The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [119]
Being somewhat divorced from national economic growth is not new to New York or other cities. When the U.S. entered a recession in 1969, New York followed. When the nation rebounded, for a variety of reasons the city did not. It was drained of 660,000 jobs between 1969 and 1976. The nation gained 8.3 percent more jobs between 1969 and 1975, while the city lost 11 percent of its employment and most older central cities declined or failed to keep pace with the nation’s growth. “If employment in New York had grown at the national rate,” Campbell and Bahl’s 1976 study found, “it would have 1.03 million more jobs than it now has, nearly 25 percent more.” A 1977 study of Philadelphia by Sternlieb and the Rutgers Center for Urban Policy Research showed that if the City of Brotherly Love “had kept pace with the nation” between 1970 and 1975, “it would have gained more than 192,000 jobs. In this period, Philadelphia hemorrhaged 11.9 percent of its jobs.
The Northeast is the only region to suffer a net job decline between 1969 and 1975. It is commonly assumed that New York’s employment woes are the same as the region’s. Not true. If New York City’s job growth imitated that of other Northeastern cities between 1965 and 1973, the Campbell/Bahl study found, the city would have generated 451,000 additional jobs. “Thus,” the study somberly concluded, “the characteristics of the regional location and central city status explain about 60 percent of the gap between New York City’s employment growth and that of the nation as a whole. Still, 40 percent of the difference remains unexplained and it is this 40 percent which differentiates New York City from its region, the Northeast, and from other large central cities. To this extent, New York City’s economic situation is unique.” Of fifty cities studied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between June 1975 and June 1977, only two lost jobs—New York and Philadelphia. While New York suffered a loss of 4.4 percent of its jobs and Philadelphia 0.7 percent, Newark gained 3.4 percent, Detroit 8.5 percent, Atlanta 6.6 percent, San Francisco 4.5 percent, Washington 3.7 percent, Cleveland 3 percent, Buffalo 2.2 percent, St. Louis 1.7 percent. And the entire Northeast, though growing at one-third the rate of the next region, still gained 2.1 percent.
Why are New York and Philadelphia today so different from other aging cities? They are not, says George Sternlieb: “In a strange way, New York and Philadelphia’s decline has lagged behind other older cities because of their more diverse job base and huge government expenditures. New York and Philadelphia held together better than older industrial cities. They are the rear runners, not the front runners. In the fifties and sixties, they did not lose 35 percent of their population, as places like Cleveland, St. Louis and Detroit did. So, in a sense, New York and Philadelphia were the last ones to lose. Beginning in 1970, they lost about 12 percent of their jobs and began to lose population. When you start losing population, you start losing your mom-and-pop stores and your buying power. It kind of feeds on itself.” Many of those mom-and-pop stores—groceries, luncheonettes, dry-cleaning shops—don’t show up on the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports because they often paid salaries off the books. Many were victims