3 Takeaways - A Blueprint for Reimagining Our Cities (#228)

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

Our cities need to be revitalized to make them more appealing. But how? Seth Pinsky, the former CEO of New York City's Economic Development Corporation, has answers. Here, he talks knowingly about creative ways to stimulate growth; how to combat the skepticism that government can deliver on its promises; the importance of what he calls magnetic infrastructure; and more.

Most people, both in the US and elsewhere in the world, live in cities. And we take our cities as they are, assuming they're hard to change, especially in positive ways. But it is possible to change cities, even ones as densely populated with skyscrapers, buildings, sidewalks, and people as New York. How can cities become more vibrant and what does an inspiring renewal that attracts new residents and businesses revitalizes neglected neighborhoods and creates a better city look like?

Hi everyone I'm Lynn Toman and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today I'm excited to be with Seth Pinsky.

Seth was the head of New York City's economic development arm under Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Mayor Bloomberg appointed Seth as president and then CEO of New York City's Economic Development Corporation. New York has been revitalized by a wide variety of diverse and innovative initiatives. These include a new sports stadium, enormous new public spaces and gardens, transformed neighborhoods, a new technology campus, and strengthened arts, culture, and entertainment. After spearheading New York City's economic development corporation, Seth became head of one of the city's

preeminent cultural organizations, the 92nd Street Y. I am excited to find out the innovative ways that cities can be re-energized. Welcome, Seth, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today. Thank you. It's great to be here. It is my pleasure to have you as a guest today. Seth, New York is a heavily built up city where it's hard to get things done between powerful unions, real estate owners and Wall Street. You were selected to head the Economic Development Corporation by Mayor Mike Bloomberg, one

of the best mayors any city has ever had. How did you start? I entered city government in 2003, which was not that long after the September 11 attacks on New York City. I joined the administration, which had actually started on January 1st, 2002. And as Mayor Bloomberg took his oath of office, the World Trade Center site was literally still smoldering.

So in many ways, what was the greatest challenge of the Bloomberg administration that is the September 11th tragedy and figuring out how to move the city forward beyond that was also the greatest opportunity for the city because it was clear to almost everyone that something significant had to be done if the city were to be saved, let alone were to grow again and become prosperous. And actually, throughout Mayor Bloomberg's time in office over the 12 years that he was in office, there were several major catastrophes that befell the city that the administration

had to respond to. September 11th, 1st, the 2008 financial crisis, second, Superstorm Sandy towards the end of his time in office. And each of those allowed the administration to look anew at the way the city operated in its entirety, to question whether the way it had been operating before was the right way, and to build a consensus among multiple stakeholders as to what the direction forward would be. I think the most important thing that

distinguished the Bloomberg administration in trying to answer all of those questions was the very rigorous approach to analyzing what the needs of the city were. And what I think was really important and that a lot of people don't appreciate about the administration was the amount of time that we put into first framing the question of what is the problem before we jumped to the answers

to the question. And in government, what tends to happen is the opposite that everyone likes answers. And so they jump to answers without necessarily knowing if the answers that they're giving are the answers to the real questions that are creating the problems in the first place. So there were several crises.

And each time you and the Bloomberg administration use those crises as opportunities. How did you use Hurricane Sandy as an opportunity? Hurricane Sandy was a terrible tragedy. There were billions of dollars in property damage, dozens of lives were lost, people were rendered homeless. It was a really terrible event in the history of the city. As the city was beginning to recover from the hurricane, I actually was on paternity leave. And about two weeks into my paternity leave,

I got a phone call from the deputy mayor, to my reported Bob Steele, who said that coming out of Superstorm Sandy, Mayor Bloomberg and the senior leadership at City Hall believed that there was a once in a generation opportunity to think about how climate change might impact New York City in the decades to hit. What they saw was one, that people were now focused on the issue of climate change in a way that they had not been prior to the storm, and two, that there would be very significant federal funding

coming into New York that we could use if we invested it strategically to strengthen the city and to make it more resilient. So they asked me if I would come back from paternity leave and to head up an effort called the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency that had as its goal to take the question first of what did we think over the coming decades would be the impact of climate change

and what could the city do to ensure that it would be as resilient as possible as it rebuilt in the face of what we knew were going to be significant challenges that climate change would bring. Eventually we ended up putting together a 20 billion dollar 400 plus initiative blueprint which has not been entirely followed since the Bloomberg administration left office but many of the aspects have been followed and I think as a result of it the city is now better positioned for climate change than it would have been followed. And I think as a result of it, the city is now better positioned for climate change than it would have been

otherwise. Can you give two or three specific examples of what was accomplished? To start, we changed elements of the building code so that, for example, when buildings were built and had electric generators, those generators, instead of being put in the basement of buildings where if flooding occurred, they would be knocked out, had to be put at

higher elevation in the buildings. We also looked at much more ambitious neighborhood wide interventions. For example, we proposed construction of a major seawall along the eastern frontage of Staten Island that faced the Atlantic Ocean, an area that had been devastated by the storm. That project, as I understand it, is now moving forward under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers and should protect dozens of neighborhoods from the sort of really devastating impact that occurred in 2012 and ensure that that doesn't happen going forward.

You mentioned the financial crisis. Many cities are dependent on one industry, and New York was no exception. It was very dependent on Wall Street. And when Wall Street had bad years, the city suffered both economically and in terms of jobs. One of your goals was to diversify the city away from finance. And diversifying a city's business is a key objective of many cities, especially when the key industry or

key companies move elsewhere. But unfortunately, many cities are not successful at doing this. How did you think about diversifying New York's economic base and what did you do? From the very beginning of the Bloomberg administration, there was an acknowledgement that New York was too dependent on financial services. And just to be clear, the goal was never to reduce the size of the financial services industry in New York. It was to grow other industries so that they could account for an even larger percentage of the city's economy. So in other words, we wanted to grow the pie and not shrink one piece of it.

From the very early days, the administration had a decent amount of success with this diversification initiative. We increased the amount of film and television filming that occurred in the city. We increased tourism and there were a number of other industries that grew. But when 2008 came around, it was very clear when the financial markets collapsed, that we still were highly dependent on Wall Street. And it looked to us like the impacts of the 2008 downturn were going to be really devastating to the city, as frankly they were to many parts of the country, but especially here.

So the approach that we took was that first we started to study the issue. And what we saw was that it was unlikely that the financial services industry was going to be growing any time soon. In fact, it was likely that it was gonna be shrinking. But that two things were going to be occurring in New York. One was that there was one part

of the financial services industry that our studies indicated might be less impacted than the rest of the industry, which was venture capital. That was an area that New York had never been particularly successful in. And the second was that as people were being laid off in more traditional New York industries like financial services and professional services, many of which are dependent on financial services, that a lot of talent would suddenly be let loose. And there was a risk that those people would leave the city.

So our focus very quickly became two-pronged. One was that we had a goal of trying to tie those people back down to New York. And two was that we wanted to grow the venture capital sector. And so what we landed on was the idea of trying to promote entrepreneurialism in the city. We really focused on making new sources of capital available to entrepreneurs, training people who had never worked in an

entrepreneurial environment before in the skills that they would need, not in a large corporation but in a small startup, and creating spaces that would allow them to start these businesses and get support. We started to see, which really surprised us, was that the businesses that people were founding tended to be technology businesses. And so we began to really focus on growing the technology industry in the city. We eventually put together a roadmap for achieving that goal, the flagship initiative of

which was the creation of a new engineering and applied sciences campus that was built by Israeli University, the Technion in Cornell on Roosevelt Island, which is in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. It was a $2 million investment and I'm pleased to say that today it has hundreds of students and is turning out new businesses and new talent that's fueling the growth of what is now by everyone's estimation not only the probably the second most important industry in the city behind Wall Street, but also an industry that has now made New York the number two center of technology anywhere in the country and maybe anywhere in the world. You also thought about geographic diversification. You thought New York was too centered on Manhattan and its central business district as opposed to the other four

boroughs of New York City, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. How did you think about diversifying the city geographically and how did you do that? A lot of it was about zoning and making sure that there were areas that were zoned so that they could become alternative central business districts for the city. And so we looked at areas like the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront, Long Island City, Williamsburg, Green Point, places that today are thriving and booming areas. But back at the beginning of the administration had suffered from underinvestment for decades. We looked at areas like downtown Jamaica and downtown Brooklyn in the areas of the South Bronx and Harlem. Another part of it was making strategic investments

to spur development, to kind of get the flywheel turning in many of those areas, using city-owned land to attract developers, getting them to build projects that then would spur further development around them, making investments in infrastructure around those neighborhoods neighborhoods from parks to schools to cultural institutions and such. And then there were even more creative efforts, like we looked at the fact that many

of the city's own offices were located in lower Manhattan, and buildings that were in terrible condition. So our own workforce were in terrible buildings. And what we did was we worked to move the workforce out of those buildings, to sell those buildings to private developers, to spur new economic activity in Lower Manhattan, and then to seed new development in other communities with the workforce that had previously been in Lower Manhattan, again, as a way

to get the flywheel turning. So for example, we moved the Department of Health that had previously been in lower Manhattan, again, as a way to get the flywheel turning. So for example, we moved the Department of Health from lower Manhattan to Long Island City that allowed Tishman Spire to build a major new development at a huge transit node, which today is now one of the most densely developed areas of the city that at the time was really the backwater. The High Line, which transformed a derelict rail yard, is an example to me of an extremely innovative project. Can you talk about that? The High Line was a project that had been discussed often on

outside of city government. Within city government there was actually hostility under previous administrations to the idea of revitalization. This was an elevated railroad that ran from rail yards in the West 30s down the west side of Manhattan, previously brought supplies and goods to the factories that had once lined it. By the time the Bloomberg administration came into office, those factories were all closed and the rail line was no longer running. And there had been an effort actually to tear the rail line down.

The administration instead came up with a very innovative plan to redevelop the Highline itself as an elevated park. But in order to do that, the city needed to get the permission of the landowners who owned the property around and the development rights around the High Line. And so an incentive program essentially was put in place that allowed the people who owned those development rights to transfer those development

rights off of the High Line and onto the avenues that abutted the High Line and then cleared the way for the city to make the investment in the Highline and onto the avenues that abutted the Highline and then cleared the way for the city to make the investment in the Highline. And today, the Highline not only is a huge tourist attraction and a beautiful work of architecture, but along the Highline has become one of the most vital and vibrant areas of the city with many offices of technology companies as well as new housing and other investments that have been made. And you know again it's an example of how with strategic investments in what I like to call magnetic infrastructure, the stuff that makes cities attractive, how you can then

attract enormous amounts of private investment, which really gets things going for a neighborhood or a city. It isn't just large and beautiful and a benefit to New York, but it's become a model that's been replicated in other cities around the world and points to a strategy for redevelopment that really can work in lots of places in many different countries.

Hudson Yards is another innovative project. It transformed a 10 plus block area of the city that was previously known as Hell's Kitchen. Can you talk about that? Dan Dockdorff was the first deputy mayor for economic development. His title was economic development and rebuilding relating to the World Trade Center. Hudson Yards was another project that came out of Dan's mind. And the issue that he was trying to address

was the fact that there are two large open rail yards that are on the west side of Manhattan that are in many ways a gaping hole that prevented development from occurring around them. And what was really innovative about the plan was that the biggest challenge to developing the Hudson Yards was a combination of two things. One was building a deck over the rail yard so that you could develop on top of them. And the other was that the neighborhood was off of the subway system.

It really was not accessible to people who were coming from most parts of the region. So what Dan understood was that if the city were to rezone the area and allow more high-density development, which would also solve another problem the city was facing, which was that we didn't have enough modern office stock, that if we were to rezone the area, that we could borrow against the future tax revenues that would be generated by that development and use that money up front to extend the subway to the Hudson Yards from what had then been its terminus at Times Square. And the city did exactly that. It turned out that not only was the city able to use the tax revenues to pay for the subway, but it's been generating a surplus of tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars a year from that tax revenue. And it has

a vital new central business district that previously had not existed. Seth, you've talked about this huge variety of successful transformations. What are the keys to success? I think that there are a few things. One is that it's very important when you're in government to stop and ask what the questions are that you're trying to answer before jumping to answers. And that upfront analysis is really key. Number two is that the key to economic development is talent. And the key to talent is quality of life. And an important sort of quality of life is magnetic infrastructure. And therefore,

when people think about arts and culture and they think about entertainment and restaurants, those are not just nice to haves for a city. They are critical to attracting that talent and starting that virtuous cycle. And number three is that it's not just about announcing initiatives. It's about making sure that you have the mechanics in place to actually deliver on your promise. And one of the things that I think we're seeing today when it comes to government, whether it be city, state, or federal, is a real skepticism that government can actually deliver on its promises. And focusing on competence is so important for any government, and it is absolutely necessary.

It doesn't matter how much money you put into the system, if the system itself is not working, then nothing's going to come out the other end. Seth, you're now leading one of New York's premier arts and cultural institutions, the 92nd Street Y. People like Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Peggy Noonan, and Malcolm Gladwell all come to the 92nd Street Y, but it's also a place where people come for coffee. How do you think about arts and culture in a city? Arts and culture are maybe the best example of what I think of

as magnetic infrastructure. I remember when I was running the Economic Development Corporation, what I used to say about arts and culture in New York was that it was a unique industry because it played three different roles. The first role was that it is what gave the heart to New York. It produces beauty, it produces works that are thought provoking, it brings people together in important conversations. And so in and of itself, it's a good. In addition to that, arts and culture are an enormous economic sector in the city.

They generate jobs. They bring tourists. They generate all sorts of economic activity just as businesses. But what makes them really important to the city is that they are a key aspect of our magnetic infrastructure. That when people are thinking about coming to work in New York, when people are thinking about coming to live in New York, and they think of all the hassles that are associated

with those decisions, and then they try to say to themselves, well, then why is it worth it for me to come? It's things like the 92nd Street Y, like the Metropolitan Museum, like Lincoln Center that make it all worth putting up with. It is because of institutions like ours and all the other leading cultural institutions across the city, large and small, that people feel like it's worth it to be here. And because they feel like it's worth it to be here, they bring their talent and their talent attracts business and businesses attract more talent and that's what fuels our

economy. What are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? One is that the key to economic development is talent and the key to talent is quality of life. The key to economic development is talent, and the key to talent is quality of life. The second is that an important part of quality of life is magnetic infrastructure, and that when we think about arts and culture and entertainment, especially when we're thinking about the health of our cities, magnetic infrastructure is not a nice to have, it's a need to have. And the third is that government can't just focus on creating new programs and spending money. It has to make sure that the programs that it's creating and the money that it's spending

are actually achieving the goals that were established and that those goals were clear. And if we want people to believe in government, government has to give them a reason to believe. Thank you, Seth. Thank you. This has been wonderful. Thank you for your leadership in New York's economic development and your leadership now of the 92nd Street Y. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are,

please review us on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at threetakeaways.com where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynn Toman and this is Three Takeaways. Thanks for listening.