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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. The New York City economy one year into the pandemic. Can vaccinations and Shakespeare bring back New York City's lost tourism and arts jobs? Will the city's thriving tech sector keep its jobs here when people go back to the office? Why are some investors ready to gamble on a retail shopping comeback? These are some of the core questions posed in a four-part series from the news organization, THE CITY. It's by Greg David who covers business for them and directs the business and economics reporting program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and Greg David joins us now. Hi, Greg. Welcome back to WNYC.

Greg David: Thank you, Brian. Glad to be here.

Brian: Your series begins with some basic stats on just how many jobs were lost in the city over the past year, the most jobs lost in one year since they started keeping good records after World War II, you tell us. Want to give us the basics and how you compare this to the other famous crashes in New York history?

Greg: 631,000 jobs lost. I did December to December to capture it that way because they're slightly different ways to do it. How bad is that? The worst post-war economic downturn in New York City cost 620,000 jobs, but that was over a seven or eight-year period. So it's extraordinary, an extraordinary decline by any measure. It's almost twice as many jobs as we lost in '87 to '93. The great recession that hurt the country so badly, barely affected New York. 2008/2009, 130,000 jobs. Yes, this is unprecedented. Unprecedented damage, unprecedented pain.

Brian: This one hit certain sectors that most of us know about the hardest: Restaurants, performing arts, tourism and travel, retail. Anything else that belongs in that top tier of our awareness for this?

Greg: Those are the main ones. The one that really matters, of course, is leisure and hospitality, that's tourism. 250,000 jobs disappeared. That's over half, but there were a couple other places that need to be mentioned. Professional and business services and education and health services, both lost around 80,000 jobs. So that's a big deal, too.

Brian: Let's go through some of those sectors and how you address them in your four articles. Your headline for article three, Can Vaccinations and Shakespeare Bring Back New York City's Lost Tourism and Arts Jobs? Is there a yes or no answer?

Greg: Well, the answer is yes, but the question is, how long will it take and how much can we get back? I was surprised when I did the reporting for this story. I talked to a couple of hotel general managers, who actually are optimistic about the fourth quarter. They think there will be a lot of domestic tourists in New York by the end of the year. Vaccinations are one piece of the equation, but the other piece of the equation is that Americans who were not hard hit by the pandemic have saved an enormous amount of money.

There was a stat, there's something called personal income that we track nationally, and savings in America in February 2020 were about $1.3 trillion. Well, they're about to hit $4 trillion. That's an enormous amount of money saved that we think people are going to be willing to spend. Then there's the question of people traveling. To be frank, I'm fully vaccinated, and I worked really hard to get my partner to go on a spring vacation. She's not ready to do that yet, but I think we are going to do some US traveling this summer. If I'm typical, there will be tourists coming to New York.

The other thing that's really important about tourists is, both hotel managers mentioned to me the outdoor plans that Lincoln Center has. An enormous programming that's going to take place there, and that came before Shakespeare in the Park said they would be back. So there are going to be reasons for people to travel in New York, and that's the upside of this incredibly hard-hit industry.

The reason that the New York City economy prospered so much in the last decade is that we diversified away from Wall Street. The number one way we diversified is to build this great tourism industry, employing something like 400,000 people. These were a lot of jobs that don't require college degrees, so they were available to lots of people. Many of them are unionized, many of them pay well, and yet that turned out to be our great vulnerability when the Coronavirus meant that there were no tourists coming to New York.

Brian: Yes, hundreds of thousands have lost jobs. That stat that you had, more than half of the leisure and hospitality jobs have disappeared in the pandemic. I want to play a clip of Mayor de Blasio from just yesterday, and I'll admit this surprised me, as he encouraged out-of-town tourists to start coming back.

Mayor de Blasio: I think you're going to see a really active summer, by the way. You talked about tourism earlier, I say to all the folks looking for someplace to go, come to New York City. It's going to be safe, it's going to be exciting, you're going to see a huge amount of cultural activity, particularly outdoors.

Brian: I am curious, Greg, if the mayor is delivering a mixed message. I take it from your previous answer that you're also bullish on this and you think it's okay, but telling New Yorkers not to go out in crowds, as the mayor does regularly, but then trying to lure tourists back to places like Time Square, when we saw what happened in Miami Beach this week.

Greg: Yes, but it all depends on what you think about the vaccines. I'm a believer in the vaccines. I'm a believer in the evidence. There's a very interesting story in The Times today about how the US media has been overly negative in its reporting of the vaccine, which I happen to agree with. Actually, I'm calling you from my office at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. It was reopened a week ago Monday. I must say there are only two or three of us here, but I'm taking the train in. I'm here. I feel perfectly safe.

As a matter of fact, I intend to bring, I run another program at the J School, the Ravitch Fiscal Reporting Program. I'm going to bring about 20 journalists from around the country to New York, the second week of June. I'm a believer it will be safe, and I'm a believer that people can come. If there are a lot of people like me, tourism will begin to come back. I do know this, Brian, there are only this- the New York City economy we knew before the pandemic will not recover unless two things happen: The tourists return and the office workers return. If those two things don't happen, we are looking at a pretty bleak future.

Brian: I'll get to get to the office workers in a little more depth in a second. In your case, how will you manage 20 visiting out-of-town journalists or journalism students? Will they do things in groups of 20 indoors? How will you manage distances?

Greg: Yes. I have a major hotel conference room, and I believe we can social distance. I believe that virtually everyone there will be vaccinated by then, and I believe that those who are not, I will ask to get a COVID test. Yes, we will abide by the social distancing rules, we will have enough room to do the six feet, but yes, we will be indoors.

Brian: You write in your article series that employers expect more than half of their workforce to work remotely at least part of the time going forward. If that happens, you write, the ripple effect will make the recovery a long-term proposition. But those remote workers are by definition still employed, so describe the ripple effect.

Greg: Well, I came back to Time Square and half the restaurants that I used to go to from my office when I wanted to get lunch are closed. I don't know if they're permanently closed or whatever. Actually, the options to eat around the J School have been sharply diminished, and there are a lot of jobs in that. That's where if we don't get the bustle back in midtown and in the other business districts, all the businesses that feed off that, just won't be recovering, won't be rehiring workers. That's where the issue is.

Then the other issue about remote work is whether remote work means companies won't be tied to New York. They'll give up office space. Maybe they'll leave-- You know the [unintelligible 00:09:18] New York business broke a story two weeks ago. JetBlue is considering pulling up stakes from Long Island City and moving to Florida entirely. They might not decide to do entirely, but that's a harbinger of something we need to watch.

Brian: Because of what in their case, do you know?

Greg: They didn't specify, except to say that they were adjusting to remote work. They did make some allusion to the fact that Florida is a less costly place and the airline business hasn't been very good. I actually am working on a story that will publish I think tonight or tomorrow, about the many fears of business leaders that higher taxes in New York State will lead to a major exodus of wealthy people and companies.

Brian: The office work conversation leads us to the article in your series headlined, Welcome to Googletown: New York City's Tech Sector Thrives During Pandemic, but Will it Stick Around for the Recovery? First, what's Googletown? Is there a neighborhood actually getting that nickname or did you just make it up for the piece?

Greg: I made it up for the piece, but I think we should call Chelsea Googletown. There are 11,000 Google workers for Chelsea and nearby Hudson Square, so I think it could be called Googletown, yes. Well, we'll see if it sticks. Google is the city's most largest tech employer. I talked to Google about what their plans are, and they have amassed a tremendous amount of real estate there. They say they're keeping it and they say that they expect a large number of their workers to come back.

Brian: You say Amazon and Facebook too, all investing in jobs in the city before the pandemic. That's interesting that you say they're expecting people to come back because those are companies that could have a lot of tech sector employees working from home on an ongoing basis. Twitter, which I guess is located on the west coast, says they want to do that much, much, much, much more permanently. When you ask in the headline, "Will they stick around, the tech companies?" Stick around in what sense?

Greg: Well, that is another great unknown. Will they do more remote work? Will they have found that remote work works or will they, and we're getting the same kind of feedback from people in financial services too, saying we have to collaborate. What we do involves density and involves proximity. This is a really good question. I did talk to a company called K3. They're a deep tech company, software, integration of people's various operating systems.

They had required all their 24 employees to live within commuting distance of New York City and the office. They didn't have to come in every day, but they had to live within commuting distance. The CEO told me that he's not sure he's going to be able to do that when the pandemic is over, he may be allowing some of those people to live much further away.

I can't tell you I know what's going to happen, because I do not, and I don't believe that anyone really knows. They're speculating or mostly I think they're hoping about what's going to happen, but this is like the second central question for New York's future. Will companies decide that most of the workers have to come back to the office because that's how we have a culture and that's how we thrive? Or will they decide, "No, this works. People come to the office some. Some people won't ever come to the office. We'll go in that direction."

We have something like 500 million square feet of office space in Manhattan. What if we can't fill a third of it? The economic implications of that are enormous. By the way, don't tell me we'll just convert it to housing, because if we don't have those people coming for the economy, we probably don't need that housing.

Brian: Listeners, we have a few minutes left with, and we can take a few phone calls for Greg David, who reports on business and economics for the nonprofit news organization, THE CITY. He did this four-part series on different sectors of the New York city economy and how they will or won't or might come back as the pandemic eases. He also is the Business and Economics Reporting Program Director at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Any questions on what Greg's been saying so far in this conversation? 646-435-7280. This is WNYC-FM HD and AM New York, WNJT FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WSJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey Public Radio. Andrew in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Andrew.

Andrew: Hello, Professor Davis.

Brian: David.

Andrew: I just wanted to say that as a city worker, I feel like the problem here is that real companies have had a chance to reimagine how work works, and to give up paying for square footage and work remotely and make efficiency gains. So now at the altar of the real estate board, city workers will be asked to come back, but none of us go to Fresh & Co and all the restaurants you mentioned in Times Square for lunch every day. We bring our tuna fish sandwiches, and I just don't ever see it coming back. I wanted to maybe ask if you could speak to the difference between the corporate world and the municipal employee world? I'll take my answer off the air. Thanks.

Brian: Thank you very much. That is relevant to the news that the mayor made yesterday, saying he will start calling city workers back to their office jobs, those who have desk jobs, starting in May. Not all at once, but he's making a point of it. Greg, what would you say to Andrew?

Greg: Well, just for the record, I'm not eating in those restaurants either, you know. I'm eating at the cheap deli and places like that, and those are the places I'm worried about, though I'm worried about the employment generally. Those are the places that have gone out of business. Yes, the mayor has been under enormous pressure to bring city workers back as a sign. Absolutely true. But he's not the only one because financial services companies from JPMorgan Chase to Citi group to Goldman Sachs, have started to bring their workforces back too.

We shall have to see what's going to happen. At this point, the ability to get a vaccine is rapidly increasing, and it is going to be safe for many people to come back. If we do reimagine, if companies have really reimagined how workforce is going to be, there's all kinds of things that are going to long-term change. For city workers, many of you will lose your jobs because there won't be enough money to pay for them. It's just going to be a fact of life.

We've gone from having a fiscal crisis to an embarrassment of riches for the next two years because tax revenues were higher than we expected, and because the federal aid is beyond anyone's expectations as of a few months ago. But after we get through two years or so, if we have an economy of 3.5 million jobs instead of 4.4 million jobs, we will have to downsize all expectations about New York, and that's the long-term worry.

Brian: Marissa in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hi, Marissa.

Marissa: Hi. I just was wondering if this is a little bit disingenuous in that it's not necessarily, New York City isn't only Manhattan. If people remain working remotely in the outer boroughs, then it would really just be a wealth redistribution, in that those jobs would become jobs that are located in the outer boroughs. Since many people commute in from these other boroughs, and you go in and even if you eat at the cheap deli in Manhattan, you're looking at spending two to three times what you would spend at the cheap deli in Bronx.

Brian: Yes. It's a great question, and Greg your article points out, one of your articles, that the retail sector, which I assume includes lunch places, did not sink as badly in Brooklyn as it did in Manhattan, just to take one outer borough example.

Greg: That's exactly right. There will be people that will transfer their jobs to the boroughs, but don't forget, we have an enormous number of commuters from outside the city. If those people aren't coming in, that will make a big difference. I believe 40% of finance workers come from outside the city.

Secondly, let's be clear, if the tourism industry doesn't come back, that is an enormous load of people who live in the boroughs. That's why the Bronx has the highest unemployment rate in the city, because the Bronx was the home, disproportionately, to people in face-to-face industries, people in leisure and hospitality, and in other essential jobs. I actually see it this way. I see you're right about Brooklyn, but you're not right about Queens and the Bronx.

Brian: Last question. Headline from your article number four. Early Signs of a New York City Retail Return With Dealmakers Ready to Gamble. Who's gambling on what?

Greg David: Restaurateurs are out there kicking the tires on vacant spaces. Real estate brokers told me that, to be frank, and I have to say I usually take what real estate brokers with a grain of salt because their job requires them to be optimistic or overly optimistic, but I found restaurateurs who were indeed kicking the tires. They're out looking for spaces to expand. They're doing that because they do believe the economy's coming back and they're doing that because landlords are willing to negotiate. Restaurateurs are willing to take spaces when the landlord is willing to do one or two years at 10% of revenue, with market rates being imposed in year three or four.

As a matter of fact, just one final point on this. Over the last few months I've talked to many small businesses, and those who talked to me and have remained in business are doing so because their landlords have cut their rent at least in half. Landlords, not all, but many landlords have made enormous strides to preserve shops and sometimes office tenants in their spaces, hoping for a recovery and eventual deal-making. They're not going to get all the rent back, but they're going to get some.

Brian: The four part series on New York City's economy now is in the not-for-profit news organization, THE CITY by Greg David, who covers business for them and directs the business and economics reporting program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Greg, thank you very, very much.

Greg: Thank you.

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