Boasting that ‘NYC is back’ doesn’t make it so

Good news: New state data show New York City has finally regained — or nearly regained, depending on who’s parsing the numbers — its staggering net less of 928,000 jobs at the peak of its pandemic shutdown.

Bad News: Mayor Adams is proclaiming that the city recovering its lost jobs — ahead of some projections but behind every other big city and 14 months after the United States got there, adding nearly 4 million new jobs since then or more jobs than there were in New York City by April of 2020 — represents a huge personal accomplishment, never mind how 70% of the job gains here came before he won office.

The mayor who started the month talking about the impending destruction of the city as we’ve known it if migrants keep arriving and who traveled south of the border to tell prospective arrivals in person how unpleasant and unaffordable it is here boasted at a campaign-style announcement on Friday about how New York is back, baby.

Before Mayor Adams got there, Mayor Adams says, “Crime was trending in the wrong direction. No one wanted to be on our subway system. We were hemorrhaging jobs and people were leaving, taking flights to Florida. Well, you know what? They want to be back now.”

Never mind that office occupancy and train ridership remain down, and crime up, from where those numbers were in 2019.

Or that learning losses during the pandemic have lingered despite federal aid meant explicitly for that purpose, with the Department of Education papering over that by touting supposedly impressive gains in new tests that, conveniently, have been recalibrated so that they’re no longer comparable to previous year’s results or other tests.

Most of all, never mind the looming $9 budget hole projected for next year, with another $13 billion hole to fill the following year, that will demand painful decisions.

As the Citizens Budget Commission notes, while Adams has said the city can’t afford to keep sheltering more migrants, those vast gaps have less to do with those costs than with the end of billions in federal emergency COVID aid that ended up paying for ongoing programs — something that started under Mayor de Blasio, as soon as those pennies from heaven started pouring down — and the generous new contracts Adams struck with city workers without any real concessions.

Putting emergency money into recurring costs is the municipal equivalent to upping your monthly budget by $2,000 after hitting the Lotto for $40,000. It’s a good time for a little while, right up until it’s a viciously lingering hangover.

With tough times ahead, the mayor is leaning hard into New York City exceptionalism, since “You know how we are as New Yorkers. We are resilient. People thought we were going to crumble during 9/11 when we saw the center of our trade attacked and collapse before our eyes, but you know what? 9/12, we got up. And when New Yorkers got up, the country got up.” 

And “There is no city on the globe like New York City. Nowhere else on the globe. All my colleagues across the globe, they debate about the second and third, but they all say we surrender to you, Eric, New York is the only city like it.”

You know what? I love this city. I’ve spent my life here and I’m raising my kids here, but this magic incantation stuff where New York will inevitably recover and thrive because it’s New York and it’s recovered before is no good. The forces that draw people and capital into big cities are always up against forces dispersing them — ones that are only growing stronger in the uncanny and often unpleasant new Zoom era that New York City beta-tested during the pandemic.

The local economy rebounded as quickly as it did after 9/11, and again after the market collapse in 2008, because federal policies kept interest rates down and boosted bank and Wall Street profits here. The city hung on following its COVID shutdown because of massive, unprecedented federal aid.

It’s been a good long run here, with at least two decades of mayors almost continuously blessed with overflowing coffers and relatively easy decisions thanks in part to an unstable world seeking shelter for its capital in our stock and real estate markets. 

Now, we’re going to need to figure things out for ourselves, and that will take more than victory laps and easy talk about how great New York City is.

It looks like there’s no help coming, no more hair of the dog. Just us, our mayor, and tough choices ahead.

Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City and a columnist for the Daily News.