Stop the forced return to office
New York City needs radical intervention to recover from the pandemic. The city’s unemployment rate is 9.4%, up from 3.6% in January 2020, and there are 300,000 fewer workers in that same period as well. By contrast, the rest of New York State has a 5% unemployment rate, and the United States has recovered even faster at 4.6%.
As we debate how to get New Yorkers engaged in the post-COVID economy, there seem to be two emerging schools of thought. One is simply put: to go back. Last week, Gov. Hochul asked New Yorkers to make returning to the office their New Year’s Resolution, following Gov. Cuomo’s similar admonishments to business leaders to return their employees to the office by this past Labor Day. Mayor de Blasio, not to be outdone, had also pushed for the full return of city employees to the office this fall.
What’s been missing from each of these pushes? Why going back en masse makes sense for those workers and businesses, and not just for the office-adjacent food service, retail and other service businesses in lower and midtown Manhattan, as well as for public transit ridership.
Prior to the pandemic, New Yorkers were struggling with the longest commutes of any major city, a perennial affordability crisis, and an aging, underfunded and literally leaky transit system. Based on annual Census Bureau estimates over the past several years, New York City was also losing more residents to other states for years.
While returning to our prepandemic economy may seem comfortable because it is known and has many positives, it also feels short-sighted. And workers agree; there’s a reason quitting rates have recently reached highs not seen since the U.S. Department of Labor started tracking “quits” in the labor market. As a former boss once remarked, chaining people to their desks is generally not an effective job retention strategy.
What’s the alternative? Embracing where New York has a distinct advantage compared to the Austins and Miamis that are racing to build glass towers we already have in abundance: innovation. While this approach is riskier, it will be more successful than turning back the clock to an arguably slow death that was already dimming the city’s vitality.
How do we start creating this new future? Let’s start by attracting workers who are asserting their power, and embrace policies that champion workplace flexibility, such as enacting a variant of the U.K.’s Right to Request Flexible Work law. It requires businesses to review and provide a rationale for rejecting a worker’s flexible hours work request.
Let’s invest in flexible work locations in boroughs outside Manhattan to reduce worker commutes and support the development of more vibrant commercial hubs across the city. Last year, when I worked in state government, a civil servant raised the idea of creating non-agency-specific government workspaces closer to where she and other state employees lived. In addition to significantly reducing transit time, this approach could improve government effectiveness by reducing bureaucratic silos which are just as confusing to government employees as they are to the public.
Just think about extending that type of cross-pollination across New York’s many diverse industries outside of commercial Manhattan and Brooklyn. Why don’t we create hubs like that in Richmond Hill, East New York and Morris Heights for all workers?
We don’t need to do this at the exclusion of Manhattan’s office-adjacent workers, whose future already looks hazy in the best return-to-work scenarios. Let’s provide grants and loans for businesses to relocate to other parts of the city and for workers to create new food and retail businesses where rents are lower and workers are spending their money. This past year, my husband and I have spent significantly more money in our neighborhood, Woodside, than when we commuted five days a week to Manhattan. Western Queens is now the center of our neighbors’ work and home lives, making it that much more durable of an area to open a thriving business.
Is Midtown dead under this vision? Not at all. We should continue to champion tourism, which our leaders have been doing a great job of, and also business visitors. Paradoxically, conferences and larger in-person company gatherings will become more important because of the lack of in-person interaction five days a week to build company culture and align on business priorities. Let’s make New York the destination for every corporate and business retreat through expanding flexible work, event and play spaces as well as continuing to invest in our creative industry.
Post-pandemic, let’s truly make a Sinatra-esque “brand new start of it.” There are no shortage of bold ideas, including the Center for an Urban Future’s 250 Ideas from New Yorkers, which makes the easiest solution — moving backwards — particularly at odds with the post-COVID future that New York should be at the forefront of defining.