With the proposal to rezone East Midtown, New York City is presented with a historical chance to revamp and reinvigorate one of the greatest commercial corridors on earth, providing benefits for nearly everyone who lives in this great city.
I’m worried that we may miss that opportunity because the focus is on the wrong place. Instead of considering the thousands of jobs across all income levels that the rezoning will create, the debate is too frequently centered on the corporate CEOs who’d inhabit the new buildings’ top floors.
Would Detroit ever stop a new Ford manufacturing plant from being built? Or an old one from being improved and expanded? In New York City, commercial office buildings are our factories. Yet we frown upon building new ones.
We’ve been lucky in New York to attract business after business. We’re the financial, media and advertising capital of the world because we attract the best, brightest and hardest-working — from the recent college graduate eager to escape the Rust Belt to the recent immigrant ready to build a new life.
But it is also because we have the building stock and capacity that provide good places for people to work and the ability to expand their businesses here. This provides jobs to a vast array of working people — many of them with very good, middle-class jobs.
Yes, the jobs in commercial office buildings that first come to mind are the CEOs and executives of Fortune 500 companies, but that’s just the beginning. There’s also the recent CUNY grad from Central Brooklyn, the first college graduate in her family, working as an analyst at a financial services firm. There’s the 32BJ service worker from the South Bronx sending his son to CUNY on his union wages hoping he ends up with an analyst position in four years time. And there’s the thousands of clerical workers from places like Staten Island and Bayside who commute into Manhattan on the express bus every morning.
But commercial office space supports even more jobs. There’s the union construction worker from the Rockaways who builds new office towers, and the livery car driver from Richmond Hill saving up to bring his family to the United States — as well as the Hotel Trades member from Jackson Heights working at the hotels that house traveling businessmen.
Office buildings create an entire ecosystem of well-paying jobs that support New Yorkers from every borough and every walk of life. That’s why rezoning East Midtown to allow for newer, larger and more modern office buildings must go forward. Simply put, it means more good jobs for New Yorkers.
East Midtown, whose character is already that of a central business district and where we have some of the best transportation hubs in the city, must be allowed to modernize and meet the needs of today’s — and tomorrow’s — workers.
Any rezoning is a process, and as the East Midtown plan has progressed, it’s faced criticism. First, that needed transportation improvements must be made up front. I agreed with the argument, but it has been addressed with a fund to make needed infrastructure and pedestrian upgrades before new buildings start to rise.
Criticism also comes from preservationists, who would rather see no new building rise. But that argument doesn’t hold weight for me, because those people would see the city die a slow death rather than grow.
There is some work to be done. More collaboration, specifically with stakeholders such as the Hotel Trades Council, should occur. We should listen to their concerns and come up with a compromise all sides can support.
But what’s most important is that growing the commercial office space in East Midtown means more middle-class jobs for New Yorkers at a time we desperately need them. It will allow New York to remain the center of the business world, where companies vie to have their headquarters.
To prevent this plan from moving forward would saddle the city with an increasingly antiquated business district that can’t compete with cities like London and Shanghai. It will prevent the creation of thousands and thousands of jobs across the economic spectrum. And it will send a signal that New York is not a vibrant city in which to start a business.
The time is now to grow the commercial office space in East Midtown; we must not let this opportunity pass us by.
Charles E. Schumer is New York’s senior US senator.