500,000

 

 NY Post

 More than 500,000 New York City residents are still unemployed six months into the lingering coronavirus pandemic, a sobering new report released Tuesday revealed.

The state Labor Department data showed that 14 percent of city residents — one in 7 — were unemployed in September. That’s 538,694 Big Apple residents.

The jobless rate is ten percentage points higher than in September of 2019, when the city unemployment rate was just 3.7 percent.

Still, the rate was a slight improvement from August, when 16 percent or 638,767 residents were jobless.

The worst of the pandemic’s impact on jobs was in June, when 20 percent or 810,177 city residents were unemployed.

New York State’s unemployment rate decreased from 12.5% in August to 9.7% in September, a noticeable bump.

But New York State’s unemployment rate of 9.7 percent was considerably higher than the national jobless rate of 7.9 percent, and the sixth highest among states and 5.8 percentage points higher than the Empire State’s unemployment rate a year earlier, noted E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy.

Movie and TV production tax credits brings diminished results for local jobs

Times Union

  Billions of dollars to subsidize film and television projects in New York hasn't had a statistically significant impact on employment in the entertainment industry, according to a new study.

University of Southern California associate professor Michael Thom conducted a peer-reviewed analysis of a handful of state's that offer the bulk of motion picture incentives in the country and found that — when controlled for economic factors such as the growth in the labor market — there is "not much" of a link between job creation and the lucrative credit offered in New York, which was created in 2004.

The study represents a continuation of scholarly analyses questioning whether the refundable tax credit, which was recently extended by state lawmakers and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, is a prudent investment.

Thom determined that employment in the entertainment industry, which increased in New York by more than 60 percent from 2004 to 2017, based on federal jobs numbers, was largely the product of trends in the overall economy and national growth in the industry. He also found a low correlation between the credit and wages paid in the below-the-line jobs that benefit from the credit.

“It’s not the incentives, its simply the normal ebb and flow of the labor market," Thom said.

This conclusion is vociferously disputed by organized labor groups working in film and television, who point to their own studies and anecdotal evidence that the credits have led to a flourishing sector with wide ripple effects.

Who is lying when it comes to supply & demand?

From Crains:

New York City and the surrounding area, including northern New Jersey, the Hudson Valley and southwest Connecticut, is home to 22.8 million people working at 10.4 million jobs, the Metro Economic Snapshot released Tuesday by the Department of City Planning found. Since the last recession, the region has added around 708,000 new jobs—much more than anywhere else in the country in terms of raw numbers—but at a growth rate of just .9%, which is about half that of other metros and roughly on par with the country as a whole.

Over the same time period, the New York area added just 378,000 new housing units, far fewer than the number of jobs created and not nearly enough to meet demand. The mismatch was centered in the five boroughs and helped drive around 100,000 people to the suburbs each year between 2012 and 2016.

The metro area also lost a significant number of recent college graduates to lower-cost cities elsewhere in the country—something Glen has experienced personally.

"I just moved my daughter to Minneapolis," she said. "It was great, but it was also really sad."

From Forbes:

Researchers at the Fed found there were no "direct estimates of the rent elasticity with respect to new housing supply in the literature." No one knows how much housing you'd have to add to have any significant impact on costs. So, the researchers built a simulation to estimate, directly from data, the elasticity of rent with respect to housing supply.

They wanted to know how much rents might change if there was an influx of new housing. Given metropolitan housing crises and a lack of other data, it was an important study.

However, elasticity isn't a simple phenomenon. There are products where changing the price doesn't necessarily result in big shifts of demand. Look at the Apple iPhone X: $1,000 for the device and tens of millions purchased it.

The Fed report suggests that housing will be much the same:

The implication of this finding is that even if a city were able to ease some supply constraints to achieve a marginal increase in its housing stock, the city will not experience a meaningful reduction in rental burdens.

Add 5% more housing to the most expensive neighborhoods and the rents would drop only by 0.5%.

The reason is that people like the amenities in given neighborhoods and want to live there, so will continue to pay higher prices. Amenities can include shopping, schools, and ease of access to public transportation.

NY is really good at making people leave

From the Daily News:

New York over the past year continued to lose more residents to other states than it gained — even as the overall population grew slightly thanks to a continued influx of immigrants, Census data shows.

During the 12-month period ending July 1, the state lost a net 190,508 residents to other states, according to the data. That pushed the net outmigration to over 1 million people since 2010 — the largest of any state, according to a review by the Empire Center, a fiscal watchdog group.

The net loss since 2010 is actually less than the net migration outflow of nearly 1.6 million during the comparable period of 2000-07, the Empire Center’s E.J. McMahon said in the review.

“The stories continue to be a lack of economic opportunity upstate ... and downstate it’s just cost,” McMahon said. “The city and downstate can’t hold people because there’s not enough affordable living.”

City suggests LIC to Amazon

From LIC Post:

Long Island City has been selected by the city as a proposed site for Amazon’s second headquarters, officials announced last night.

The bid, submitted by the city to Amazon on Oct. 18 in partnership with New York State, and just a day shy from the tech company’s deadline, includes four districts within the five boroughs that meet the “essential criteria” Amazon listed in its request for proposals announced early September.

In describing Long Island City within the proposal, the Economic Development Corporation noted the neighborhood’s legacy as an industrial innovation center and its proximity to transportation networks, including train lines and airports. The neighborhood’s restaurants, bars, cafes, and arts and culture institutions were also listed as attractive components to lure Amazon to the area.

The proposal also identified over 13 million square feet of real estate that could be used to fulfill Amazon’s RFP.

Other districts included in the proposal were Midtown West, the Brooklyn Tech Triangle, and Lower Manhattan. The districts were chosen from more than two dozen proposals submitted to the city. Letters of support for Long Island City as a possible site were also sent to de Blasio by Queens Borough president Melinda Katz and Assemblymember Catherine Nolan, with Council member Jimmy Van Bramer also expressing his support. All three signed a letter, along with more than 70 elected officials from the five boroughs, sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, on New York City’s potential as a home for Amazon HQ2.

State would make more money off filming if it ended subsidies

From the Village Voice:

When the D.C.-based subsidy watch group Good Jobs First released its analysis recently of the $1.2 billion that New York State hands out in tax breaks to private industries each year, one item stood out: $621 million in subsidies for film and TV shoots that take place in the state. That means every man, woman, and child in New York shells out an average of $31 a year in public money into the coffers of studios and production companies.

...though both the city and state film offices provide data showing that the film industry has grown here since Governor George Pataki instituted the state’s tax credit program in 2004, economic experts aren’t so sure, pointing to other numbers that show that film and TV shoots don’t employ many more people in the state than they did fifteen years ago — and that any gain is nowhere near worth the hundreds of millions of dollars a year that the state pours into it.

And even if a positive impact does exist, New York’s film industry spending may just be a way of treading water: a zero-sum game where states compete to throw increasing amounts of tax money at the same number of jobs. It’s a problem that corporate-subsidy experts in other industries have dubbed “the economic war among the states” — and it serves mostly to funnel money out of public treasuries and into private pockets.

How could one set of numbers show that film tax credits have led to a huge boom in production jobs, while others show little to no effect? One issue is that the state’s audits separately report each job stint, no matter how short, rather than converting to “full-time equivalent” jobs — a tiny footnote in the Camoin study indicates that “if one person is employed part-time for four months, then takes two months off and is hired again for four months that would be counted as two jobs.” As a result, the official state numbers double- or triple-count crew members who work on multiple productions in one year.

Thom says that a study by the California legislature estimated that one-third of production activity in that state would take place in that state with or without subsidies. If the same ratio holds true in New York, then even if the state cut off the subsidy spigot and two-thirds of productions hightailed it to more budget-friendly climes, the state would still collect more than $250 million a year in tax revenues on an expense of zero dollars. With the current program running about a $100 million annual return by the state’s own figures, this implies that New York state would bring in about $150 million a year more in net revenues if it cut off film credits entirely — money it could conceivably then spend on more effective job-creation programs.

Amazon looking for space and Sunnyside Yards is in the running

From Queens Tribune:

Amazon has announced that it is looking for a location to develop its second headquarters—which would be known as Amazon HQ2—and Sunnyside Yard is among the spots it is eyeing.

Earlier this year, the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) released its $2.5 million Sunnyside Yard feasibility study, which evaluated the viability of decking over active rail and facilities currently at the site to make way for housing units, retail space, parks and schools. Sunnyside Yard—which currently serves as a storage hub for Amtrak, the New Jersey Transit and Long Island Rail Road—sits on approximately 180 acres of land in western Queens.

Grant Long, a senior economist at Street Easy, an online real estate organization, spoke to the Queens Tribune to discuss the possibility of Amazon HQ2’s being built above Sunnyside Yard.

“Sunnyside Yard is the best fit,” said Long. “Through this project, people within the community can get good jobs.”

Amazon HQ2, which would seek up to eight million square feet of commercial space, is expected to create 50,000 high-paying jobs that offer an average salary of more than $100,000.

Long said that these salaries would enable workers at the new headquarters to afford apartments or condos at the numerous buildings constructed in Court Square, Downtown Brooklyn, DUMBO, Williamsburg and Long Island City.

East Elmhurst hotel to close and make way for ....?

From the Queens Chronicle:

An East Elmhurst hotel previously thought to become a homeless shelter will close its doors on Oct. 1, due to “economic” reasons, according to a notice from the state Department of Labor.

The agency’s “Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification” website posted on July 3 that the Courtyard by Marriott LaGuardia Hotel, located at 90-10 Grand Central Pkwy., will close and 144 employees will be affected.

The reason was only listed as “economic” and no further details were available.

The hotel was in the headlines last October when East Elmhurst officials blasted the city Department of Homeless Services for failing to notify the community of plans to house 60 single men there.

“As with prior occasions, DHS has completely failed to inform both elected officials and community members of their plans to house any individuals at this facility,” Rep. Joe Crowley (D-Queens, Bronx), state Sen. Jose Peralta (D-East Elmhurst) and Assemblyman Francisco Moya (D-Jackson Heights) said in a joint statement at the time.

The DHS back then denied any plans to convert the hotel into a shelter — saying it had received no offers to put homeless services at the site. The agency says it still has no plans to use the location.

De Blasio jobs prediction is full of crap

From the Observer:

Nearly everyone noticed the lack of detail in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s State of the City proposal to create 100,000 “good-paying jobs”—and it appears that’s because it’s simply an extension of what the city’s mayoral-controlled Economic Development Corporation has done for the past 15 years.

The jobs proposal was the centerpiece of the State of the City address de Blasio delivered at the Apollo Theater in Harlem last Monday night. De Blasio vowed his policies would produce 100,000 positions over 10 years in a variety of sectors throughout the city, with salaries ranging anywhere from $50,000 to $75,000 a year or more.

The mayor promised work in film and TV, technology, life sciences and “advanced manufacturing,” though declined to offer much in the way of an explanation of how the city would generate these jobs.

“This new addition, this new focus on creating more and more good-paying jobs, this will be the new frontline in keeping New York City affordable,” he said.

For the mayor’s emphasis on what a “new” and ambitious undertaking this is, a 2016 report from the New York City Industrial Development Agency, a public benefit corporation that the EDC runs, credited its combination of tax incentives and bond financing with the creation and preservation of approximately 146,000 jobs since 2002. That would average roughly 10,428 jobs a year.

This would suggest that the mayor’s plan for 100,000 jobs between Fiscal Year 2018 and Fiscal Year 2028 is merely a projection of a pattern of growth the IDA and EDC established over the past decade and a half.

De Blasio redeveloping Bush Terminal

From DNA Info:

The city will spend $136 million to renovate two rundown buildings at Bush Terminal, creating a campus where textiles will be created, movie and television shows filmed and food manufactured.

The plan, which Mayor Bill de Blasio revealed as part of his 2017 State of the City speech Monday, is expected to create a 100,000 square foot film and television production studio and 200,000 square foot garment production space that will support 1,800 permanent and good-paying jobs.

The project, called the Made in NY campus, is part of de Blasio's pledge to create 40,000 jobs that pay $50,000 and up over the next four years, and to eventually create 100,000 such jobs over the next decade to help New Yorkers struggling to afford one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.

The mayor, who is running for re-election this year, has pegged the plan as the natural extension of his affordable housing plan.

"Folks got used to struggling just to get by. We want something better for people," said de Blasio.

Details on where the 40,000 jobs will come from are still sketchy.

And who will run this? And creating jobs is great, so long as you aren't importing the employees from elsehwere. Then it defeats the purpose.

Another attempt to revitalize Jamaica

From Crains:

The city selected a developer to turn a former NYPD parking garage in Jamaica, Queens, into a large, mixed-use complex with more than 350 affordable apartments, officials announced Thursday.

The building, which will be developed by Omni New York, is a key component of the de Blasio administration's 2015 economic development initiative called the Jamaica NOW Action Plan, which aims to spur job growth and retail development in the neighborhood.

"[This] proposal builds on southeast Queens' strengths as a commercial and transit hub," said Maria Torres-Springer, president of the city's Economic Development Corp.

A request for proposals for the site was issued in February 2015, with Manhattan-based Omni submitting the winning bid. All of the units in the new building, located on 168th Street between Jamaica and 93rd avenues, will be enrolled in the city's affordable-housing program, and a portion of the parking in the building will be dedicated for NYPD use.

The project, which will also include ground-floor retail, is the first milestone of a larger effort to foster job growth in Jamaica, which is served by four subway lines, a major Long Island Rail Road junction and the Airtrain to John F. Kennedy International Airport. Yet, despite those existing transit advantages and a 2007 rezoning that allowed for the construction of ample commercial office space and hotels, job growth and economic activity have declined during the past decade, according to the city.

Wages not increasing enough to make NYC affordable for most

From Epoch Times:

A shortage of talent for mid-skill jobs in New York City is linked to low wages and an inadequate education system, experts say.

A mid-skill job is one that requires a high school diploma and a post-school certificate, but not necessarily a four-year degree—for example, many technology, health care, and trades jobs.

“Tech in particular, while growing, is not at levels of mid-tier cities like Seattle and Austin due to higher cost of living,” said Jessica Walker, president of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, in an email. “So figuring out how people in tech, health care, and business and finance can live with families in NYC and the state is important.”

The shortage of talent prompted job search website Indeed.com to dig into its vast database for answers.

A big problem in New York City is labor market polarization, or “a hollowing out of middle wage jobs,” said Daniel Culbertson, an economist at Indeed.com.

The company separated its job database into 800 different categories, then ran the data through two filters: The first was whether a wage had kept pace with inflation, and the second was whether a wage was higher than the unadjusted median amount for that job in the year 2000.

Only 35 percent of New York City jobs made it through the filters.

The origin of talent shortage lies in the education system, said Allison Armour-Garb, senior fellow at Public Policy Institute of New York State.

In New York City, only 35 percent of high school graduates are college-ready, she said, and at least 50 percent of students have to take at least one remedial class when entering college.

The city spends more than $70 million on remediation classes at CUNY alone, Armour-Garb said. “[We’re] paying millions for material they should have already mastered in high school.”

NYS jobs program craps out

From Forbes:

...it would appear that one of the things that government isn’t very good at is creating jobs. For we’ve got the result of Andrew Cuomo’s lovely jobs and startup plan for New York. Which has created some 408 jobs. To put this in perspective that’s about the number that Walmart employs in the average store. Leading to a modest proposal. Why not stop spending the taxpayers’ money on something that government isn’t very good at and instead just get out of the way and let private sector companies do their stuff?

In fact, in many parts of the country it would actually be simpler to get government to stop doing what it currently does so that Walmart could open a store and employ 400 people.

One of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s most highly promoted economic development initiatives has produced just 408 new jobs across New York State in the past two years, even as the state has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting it, according to a delayed report released on Friday afternoon.

You know when something’s bad news in this trade. Reports that come out on Friday afternoons, especially in the summer, are things that those releasing the report would really prefer no one took much note of. Perhaps by Monday the news caravan will have moved on and no one will really have understood?

There’s also that other little clue when the PR budget is vastly larger than the program budget. This means that this is politics, about burnishing the vote gaining abilities of those proposing the plan rather than actually doing anything about the economy or jobs. We might even think that not taking $175 million off the taxpayers of New York in the first place would create more than 408 jobs.

It's all about the incentives

From Crains:

When Cumberland Packing Corp. said it would stop production at Sweet’N Low’s Brooklyn Navy Yard factory and lay off 320 people, the de Blasio administration did nothing. Public Advocate Letitia James demanded action, but the president of the Navy Yard, saying he was speaking for City Hall, issued a statement saying it was “unfortunate the global economic conditions in their industry forced [this] difficult decision to relocate.”

What Cumberland shows is that if the de Blasio administration’s goal is to grow the city’s manufacturing sector—and that’s what the mayor said last year—it can’t be done without incentives.

A different Hallet's Point perspective

From DNA Info:

City officials celebrated the start of construction on the Hallets Point project Thursday, hailing the future development as a means of transforming the isolated Astoria waterfront.

The development, to be built by The Durst Organization and Lincoln Equities, will bring 2,400 new apartments to the Hallets peninsula, a parcel of land on the East River south of Astoria Park that officials describe as largely cut off from the rest of the neighborhood.

The area is home to the Astoria Houses but is otherwise mainly industrial, lacking in retail options and — with the exception of a baseball field — public green space.

"A community that’s not only underutilized, but a locked waterfront," City Councilman Costa Constantinides said. "This project changes the entire paradigm here."

It certainly does.

Deal done for horse carriages

From NY1:

The Mayor's office and the Teamsters Union announced a tentative deal late Sunday that would reduce the number of horses and permanently move the carriages to Central Park.

Under the agreement, the number of licensed horses would drop from about 180 to 110 by December 1.

That number will eventually be reduced to 95 by the time a new stable is built in Central Park.

That stable is expected to be complete by October 2018, and will have room for 75 horses and 68 carriages.

Once the stable is finished, all travel and operations will be confined to Central Park.

There are still a number of issues to be ironed out, including how to compensate carriage drivers who will lose their jobs under the deal.

Horses may be moved to Central Park

From the Daily News:

The city is close to a deal with the horse carriage industry that would permanently move their stables inside Central Park — and could have a City Council hearing on the proposal as early as Friday, multiple sources told the Daily News.

Reps for Mayor de Blasio have been in meetings over the past few days with the Teamsters, the union that reps the drivers, according to the sources.

The city has agreed to pay to build new stables in Central Park as part of the plan to move the horses — who currently live in stables in Hell’s Kitchen — off the city streets.

The Teamsters also want the city to give buyouts to the drivers who will lose their job because of the move to Central Park, which won’t be able to accommodate the current number of 220 horses, the sources said.

The city has not agreed to buyouts, according to the sources.

The new bill calls for licensing 68 carriages and 75 horses to operate in Central Park. Those carriages will be in place by October 2018, sources said.

How convenient that this will free up valuable real estate on the west side!

Forget what you heard about the economic benefits of the film industry and recycling

From the Wall Street Journal:

Proponents argue that film tax credits create well-paying jobs for local residents. Some even suggest that the incentives pay for themselves by boosting the economy and increasing government revenues. The Motion Picture Association of America claims: “Pure and simple: film and tax incentives create jobs, expand revenue pools and stimulate local economies.”

But real life is no Hollywood dream. Nearly every independent study has found that these arguments are more fiction than fact. The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it best in a 2010 report: “State film subsidies are a wasteful, ineffective, and unfair instrument of economic development.”

From the NY Times:

In New York City, the net cost of recycling a ton of trash is now $300 more than it would cost to bury the trash instead. That adds up to millions of extra dollars per year — about half the budget of the parks department — that New Yorkers are spending for the privilege of recycling. That money could buy far more valuable benefits, including more significant reductions in greenhouse emissions.

It would take legions of garbage police to enforce a zero-waste society, but true believers insist that’s the future. When Mayor de Blasio promised to eliminate garbage in New York, he said it was “ludicrous” and “outdated” to keep sending garbage to landfills. Recycling, he declared, was the only way for New York to become “a truly sustainable city.”

But cities have been burying garbage for thousands of years, and it’s still the easiest and cheapest solution for trash. The recycling movement is floundering, and its survival depends on continual subsidies, sermons and policing. How can you build a sustainable city with a strategy that can’t even sustain itself?

Weiner lands a job

From the NY Post:

If you find yourself in a p.r. nightmare, there’s a swashbuckling new hero you can turn to — Carlos Danger.

A top “crisis” public-relations firm with ties to Hillary Rodham Clinton has hired the last person in the world that most people would call on to dispense advice on dealing with a scandal: disgraced, penis-texting former Congressman Anthony Weiner.

The man who destroyed his own promising political career by botching a 2011 sext-message imbroglio with bald-faced lies — and who then ruined his comeback by running one of the most disastrous mayoral campaigns of all time — will now get paid to dispense advice to high-paying clients of the MWW p.r. firm, sources told The Post.

About the only thing that makes sense about this is that one of the company’s clients is Ball Park Franks.

MWW is headed by Michael Kempner, a prominent New Jersey Democrat who has been a top fund-raiser for both Clinton and President Obama.

Starbucks opening in Jamaica

From DNA Info:

Jamaica is getting its first Starbucks, and it's looking to hire from the community.

The coffee chain is set to open a new cafe in a recently renovated building at 89-02 Sutphin Blvd., across the street from the Queens County Civil Courthouse in downtown Jamaica, the company announced Thursday.

The new store is launching as part of the 100,000 Opportunities Initiative, a plan in which more than a dozen American corporations commit to hiring 100,000 unemployed young people by 2018.

The Jamaica location is slated to be among the first five stores scheduled to open in 2016, according to Starbucks.

The cafe on Sutphin will include an employee training center, and the chain plans to hire about 20 to 25 employees from the community, the company said.