NYC NOW - January 8, 2024: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

Proposed citywide budget cuts have the NYPD set to freeze hiring and suspend the next five police academy classes. Also, Governor Hochul and Governor Murphy are both set to give their state of the state speeches this week. And finally, WNYC’s Tiffany Hanssen and Arun Venugopal discuss New York City’s turn away from a possible doom loop scenario.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Jenae Pierre. The NYPD is set to freeze hiring and suspend the next five police academy classes, thanks to propose citywide budget cuts. Still, NYPD chief of patrol John Shell says the department is working to get its recruitment numbers up. Our staffing is slightly down. We know that. But we have a class going on like you mentioned by 650 plus give a take.

We have 1,100 eligible people who want to be police officers on deck. The number of police officers is set to fall below 30,000 by 2025, marking the lowest headcount in decades. This week, both New York Governor Kathy Holkell and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy are expected to deliver their state-of-the-state addresses. It's an annual event where the governors lay out their agenda for the coming year. Governor Holkel has already revealed that she's going to discuss it. initiatives around reading and phonics, prenatal leave, and even pools. WMYC's John Campbell covers Albany, and he says he'll be looking for the governor to return to an issue that dominated the last legislative session. What is the governor going to do to spur new housing

throughout the state, but especially in New York City? Last year, Hockel had hoped to build about 800,000 new housing units across the state, but that plan didn't make it through the legislature. Listen to our Tuesday morning episode for a special preview of Holcomb and Murphy's state-of-state addresses from the WMYC Newsroom. Stick around. We'll be back after the break. The work-from-home phenomenon that accompanied the pandemic might have made things easier for people who really hate commuting, but it caused a big headache for municipal governments, including New York cities. As workers stayed home, the city's city's state home, the city's city. saw vast tracks of office space go empty, along with a drop in commercial tax revenue and

MTA revenues that threaten to send New York in a downward spiral. But some experts are starting to sound more optimistic about the city's future. For more on the threatening doom loop scenario, my colleague Tiffany Hansen talked with WMYC's Arun Vanne Gapal. The doom loop. It's a rather apocalyptic term, but explain to us what the doom loop is. All right. Well, doom loop is a term that really caught on in the last year or so. It's a term that was used by a scholar at Columbia University's business school. His name is Sten Van Neuerberg. He wrote this academic paper in 2022. And the basic idea is that if workers don't return to their offices in midtown and downtown, the city is going to lose so much tax revenue that it'll have to slash services, which will in

turn scare off even more workers. And in its like most extreme. The doom loop scenario is one in which city streets are just completely emptied of professionals leaving just homeless people behind. That's the sort of dystopian division that kind of gained traction in the media in the last year. You met with Van Neuerberg at his office. What does he say now? Are we in the doom loop? Short answer is too early to say because on one hand, he says, you know, the city is facing pretty severe budget cuts. their fears that those cuts are going to really impact New Yorkers, quality of life, you know, things like public safety and public transit.

But there are also positive indicators that he really wants to emphasize. You know, tourism is up. Office workers are heading back to offices at higher rates than they were, say, a year or so ago. A couple months ago, the city recovered all the jobs. It had lost due to the pandemic. Van Nuerberg says it is really encouraging to see these positive signs. He may think it sounds encouraging, but there are still plenty of empty office buildings. So what does he think we should do with that space?

Yeah, let's just look at this situation now. Like 20% of it Manhattan office space is empty right now, according to the firm Avis and Young. And it has been rising, but this thing called the office visitation rate, it stands at like 70% in midtown, just 61% downtown. However, Van Uyroberg, he says there is a silver lining here if we were to repurpose all those offices. He says we really need to pursue what he calls in all of the above approach. And at the end of the day, we want to create vibrant neighborhoods. And vibrant neighborhoods require housing. They also require hospitals or health care facilities.

They require some educational facilities. They require some artists space, some community space. We need all of these things. But housing is really his top priority, Tiffany. And he wants office conversions to kick in in a big way. And he says, if lawmakers and real estate interests and just regular citizens can get on the same page, he sees a future in which, say, 10 years from now, 50,000 housing units will have been created from office space that, for the most part, right now is pretty much empty. And he hopes that some of that includes affordable housing. So regular New Yorkers can also live in these neighborhoods.

I can't believe that New York is the only city that's been caught in this kind of discussion around the doom loop dystopian future. So what are these other cities experiencing in comparison? Yeah, this is a word that's being used across the board, this term rather, doom loop. A lot of cities, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Kansas City, all these different towns which have seen a lot of people just kind of like. stop working their office districts. The contrast, I guess, that is most often employed, is between New York and San Francisco, another very densely populated city and one that's really been struggling. San Francisco is spiraling further down, whereas New York City is recovering,

sort of to a better extent than most large U.S. cities. And I think that has to do with the fact that New York City's economy, the well-diversified economy, we have sectors. We have a lot of different sectors, whereas San Francisco is fairly different. tech dependent? So overall, he's more optimistic than he was even a year ago. Yeah, he is. I mean, the real litmus test, as far as he's concerned, is, you know, do people want to live here in New York? And he says they do. We have a lot of young people that want to be here and, you know, they want to, you know, go to the bars and to the clubs and all that, all that jazz. So I think that's what continuously,

the fact that New York City continues to attract those young people, those 22 to 25-year-olds, because of its vibrancy, is what really sets our city apart. I think, you know, right now there's a lot to be determined, you know, in terms of how severe the budget cuts are and whether or not, like, the robustness of these office districts continues to climb and return to pre-pandemic figures. He thinks it's heading in the right direction, but there's a lot to be seen. That's WNYC's Arun Venigapal, talking with my colleague Tiffany Hansen. We rarely talk about sports here, but the Buffalo Bills are headed to the NFL playoffs.

It's Buffalo's fifth straight playoff appearance and their second longest streak in team history. The Bills first punched their ticket when the Jacksonville Jaguars lost to the Tennessee Titans on Sunday. That meant the Bills would get at least a wild card spot. Then, later Sunday night, the Bills also quenched the AFC.F. East Division with a 21-14 win over the Dolphins. They're now the number two seed in the AFC playoffs and will host the number seven-seat Pittsburgh Steelers.

Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day. I'm Jene Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.