Upon assuming office (January, 2002), Bloomberg immediately had to confront: (1) a $6.2 billion budget deficit arising from depressed revenues caused by 9\/11 and the World Trade Center catastrophe; (2) a burst technology bubble, a \u00a02001 stock market collapse and 2002 recession which depressed stock industry bonuses from which twenty-five percent of New York’s revenues originate. Also relevant to the luxury city strategy discussion is that as the strategy was being implemented, we waltzed through a (3) 2008-2009 Great Recession and Collapse of American Finance Industry (did we mention earlier that New York City was the “financial capital of the world”), which again crushed bonuses and\u00a0depressed real estate values (and taxes)\u00a0, and, for a coup de grace, caused huge financial sector down-sizing-bankruptcy-consolidation (this is no way to treat a core cluster of one’s economic base). \u00a0Mother Nature, not wanting to appear impotent in comparison, arrived on the 2012 scene in the form of (4) Hurricane Sandy. Governor Cuomo totaled the impact of Sandy on New York at $32 billion and, an indisputable authority of all things New York, the Huffington Post, said it was $42 billion.<\/p>\n
We mention these events only as context; the reader can make her own judgment as to how well Bloomberg responded to it all–but all this did hit the fan while the so-called luxury city strategy was being implemented.<\/p>\n
![\"Bloomberg:](\"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Michael_R_Bloomberg.jpg\")
<\/a>Bloomberg: aka Neoliberal<\/p><\/div>\n
What\u00a0hath Bloomberg done in terms of\u00a0comprehensive economic development strategy while he was in office?\u00a0Based on\u00a0his 2002 “Five Borough Economic Development Strategy”<\/strong><\/em>, that strategy articulated three goals and eventually included some sixty plus specific initiatives. This review will use these three goals as a classification system to categorize the major economic development-related initiatives pursued throughout his three terms. In the below paragraphs we will specify the goal and its specific objectives (in bold<\/strong>)\u00a0 and then list his actions and initiatives which, the Curmudgeon at least, believes to be related. We shall not make any comment regarding the perception or reality of how well any of these programs\/initiatives worked. They all were at one time or another severely criticized–and almost certainly the performance of each initiative is a\u00a0 mixed bag.\u00a0At this point this classification system is\u00a0only\u00a0meant to be a reasonable description of his goals\/objectives and programs launched during his Administration.<\/p>\n Sub-Strategy A: Make NYC More Livable: (a) access to affordable and adequate housing for\u00a0all\u00a0income levels; (b) revitalize waterfront (all five boroughs) to create dramatic, high income housing and accessible parks; (c) construct strategic parks and open spaces to stimulate surrounding area development; (d) pursue other livability issues to make NYC attractive to live and work<\/strong><\/p>\n The High Line–20th Street<\/p><\/div>\n Sub-Strategy B: Make NYC More Business-Friendly so firms are more competitive (profitable) and create more jobs: (a) develop borough central business districts (create supply); (b) attract and retain firms through carefully targeted incentives and aggressive outreach; (c) adopt customer service orientation to support small business by treating them as partners; (d) develop city workforce by increasing talent base and placing in jobs; (e) improve transportation and other infrastructure to catalyze growth<\/strong><\/p>\n A Depiction of the Hudson Yards Project<\/p><\/div>\n Strategy C: Diversify Economic Base and reduce dependence on Manhattan-based financial services; (a) promote tourism by marketing and targeted infrastructure investments; (b) attract and retain firms through targeted incentives and aggressive outreach; (c) enhance competitive advantage of other industries likely to grow.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n [Hurricane Sandy led to a $20 billion “resiliency” plan justified confidence that NYC was no Atlantis, that the City could adapt to climate change, and would not disappear into the sea overnight. Since this more than touches on disaster recovery–although a legitimate element of economic development–is probably not an element of the luxury city\/two cities motif–and is so recent that we do not include it in our analysis]<\/p>\n What Does the Curmudgeon Make of All This?<\/strong><\/p>\n There are\u00a0a lot of moving parts to Bloomberg’s economic development strategy. First, he defines economic development broadly.\u00a0Economic development is never about just creating \u00a0jobs. Economic development creates, and distributes, prosperity and\u00a0quality of life\u00a0in its\u00a0multiple\u00a0forms to the various segments of its resident population.<\/p>\n Accordingly,\u00a0 a broadly defined economic\u00a0development allows\u00a0Bloomberg to use other policy areas as part of his economic development strategy.\u00a0Education and planning\u00a0became central elements of Bloomberg’s economic development vision.\u00a0Reform of the school system and the provision of affordable and luxury housing\u00a0were key elements in Bloomberg’s strategy. The fact that Bloomberg raised taxes (negative business climate to be sure) to pay for new schools and enhanced teacher salaries demonstrates the almost inevitable trades-off among the different components of any jurisdiction’s economic development strategy.\u00a0 But it also acknowledges that World Cities do not compete with incentives on the basis of low cost, low tax, less services. Bloomberg raised taxes\/fees, especially in his first term. If nothing else, Bloomberg downplayed the traditional “business climate” strategy found in most American cities and states. His aggressive attraction and retention program was built less around incentives (although he used them when he thought he needed to) than his own ability to talk with and partner with the CEOs from whence he came. If he was a plutocrat, he used that status to talk to other plutocrats and induce them to some positive relationship with the city. If he was a media-darling, that access to the media served his marketing\/attraction campaign well.<\/p>\n Bloomberg’s creative use of planning, re-zoning in particular (I am\u00a0less keen on his\u00a0furniture for parks and closing Times Square to traffic) of former\u00a0industrial parks to mixed uses deemed suitable to the each Borough and its CBD\u00a0is really, really good because<\/strong> . Also, the East River Technology Park has been quite successful in attracting big name firms and jobs–but frankly we suspect the personal contact and resources of the Mayor were instrumental\u00a0to its success. Economic developers with less well-connected Mayors in smaller cities\u00a0will almost certainly risk that a similar type venture will linger and stumble more. Good planning as an economic development tool is rare, in my opinion. Too often planning has been more anti-business than an inducement for business location and expansion.<\/p>\n New York City Hall<\/p><\/div>\n The Curmudgeon, who has\u00a0had experience with redevelopment and physical development projects, was quite impressed\u00a0with the number of these initiatives. But their uneven success, and the intensity of debate, he suspects,\u00a0are\u00a0\u00a0indications of Bloomberg’s tin ear and tendency to overreach. Three stadiums\u00a0with all sorts of high profile owners and\u00a0players,\u00a0the World Trade Center, water tunnels, and subway lines tends to scatter one out and surround policy implementation with endless crises and confrontation. So while I do favor physical development—please focus a bit.\u00a0I suspect that Bloomberg’s\u00a0many projects created a critical mass of opposition and\u00a0that contributed in no small measure to the luxury city\/two cities attack.<\/p>\n As to the workforce initiatives? Not bad. The attention he gave to workforce is probably more than past Mayors had paid.\u00a0His workforce\u00a0reorganization, on the face of it, seems reasonable and the decentralization to the Borough-level should have been done years previously. Again, having a well-connected Mayor allows for a much more meaningful private-public partnership opportunities–and we believe that is mostly good.<\/p>\n Bloomberg, and any New York City Mayor, is being between a rock and a hard place–especially considering that whoever is in charge, the New York City Mayor and the New York Governor are seldom anything but rivals and competitors. There’s seldom any shining knight on a white horse riding in from Albany.<\/p>\n Finally, the comprehensiveness and the sticktoitiveness? of plan implementation is, honestly, astounding. Bloomberg grabbed a hold of New York City, focused it for a decade, and kept it moving in one direction. You try it sometime. See how easy it is.\u00a0 What truly amazes me was Bloomberg’s ability to roll with the punches–the City got some real body blows during his administration: the collapse of the finance industry (remember his tax base\u00a0was the finance industry), Hurricane Sandy, and the Great Recession. Governing New York City is difficult enough without these stocking stuffers.<\/p>\n The Luxury City as World City<\/strong><\/p>\n New York is not Toledo, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, \u00a0Sacramento or even Boston and it’s probably not Atlanta either. \u00a0New York City\u00a0is a “World City”. It’s competitors are London, Paris, Rio, Tokyo, and probably Singapore and Beijing. New York is the financial capital of the world–home to the United Nations. It is a city of eight million human “stories”. Sure, it has loser baseball and football teams–but it has two of each (sorry New Jersey). World\u00a0 Cities compete in a different league than average or even very large national cities. world cities are not inexpensive places to live. World cities are often (not always) ports of entry for immigrants and business. Thirty-seven per cent of New York City’s current residents are foreign-born. Immigration into a world city is notoriously bi-modal–extremely rich and uncommonly poor. Not everybody who lives in a world city is a legal citizen. New York City, in addition, has traditionally served as Puerto Rico’s (and Dominican Republic)\u00a0entry into the U.S. Mainland–and Puerto Rico in recent years has suffered from massive economic difficulties, and currently is dangerously close to bankruptcy (or whatever a federal territory is classified as when it goes broke). Puerto Rican rates of emigration have accordingly been very high. Thus Bloomberg’s famous 2003 utterance:<\/p>\n If New York City is a business, it isn’t Wal-Mart–it isn’t trying to be the lowest price product in the market. It’s a high end product, maybe even a luxury product. New York offers tremendous value, but only for those companies able to capitalize on it. <\/em><\/p>\n (<\/em>Bloomberg speech, January 2003 reported by E.J. McMahon, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Civic Report No. 47, November 2005, “Pricing the ‘Luxury Product’: New York City Taxes Under Mayor Bloomberg)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The “Luxury City” expression\u00a0was set in motion by Bloomberg himself during his first year in office. As Bloomberg\u00a0defended his shift away\u00a0from Guiliani’s incentive-driven business retention, “don’t move to New Jersey”, and attraction program, Bloomberg explained that he wanted to move away from using incentives\u00a0to attract firms to NYC. Rather, he wanted to target\u00a0those firms which could profit from NYC’s assets and could afford NYC’s high cost structure. The expression “luxury city”\u00a0originated from a McKinsey & Company study commissioned by Bloomberg shortly before his taking office. McKinsey was asked to evaluate New York’s market position both in the United States and “the whole wide world”. Using a SWAT methodology, McKinsey observed that city’s strengths included a large educated talent pool and cosmopolitan culture; as weaknesses, McKinsey cited the obvious high costs (taxes, real estate and cost of living). \u00a0The conclusion drawn from\u00a0McKinsey’s assessment was that New York City should market itself to those who valued or needed\u00a0its strengths and who could live with\u00a0the\u00a0its\u00a0weaknesses. Certainly, a cynic could say this conclusion is pretty much “if you’ve got a lemon, make lemonade”–but that’s not fair and probably does a city like New York a disservice.<\/p>\n Accordingly, our first caution for the reader is that New York City’s principal economic development\u00a0competitors do not include Springfield, Massachusetts, Hartford Connecticut or even Trenton\/Jersey City, New Jersey. For Bloomberg, luxury city is a marketing concept used to define New York City’s real competitors–other World Cities.<\/p>\n For those of us familiar with economic development, if this statement\u00a0is meant to be\u00a0a comprehensive New York City economic development strategy, it seems a bit weak in the robustness department. By that I mean there’s not a lot of moving parts in this so-called strategy. The Curmudgeon doesn’t really see\u00a0luxury city\u00a0as a comprehensive economic development\u00a0strategy at all; it’s merely\u00a0part of\u00a0its attraction\/retention program. For Bloomberg, a novice politician, “luxury city” was little more than a business marketing metaphor\u00a0and a justification for re-positioning the City’s marketing and re-targeting its incentive rationale–a re-targeting that makes lots of sense given New York City’s status as a high cost business climate\u00a0World City.<\/p>\n The Revolution Cometh<\/p><\/div>\n It was not his marketing re-targeting, however, that led to “the luxury city” debate; it was his continued assertion in subsequent interviews that\u00a0the firms and their employees located in the City paid a disproportionate share of the taxes needed to maintain vital services and address the needs of those who were not yet in the mainstream economy. \u00a0He never backed away from this observation\u00a0throughout his entire Administration. An example of this accurate, but controversial, linkage is one he provided in an interview during the De Blasio 2013 campaign:<\/p>\n The way to help those who are less fortunate is, number one, to attract more very fortunate people. They are the ones who pay the bills. The people that would get very badly hurt here if you drive out the wealthy are the people he (De Blasio) professes to try to help. Tearing people apart with this ‘two cities’ thing doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s a destructive strategy for those you want to help the most…. but this city is not two groups, and if to some extent it is, it’s one group paying for services for the other.<\/em> (Interview with New York Magazine, 2013)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Linking the rich and big firms to pay for social services to “the other\u00a0half” \u00a0(Jacob Riis) of New York City, however, is asking for trouble. That link,\u00a0to which Bloomberg himself called attention,\u00a0between large resident corporations and the financing of New York City social\/education services\u00a0opens the door\u00a0for a “two cities” attack.\u00a0Luxury city is just the portal-buzz phase\u00a0which leads into the “two cities” critique. The “tale of two cities” dialogue\u00a0in which Bloomberg willingly\u00a0assumes the role of Sydney Carton (the one who got his head chopped off) is the more serious criticism.<\/p>\n Asking For Trouble: Two Cities\u00a0as Neoliberalism<\/strong><\/p>\n Serving three terms\u00a0as New York City mayor\u00a0provides plenty of opportunity to be criticized. The most\u00a0visible and earliest\u00a0two cities\u00a0critique was made\u00a0in\u00a0Julian Brash’s<\/strong>, Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City<\/strong><\/em>, but the concept has also been the center point behind Danny Katch’s<\/strong> “Mayor Michael Bloomberg: A Depreciation”, International Socialist Review, Issue #90<\/strong><\/em> and Dan Steinberg,<\/strong> “Planning the Neo-liberal City”, New Politics, Vol. XIII, No. 4<\/strong><\/em>. To the Curmudgeon, the unifying element in the wide diversity of luxury city\/two cities critiques is class, i.e. social class–rich versus poor–that kind of thing. The second unifying dimension is that proponents of\u00a0Luxury City\/two cities\u00a0critique view Bloomberg as a “neo-liberal”. The two elements tend to travel together.<\/p>\n As background for the reader,\u00a0“two cities”\u00a0proponents view capitalist corporate elites as using the city to serve their self-interests– i.e. make a profit. This can be done by their controlling the political class elected to lead the city, or secondly, to physically grad a hold of key elements of the Mayor’s economic development strategy (usually physical redevelopment, deregulation\u00a0and tax cuts)\u00a0so the corporate elites can transform the city, urban-renewal style, so that portions of the city are physically redeveloped to build new projects for these elites. In this physical redevelopment, existing residents, the poor mostly, are removed, displaced, and uprooted to new areas unwillingly. The rich achieve their profits by manipulating urban America to the inevitable detriment the poor (sometimes the middle class and mom and pop business as well). The real estate and developer community (FIRE)\u00a0are the most commonplace culprits–but big business capitalism is the ultimate cause of the problem. This generalized description of the two cities critique overlaps, very, very closely with the standard critique used in recent years against something called Neo-Liberals and Neo-Liberalism. [From this point on we will not use hyphens in neoliberal or neoliberalism except in quotes]<\/p>\n So the next issue is what the heck is neoliberalism? First of all, despite the existence of a very large amount of literature on the topic, there is not an easily understood and\u00a0consensual definition. Almost everybody who writes about or\u00a0uses the “concept”\/economic approach defines it to fit their particular approach. It is\u00a0fruitless for us in this relatively brief review to\u00a0enter into a precise definition. \u00a0Investopedia defines neoliberalism as:<\/p>\n An approach to economics and social studies in which control of the economic factors is shifted from the public sector to the private sector. Drawing upon principles of neoclassical economics, neo-liberalism suggests that governments reduce deficit spending, limit subsidies, reform tax law to broaden the tax base, remove fixed exchange rates, opening up markets to trade by limiting protectionism, privatizing state run business, allow private property and back deregulation.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Neo-liberalism first jelled during the late 1930’s and came into prominence in the post-World War II period. In more current days, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are held to be examples of neo-liberals in office. Some even called Clinton a neo-liberal. That’s the problem with a fairly loose set of definitions. The thing is most active politicians and economists do not define themselves as neo-liberals or advocates of neo-liberalism, they are labeled as neo-liberals by others. One does not go down to the Auto Bureau and register as a neo-liberal; the usual procedure is to read in an academic journal or magazine that you are, in fact, a neo-liberal. Few outside academia, the disciplines of economics\/planning\/ and maybe political science specifically\u00a0have even heard the word before. Being called a neo-liberal is not meant to be a compliment, like neo-Keynesian is. Nobody in their right mind wants to be willingly called a neo-liberal. It’s like admitting to be an old-style “robber baron” or the banker (Mr. Potter-Lionel Barrymore) in “It’s a Wonderful Life”. “Two cities” is a proxy for “Bloomberg is a neo-liberal” and the expression bridges the gap between academia and the voter.<\/p>\n If the proponents of the luxury city\/two cities approach are the opposite of this, then we can reverse the above definition and at minimum suggest their core issue is to shift control of “the economic factors” from the private sector to the public sector. Essentially for those opposed to neoliberals and neoliberalims, the private sector, economics and the economy, should be subject to democratic controls and accountability and the ends of economics, the practical results of economic growth ought to be to help the citizen and resident as opposed to the corporations and the individual capitalists.\u00a0Antagonists of neoliberalism are usually upset because the normal way neoliberalism operates is that the private sector\u00a0indirectly is able to dominate, or manipulate, the public sector, i.e. government, thereby distorting elections and overturning the more legitimate ends of public policy. So, the neoliberals get their proxies to run for office, and then they get their proxies to intermediate with the citizen and resident. \u00a0Government, in varying degrees,\u00a0is made into a tool of the neoliberals and government policy serves, not the average citizen, but the interests of the neoliberals and their corporations.<\/p>\n But Bloomberg screwed things up and got himself elected three times as mayor. Bloomberg eliminated the middleman. Bloomberg, “the Neo-Liberal”, would directly and legally run the city government. There in lies the nexus of the current Bloomberg’s luxury city\/two cities critique. Bloomberg, by sheer dint of his biography fits is the personification of the neoliberal. The problem with Bloomberg as mayor, however,\u00a0is that he departs from the conventional model by which the neoliberal \u00a0is supposed to operate by directly and personally controling the city. Bloomberg is his own intermediary with the citizen, voter and tax payer. That he was elected for three terms is not only an outrage, but a reality that demands some explanation.<\/p>\n Accordingly, Brash and the others allude to “the Bloomberg Way” so to describe the neoliberal as\u00a0mayor.\u00a0 “Got himself elected” is the right choice of words, because to the luxury city\/two cities proponents Bloomberg bought these elections literally–and the third term he not only\u00a0bought, but compelled city government to make the legal adjustments which made that possible. There is some truth to these charges–that Bloomberg fits the description of a billionaire\u00a0“plutocrat”, that he spent so much in the elections and was a shade heavy-handed the third term elections–provides a level of acceptability to the larger argument. Once in office the independent fortune of the mayor provided Bloomberg some\u00a0insulation against the populist media as well as access to key private and public decision-makers which was so important in his economic development program. Also Bloomberg\u00a0was able to recruit and sometimes pay for the “best and the brightest” to staff his administration. The ability to finance his own election was critical to his independence. Plutocracy yes. but also a mayor able to keep some distance from constituencies, such as unions and neighborhoods. He was the “mayor who couldn’t be bought”–or controlled by traditional New York City powers that be. But if having lots of money and using it to get elected got Bloomberg off on the wrong foot to begin with, the obvious reality that he easily won his elections raises disturbing questions. Why did voters vote for him being the most basic?<\/p>\n Citi-Field (2009): Where the Red Sox Beat the Yankees<\/p><\/div>\n The explanation was Bloomberg the man and his style of leadership–“the Bloomberg Way”:<\/p>\n ‘The Bloomberg Way’ refers to an ostensibly pragmatic, non-ideological approach to urban governance that places a premium on management skill, technical expertise, and data-driven evaluation. In its core formulation, the mayor serves as CEO, the city government is a corporation, business and residents are clients and customers, and the city itself is a product to be branded, marketed and developed, On this logic, the city’s bottom line depends on its ability to generate more property tax revenue, which therefore is a primary consideration when it comes to land use policy and economic development. The flip side, of course, is that distributional concerns–for example, the quality of jobs produced and the impacts of public actions on the stability of neighborhoods and fragile networks of small businesses–are of secondary importance at best. [Steinberg, “Planning the Neo-liberal City”, p. 2]<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Bloomberg’s vision of making New York City a ‘luxury product’–a high status habitat of waterfront playgrounds and neo-artisan style designed to attract the international elite and keep the local middle class wanting to stay despite the sticker shock. On the other [hand] this program of urban renewal for the rich has barely touched the majority of the city’s people who have fallen deeper into poverty and near-poverty. [Danny Katch: “Michael Bloomberg” p. 3]<\/em><\/p>\n Brash charges that\u00a0Bloomberg\u00a0the\u00a0neoliberal mayor and his brand of neoliberal economic development rejected the right of those disadvantaged by\u00a0Bloomberg’s policies and strategies from defending themselves through political conflict and opposition. NIMBY, a traditional enemy of economic developers, in his mind is the legitimate opposition of those hurt, just as gentrification, usually viewed as success by an economic developer, is viewed by the two cities advocate as a defeat for those residents displaced or disadvantaged by the success of the more wealthy\/middle class moving into the neighborhood. Hudson Yards and the Atlantic Project are victories of the corporate rich over the residents and small business in these areas– and are not for the greater good of the City as a whole. In this dialogue there is a battle between technocrats and the people–between experts with their plans and strategies—and the community.\u00a0There is a whole lot of existentialism going on here! This is a circle that is not going to be squared any time soon.<\/p>\n The First Neoliberal<\/p><\/div>\n Bloomberg (a member of the Transnational Capitalist Class) and his “best and brightest” administration (the Professional-Managerial Class, in our case Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development) took over through elections which Bloomberg “bought” and used government to cram down through planning, economic development projects\/incentives\u00a0and branding a set of policy goals and programs which ran counter to the interests of the average citizen, the lower classes, small mom and pop business, immigrants, and neighborhoods of color. Bloomberg advanced the interests of his neoliberal chums (transnational capitalism) directly by controlling government himself. De Blasio, in adopting major tenets of the luxury city\/two cities critique, placed himself, his campaign, and his future Administration as a departure of the neoliberal domination of city government. He would\u00a0require politics, economics, planning, and economic development to serve the interests of those outside the neoliberal capitalist framework.\u00a0 Whether or not all this is an attack on specific\u00a0Bloomberg’s economic development program and strategy is unclear–at least to the Curmudgeon.<\/p>\n Now whether that is what the voters actually voted for–well, that is another matter. Bloomberg wasn’t defeated; he was termed out.\u00a0No doubt, after twelve years in office, many simply wanted a new face and a new approach and in a one party city, De Blasio was the guy who came out on top.<\/p>\n The Curmudgeon Intrudes and Concludes<\/strong><\/p>\n While the Curmudgeon sees luxury city marketing strategy as appropriate in a competitive world cities environment, the opponents to the luxury city see it as a selling of the city and its residents to capitalist bidders for locating in the geography where they can best make profits–at the expense of those who are already living and working in such geographies. Does this conflict in approach raise the issue of whom should be the immediate beneficiary of an economic development strategy or tool? Does it question the conventional economic development notion that helping business and its elites is the best way to “raise all boats”? Of course.<\/p>\n The luxury city\/two cities debate penetrates the crux of what economic development\u00a0is and who and how it is supposed to help. Economic developers, usually without a great deal of forethought, work for “the city”–all its residents and tax payers–for the city “as a whole”, “the greatest good for the greatest number”. Proponents of the luxury city\/two cities approach, however,\u00a0see this conventional economic development perspective as constructing an abstract entity (the city as a whole) which doesn’t really exist. What exists to them is the average or poor person who is being exploited by an economic system run by corporate plutocrats and served by their technocrats (economic developers fitting into that group).\u00a0\u00a0Anti-Neo-Liberals do not advocate for the city as a whole, but for the less advantaged in that city–and helping rich get rich and hoping that some tidbits will drop from their table through trickle down is not what “they are about”. Julian\u00a0Brash?\u00a0 points out this divergence, this zero-sum politics, very well.<\/p>\n The irony to the Curmudgeon is that to him Bloomberg was, at best, an indifferent neoliberal. Neoliberals were supposed to cut taxes and fees–Bloomberg increased them a lot. They are supposed to deregulate and Bloomberg, among other things, stopped me from driving through Times Square, and took away my salt and Slurpee. His affordable housing program may not have been all that everyone wanted it to be–it certainly was large in scale\u00a0and expensive. His takeover of the school system was meant to make it better, not prepare it for a charter school future–and he paid the teachers more and hired more of them. Bloomberg was big on public-private partnerships (arts and culture, as well as workforce and schools)\u00a0and his physical redevelopment projects fit the neo-liberal mold, but he used the “State” (city government) a great deal.<\/p>\n The Mayor calls\u00a0the “two cities” attack a\u00a0class war–and that label is not unreasonable. My take is that most proponents of the luxury city\/two cities attack Bloomberg and his economic development programs because he is the personification of a Neoliberal–which is bad, very bad. Done\u00a0by somebody else–somebody who did not coin ” the Bloomberg Way”–the Curmudgeon is not sure they would have had as much of\u00a0a problem or gathered as much momentum. In other words, their criticism may be more political and personal, than economic.\u00a0For the rest of us, absent a mayor such as Bloomberg (the neoliberal who runs the city directly without a middleman)–it is less likely that we will see the luxury city\/two city\u00a0debate come up in your big city. College and university towns may be more susceptible because of a more academics voting.<\/p>\n The luxury city critique is mostly associated with world cities such as New York City. Most economic developers don’t work in a world city and would be nuts to try to copy the luxury city brand. For NYC, however, the luxury city seemed quite appropriate; \u00a0at a minimum it defines its attraction program in terms relevant to its real competition–and it takes NYC out of the headline-grabbing ” let’s make a deal” of Texas, or the slavish and incompetent\u00a0humiliation of Maryland attracting “House of Cards”.<\/p>\n But as the Curmudgeon signs off, he ends by observing that the debate does alert\/reacquaint the economic developer to the bi-polar nature of his\/her profession. Most of us, while we may be quite “progressive” in our personal politics (or not), as professionals we can be attacked\u00a0as being intermediaries in the this so-called neoliberal domination of the city for private profit. Certainly, it is awfully hard to do economic development without working “WITH” the private sector. We do frequently help millionaires make more money. And a rising tide may raise most boats–but a few don’t make it and get broken to pieces on the rocks. Few, if any of us, want to hurt those who cannot defend themselves–and yet we are ambivalent about letting those folk defend their perceived interests. The Curmudgeon personally has used eminent domain, hated public hearings and said (still says)\u00a0many an unkind word about NIMBYs and BANANAs. Being an economic developer may mean one is resident of both of “the two cities”. That is a bit awkward.<\/p>\n As I said earlier, there is a lot of existentialism in our profession and that circle raised in this review is not going to be squared very soon.<\/p>\n\n
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![\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I’ve been reading stuff lately about the goings on in New York City. The new De Blasio administration is\u00a0proclaimed by many to be the wave of the future? For\u00a0me it’s too early to tell. Only fair\u00a0to give\u00a0the poor soul at least a full year before we see what his new approach shakes down to be. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":3070,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,11],"tags":[],"post_folder":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3061"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3061"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4923,"href":"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3061\/revisions\/4923"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3061"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=3061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/640px-Antoine-Fran\u00e7ois_Callet_-_Louis_XVI_roi_de_France_et_de_Navarre_1754-1793_rev\u00eatu_du_grand_costume_royal_en_1779_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg\"){kind=link}