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Speech
The Economy in the Time of Coronavirus
Remarks at the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, the Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce, and CenterState CEO (delivered via videoconference).
Discussion Paper
Will Silicon Alley Be the Next Silicon Valley?
Discussion Paper
How Did New York City’s Economy Weather the Pandemic?
When COVID-19 first struck the U.S. in early 2020, New York City was the epicenter of the pandemic. By early April, there was an unthinkable scale of suffering, with massive hospitalizations and roughly 800 fatalities per day, accounting for nearly half of the nationwide total. The rapid spread was facilitated by the city’s extraordinarily high population density and widespread use of mass transit. What followed was a quick and massive shutdown of restaurants, retail stores, personal services, offices, and more. And the shutdowns, of course, led to widespread job losses. Between February ...
Discussion Paper
Good News or Bad on New York City Jobs?
Unlike much of the nation, New York City has seen a robust rebound in employment since the recession. In early 2012, employment here reached 3.86 million, the largest number of jobs ever recorded. Yet the city’s unemployment rate has risen in recent months and is now 10 percent—its peak during the recession—and well above the 5 percent rate seen before the downturn. This lack of improvement reflects the fact that the number of employed residents of the city has not rebounded at all from its losses during the 2008-09 downturn. While commuters from outside the city have always been a part ...
Discussion Paper
The Tri-State Region’s Recovery from the Pandemic Recession Three Years On
The tri-state region’s economy was hit especially hard by the pandemic, but three years on, is close to recovering the jobs that were lost. Indeed, employment initially fell by 20 percent in New York City as the pandemic took hold, a significantly sharper decline than for the nation as a whole, and the rest of the region experienced similar declines, creating a much larger hole than in other parts of the country. Three years later, the recovery has been uneven: Recent job growth has been particularly strong in New York City, where employment remains just slightly below pre-pandemic levels, ...
Speech
A New York Moment
Remarks at The Future of New York City: Charting an Equitable Recovery for All, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City.
Discussion Paper
Why New York City Subway Delays Don't Affect All Riders Equally
The state of the New York City subway system has worsened considerably over the past few years. As a consequence of rising ridership and decaying infrastructure, the network is plagued by delays and frequently fails to deliver New Yorkers to their destinations on time. While these delays are a headache for anyone who depends on the subway to get around, they do not affect all riders in the same way. In this post, we explain why subway delays disproportionately affect low-income New Yorkers. We show that wealthier commuters who rely on the subway are less likely to experience extensive issues ...
Discussion Paper
New York City’s Economic Recovery—Main Street Gets the Jump on Wall Street
After bottoming out in late 2009, New York City’s economy has been on the road to recovery. In this post, we call attention to an unprecedented feature of the current economic recovery: overall employment in the city began to rebound from the recession well before Wall Street started adding jobs. We also consider some questions that this development naturally raises: What took Wall Street employment so long to recover? What’s been driving job generation on Main Street? What does the recent pickup in Wall Street employment suggest about the outlook for the city’s economy?
Discussion Paper
Twenty Years After 9/11, New York City’s Resilience Is Tested Once Again
As we mourn the tragic losses of the 9/11 attacks twenty years on, we thought it would be appropriate to re-examine the remarkable resilience New York City’s economy has shown over the years—a resilience that is once again being tested by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In this Liberty Street Economics post, we look at how Lower Manhattan, in particular, has changed since that tragedy on a number of dimensions, and use that as a framework to think about how the city might change as a result of the COVID pandemic.
Journal Article
Flexibility and Conversions in New York City's Housing Stock: Building for an Era of Rapid Change
Post-COVID, New York City faces reduced demand for commercial space in its central business districts, even as residential demand is resurgent. Just as in past eras of New York’s history, conversion of commercial spaces into housing may help the city adapt to these new market conditions and provide an additional pathway for producing badly needed housing. If 10 percent of office and hotel spaces were converted to residential use, around 75,000 homes would be created, concentrated in Midtown Manhattan. However, there are considerable obstacles to such conversions, including a slew of ...