's gift of coal to America. But he can't even point out who they are, because they are all people with difficult names in far-away places.

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