Here’s what Adams and Hochul must do to bring workers back to Manhattan
Mayor Eric Adams wants you back in the office. Last week, he said of New Yorkers working from home, “I need them to do one more job, go back to their job. Let’s get our city up.” The mayor is pitching to lapsed commuters’ charitable impulses — but that’s not what will work. He needs them to think that coming to the office is in their own interests.
Adams is correct to remind that, hey, Midtown is still here. As with many of the mayor’s initiatives, this concept may seem obvious. But it wasn’t obvious to his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, who maintained that Manhattan and its office workers don’t matter that much, as long as working-class neighborhoods are fine.
Yet they won’t be fine as long as the core of the city remains hollow. Before COVID, 1.1 million people from Connecticut, New Jersey and elsewhere in New York came to Manhattan to work at a desk each day. Now, only about 28.6% percent are back, most not every day.
As Adams said last week, “Many of us are believing that we can stay home and not impact our financial ecosystem.”
They can’t. Restaurants and stores in Manhattan are suffering, where they haven’t already closed. “We’re connected,” the mayor said: Office people buy food and clothing near where they work. As for when people should come back, the mayor added, “The timeframe is now.”
The mayor’s push for immediacy is good.
But his argument, and his targets, are wrong. Nobody is going to go to the office out of a selfless impulse to support Starbucks, or to prop up the values of the Middle Eastern investment fund that owns the office building.
And they won’t go because their boss is going to make them. “The back to work pitch from Adams and Hochul is helpful, but the key is they need to be pitching the employees, not the employers, who would love to have everyone back,” says Kathy Wylde, head of the Partnership for New York City business group.
They’ll go because they feel it’s good for them. You can see a glimmer of it: Last Thursday, the 65-degree day, there was a marked increase in the number of people on the Midtown streets.
And they were all young people — under 30. It was striking how well-dressed the young people were. I even saw a pair of high-heeled shoes.
This makes sense: People who have never worked in a Manhattan office before want to experience the real thing. They want to meet and impress other young people. Gritty adventurism also appears to the young crowd, so they are less put off by soaring crime.
If everything goes well, as the weather gets warmer, older people will follow the younger ones, gradually and grouchily, for fear of being left out. Nobody wants to do Zoom anymore.
Problem solved — if.
If Adams realizes people won’t put up with bad experiences on the streets and subways. The twentysomethings may like the idea of life in bad-old-days New York; they won’t tolerate the reality.
Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a subway-crime plan six weeks ago — and, last Friday, had to re-announce the very same plan. That’s because, so far, it’s not working: Violent felonies on the subway in January, at 105, including two murders, were nearly 60% higher than in January 2019 despite much lower ridership.
That’s partly because the plan depends almost entirely on mental-health outreach, not law enforcement. Farebeating summonses and arrests in the transit system are down 27% from January 2019, even as the criminal element underground has increased.
Without results now, people will be afraid to adopt Adams’ timeframe for returning to work. They just won’t want to put themselves in harm’s way. And their bosses won’t make them.
Second, New Yorkers aren’t going to back to the five-days-a-week, in-person workweek. A three-days-in-the-office model means lower, and different, foot traffic. That has big impacts on future transit revenues, as well as the value of office and retail properties.
But that’s a problem for the future — and the future can wait; we have our own problems right here in the present. For now, getting most people in three days a week, repeatedly, would be a victory.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
