Sumner Rosen: As we address the question of how to reconstruct Lower Manhattan, we need to reconsider the configuration of the City’s economy and the distortions that were embodied in the building of the World Trade Center.  That area was very different forty years ago, with lots of small manufacturing.   The crisis growing out of tragedy can provide an opportunity not to replicate but to create something that will benefit the entire City.

Len Rodberg: To me, the most important aspect of manufacturing is that it can employ, at a decent wage and with good benefits and prospects for promotion, non-college-educated men, especially young minority men, who are otherwise a surplus population in the service economy.  Witness the low labor force participation rates among young males in a City that has largely turned its back on manufacturing.  The working class needs a manufacturing base, not just construction, transportation, and security jobs, or we will continue to see drug trafficking and other criminal activities as among the most attractive, available routes out of the underclass for a young man with no capacity to work in a white-collar office.  Historically, manufacturing helped equalize the U.S. income distribution by creating relatively well-paid jobs for America’s less educated but motivated workers. Service industries have thus far not been able to play a similar role in the labor market.

Robert Cherry:  I might as well believe in the coming of the Messiah as believe that we could have a dramatic increase in semi-skilled manufacturing jobs in NYC.  Where the City could make inroads is through biotechnology, film, and tourism industries.  While we can improve the situation for semi-skilled manufacturing a bit (particularly if there was a rail tunnel from the US “mainland”), New York would still have primarily small, specialized manufacturing firms that service City consumers and other local producers. It will not be any kind of mass manufacturing that would export to the rest of the nation or the world, so that only a modest number of semi-skilled manufacturing jobs would be created.

The historic romanticism with manufacturing is touching.  The reason for this was not that manufacturing was “real” and necessary while services were more amorphous; it was that manufacturing, thanks to unionization, was the one area outside of construction and trucking, where men could earn a middle-class income.  However, thanks to the movement of manufacturing to the South and then overseas, unions could no longer extract a wage premium in most industries.  Thus, the significance of manufacturing has faded, and it cannot be recreated simply because we wish it! 

We are living in a global economy where no barriers are left to restrict the movement of manufacturing.  If we fall into the trap of looking back to some golden age, we will become irrelevant.

George Locker: I am no expert on the return of the Messiah, but in my view a good part of the economy of the future — real production, not just services, finance, or information — will be found in concentrated urban centers in the First World. A clearer view of what is actually happening now would show that most industrial investment is made within, between, and among the advanced industrialized urban countries; with some exceptions, the Third and Fourth World countries are not the locus of advanced manufacturing, despite significantly lower wage costs.  Most important, in the long run, a successful advanced national economy cannot exist without a strong domestic manufacturing capability and an educated workforce.

Images from the past do not serve as accurate guides for the future. We can foresee advanced machinery (e.g. a three-dimensional knitting machine that can produce a whole shirt from yarn, obviating the need for acres of floor space), advanced energy sources (e.g., nuclear fusion); improved manufacturing technology (e.g., nano-technology); new building methods and techniques (e.g., modular multiple dwellings such as Habitat); new forms of transport (e.g., magnetic levitation trains), and entire new industries (e.g., biotechnology) will of necessity originate in, depend upon, and be executed within the heart of advanced urban areas. 

Cities such as New York City will be more, not less, important and competitive as the world economy and polity becomes more complex and interrelated.  Whether we will be competitive with other global cities will depend upon our vision, organization and political will. 

Adam Friedman: When we talk about expanding manufacturing in New York City, we aren’t talking about auto plants or steel mills. Our clients tend to be small niche manufacturers, but that niche could be global: For example, VGS, a sign company located on West 38th St. in Manhattan, employs 125 people, half in fairly sophisticated graphics and half in basic woodworking. While most of their product is probably purchased and consumed in NYC, they do a significant business out of state.  There are also all the small food companies that sprang up to serve local ethnic markets, but then crossed over into mainstream markets nationwide.

On the other hand, we have companies that probably do no local business. For example, we have a significant number of companies in aviation. One large company in Long Island City makes components for aircraft engines. A Sunset Park company makes landing gear. A Manhattan company makes the equipment used for removing ice from wings. While they all say they remain here because of the skilled labor market, inertia and the personal lifestyle preferences of the owners also make a difference. These types of firms may be the most at-risk.

Regarding the impact of municipal policy, the City subsidizes office development outside Manhattan at the rate of $25-$29 per foot per year for leases of at least 8 years. This is about three times what a manufacturer can pay in rent. The building into which MetLife is moving, at a City subsidy of $30,000 per job, formerly housed several manufacturing tenants on month-to-month leases; they relocated without any City benefits.

Sumner Rosen:  The firms that Friedman works with in the Industrial Retention Network are the Darwinian survivors of a long process of erosion. They have a valid claim on City resources to ensure their access to the services that have so lavishly supported the financial sector. They function well in the niches that Jane Jacobs and others have highlighted as key elements in urban economies. The history of planning in New York, as Fitch and others show, embodied a systemic bias against support for manufacturing. This was key to the destruction of the Lower Manhattan economy in order to build a World Trade Center.

These are the issues that we exist to discuss and in future issues in our effort to articulate public policies that can best sustain an economic order in which working people can flourish consistent with the economic viability of a City that embodies all the power, potential and contradictions of the global economy. 
 

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