Every two weeks the New York City Council meets for its Stated Meeting to introduce and pass legislation. As a regular feature, Searchlight covers these meetings and posts a summary of the bills passed.
Quote of the Day:
"Some of the industrial jobs we have had in the past we just don't have anymore. But film production is a 21st century manufacturing industry, in which New York City is perfectly positioned to grow and grow very rapidly." - Brooklyn Councilmember David Yassky.
Meeting Summary:
Responding to concerns that New York City needs to do more to make itself attractive to filmmakers, the City Council voted to give a 5 percent tax credit (Intro 454-A) to film and television companies who film in New York City.
The film industry will recoup up to $12.5 million in city taxes, while also getting a state tax credit of 10 percent credit worth up to $25 million. NBC is expected to announce a new pilot that will be filmed in New York City instead of Toronto, thanks to the financial benefits the network will gain as a result of the film tax credit. Both credits are set to expire in 2008.
Supporters said that the measure will generate billions of dollars for the city's economy and create thousands of jobs. But several council members who voted for the bill still voiced concern that it might not benefit New Yorkers who need the jobs most.
"Clearly we are concerned that this is an industry that has a long history of discrimination," said Councilmember Bill Perkins. "Very often this council has passed legislation was ostensibly supposed to provide jobs for the city, was ostensibly supposed to create jobs for people of color, and in fact it doesn't actually happen."
Perkins said that there must be a continued effort to make sure that new jobs benefit a diverse swath of the population.
The bill passed 48 to 1. Staten Island Councilmember Mike McMahon, cast the sole "no" vote.
"There are many industries that can make the same case for getting special privileges," said McMahon, adding that government often regrets giving particular industries such credits.
The council also overrode mayoral vetoes on three bills concerning campaign finance reform. The legislation will aid opponents of billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who spent $74 million of his own money in 2001. City Council Speaker Gifford Miller is considered a possible candidate in next year's mayoral race.
One bill (Intro 124-A) increases the maximum amount of public matching funds to $6 for every $1 a candidate raises. It passed 43 to 6, with Councilmembers Tony Avella, Simcha Felder, Dennis Gallagher, Andrew Lanza, Madeline Provezano, and James Oddo voting against it.
The other two bills (Intro 371-A and Intro 466-A) concern disclosure on money raised for campaigns. The legislation will require self-financed candidates who choose not to be part of the voluntary public financing system to abide by the same limits on contributions and spending as those who join the program. Candidates who are not part of the program would also have to comply with disclosure requirements.
Intro 371 passed by a margin of 44 to 5, with Avella, Felder, Lanza, Lopez and Provezano voting "no"; Intro 466 passed by a margin of 45 to 4 with Avella, Felder, Lopez, and Provezano Lopez voting "no".
The council also passed a bill (Intro 114-A) doubling the fines for landlords who don't provide heat and hot water for their tenants from $250 a day to $500 a day. Landlords who have already been fined in a calendar year will be fined $1000 a day for violations in the same building. The bill passed 49 to 0. Â
![]() • Online Shopping and Sales Taxes • A Mall Grows in Brooklyn |
Somebody used pepper spray at the biggest Toys â€R’ Us in the world, the one in Times Square, and since this anti-riot chemical, made from cayenne peppers, can cause temporary blindness, some 3,000 shoppers were evacuated. Many did not stay out for long. “I was scared,” a nine-year-old told the Daily News. “Now I want to go back in for toys.”
The incident occurred, after all, on the weekend after Thanksgiving, the busiest shopping weekend of the year, in the city where people come from around the world just to go shopping.
Then last week, Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer and a symbol to its critics of all that is wrong with the big chain stores, announced plans to open its first outlet in New York.
Shopping has long been recognized as a quintessential New York activity, but it is far more important to the city's economy than most New Yorkers realize. Only Wall Street, some say, is as central to the city's financial health as the retail industry, which provides billions in tax revenue and an increasing percentage of the city's jobs.
But the arrival of chain stores, along with the rise of Internet shopping (see related story), have altered the retail industry in New York. Wal-Mart is not planning to open its New York store until about 2007, but many other chains have already established a very visible presence, including Target and Home Depot, and a giant Ikea has been approved for the Brooklyn waterfront.
New York City has been a shopping capital for a century and a half. Department stores were invented here; the first one debuted in 1862 at Astor Place. Retailers such as F.A.O. Schwarz and Tiffany's later moved north to the area from Union Square to 23rd Street, which became known as Ladies Mile and featured such opulent stores as Siegel-Cooper, with its marble staircases and a pet department that sold panther cubs. By the 1890's, a tourist guide could proclaim, "all America goes to New York for its shopping," and this became even more true at the turn of the century, when R.H. Macy moved further uptown to 34th Street, with a half dozen grand emporiums to follow.
The era of the city department store lasted until the middle of the 20th century. That is when a new form of shopping emporium was invented – the suburban shopping mall, which killed downtown shopping districts across the country, and helped put many New York department stores out of business.
New York recovered in the 1990s, with the advent of expensive boutiques in Soho, on Madison Avenue and in the Upper West Side; a much-publicized 1990 guidebook was entitled "New York On $1,000 A Day/Before Lunch." In 2000, according to the Independent Budget Office, stores in New York grossed $21.9 billion in sales.
Following a sharp decline after September 11, 2001, Soho has rebounded this year, with the opening of a Bloomingdale's and an Apple store that some liken to a singles bar, others to a theme park. A new shopping mall -- the Time-Warner Center -- brought an array of chain stores for the affluent to Columbus Circle.
If some of the new stores seem specifically tailored for New York, most reflect what could be considered the third wave of New York emporiums -- transplants from suburbia.
More than 260,0000 New Yorkers worked in the retail industry (excluding bars and restaurants) in 2003, accounting for about one-twelfth of all workers in the city.
Retail workers tend to be less educated than city workers as a whole, and years ago might have found employment in manufacturing. But factory jobs in the city have declined sharply, while the number of retail jobs has risen.
The average retail worker in New York, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute, earned a little less than $30,000 a year in 2003. Nearly two thirds of full-time retail workers do not have health insurance benefits provided by their employers.
And these retail jobs pay less and less. (pdf format)
While the figures do not distinguish between chain stores and others, the drop in wages coincides with the move of chains to the city. About 70 percent of metropolitan supermarkets are unionized, providing workers with health benefits and pensions, but most big retail stores, such as Target, K-Mart, and CVS, are not.
"The quality of jobs in retail is really spotty," said Bruce Herman of the Center for Workforce and Economic Development.
While some entrepreneurs launch their own businesses -- Fifth Avenue and Smith Street in Brooklyn, for instance, have both seen a spate of new stores selling fashion and unusual home accessories -- chain stores account for much of the expansion in New York's retail industry.
Many shoppers hail the chain stores, saying they offer the kind of products and prices that consumers once had to go to the suburbs to get. But others fear these multinational businesses have destroyed local establishments that once formed the economic backbone of the city and gave it much of its character. Book chains, for example, have helped wipe out cherished local independent bookstores such as Rizzoli's and the Endicott. Rents in malls, as well as demanding specifications written into leases, tend to exclude local businesses of all kinds in favor of chains.
Over the past decade, chain stores have replaced locally owned shops on the Upper West Side. "Midtown Manhattan keeps creeping further north. The big-box stores are replacing the mom-and-pop stores that were our mainstay," Assemblymember Scott Stringer told the Post.
Home Depot has opened two branches in Manhattan, complete with escalators and a concierge. Not even sex shops are locally owned. The first U.S. branch of Myla, an upscale British chain selling erotic wares, opened on Madison Avenue this fall.
There is a surreal aspect to the mushrooming of the chains. Often two Starbucks sit a block from one another. In 2002, Cingular Wireless announced plans to open 200 stores in the New York area. "It's a branding issue more than anything else," Bradley Mendelson, a real estate broker working for Cingular said at the time. "Everybody knows AT&T, and everybody knows VoiceStream. Why do they know them? Because they have stores on the street."
Along with high rents, chain stores seeking to enter Manhattan face community opposition and the search for suitable space. To make things easier, Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 1996 proposed changes to city zoning that would have allowed stores under 200,000 square feet, the size of the average Ikea, to be built in manufacturing zones without approval from the City Council. But the City Council overwhelmingly rejected the proposal.
The council has approved individual big box stores, including the Brooklyn Ikea. And some of the stores do not need the council's acceptance. In response to Wal-Mart's possible move to New York, Councilmember Christine Quinn announced that she will propose a bill requiring that the council review plans for any big box store above a certain square footage.
While most big retailers dream of Manhattan, many settle in the boroughs, where there is more space, less cost, and lots of eager shoppers. Last year, real estate broker Chris Conlon estimated that there might be one mall for every 50,000 people on Long Island, compared to one for every 300,000 people in the boroughs. While the figures are rough, they do indicate a gap that stores want to fill.
Shopping malls already thrive in Staten Island, Queens and Brooklyn. The Queens Center, which opened in 1973, has had sales per square foot that are triple the national average for malls. The Old Navy at Atlantic Center in Brooklyn has been among that chain's most successful stores. In its first weeks of operation, the new Target at Atlantic Terminal (see related story in the Community Gazettes) "far exceeded our expectations," a store manager told the Times.
Seeing such results, more retailers are coming to the boroughs, including the Bronx. This summer, River Plaza in Marble Hill opened, bringing the Bronx its first Target and its first Starbucks. The borough is "not a well known market, but retailers are beginning to figure it out," David Rosenberg, a real estate broker, told Newsday.
Michael's, a Texas-based chain of crafts stores, will open in Woodside Queens early next year -- and then move on to Manhattan. "Our approach has been to gradually push in further and further to the city," Douglas Sullivan, Michaels's executive vice president for development, told the Times. "That's how Wal-Mart used to describe the strategy . . . surrounding a city and then entering it."
And now Wal-Mart itself is preparing its foray. The retailer reportedly confirmed last week that it wants to open a New York store in an area of Rego Park that already includes a Target and BestBuy. For years, Wal-Mart had tended to stay away from big, expensive cities because of high labor expenses and the cost of space for its sprawling one-story stores and huge parking lots.
But that did not stop many New Yorkers from forming an opinion about the store. Wal-Mart, with its non-unionized workforce, inexpensive imported merchandise, and willingness to sell guns and ban books, symbolizes what many people dislike about giant chain stores. Opposition emerged almost immediately.
Assemblymember Brian McLaughlin, the president of the Central Labor Council, said the store would come to Queens "over my dead body." An aide to Queens borough president Helen Marshall reportedly expressed concern over gun sales and allegations of sex discrimination by the company. And some community leaders worried that the stores could destroy existing businesses.
Critics charge that Wal-Mart keeps prices low by underpaying its workers and not giving many of them health benefits. This, some groups charge tends to drive down wages and benefits in other businesses.
That helps explain why urban communities sometimes rise up against Wal-Mart as David against Goliath. Earlier this year, the Chicago City Council vetoed one planned Wal-Mart. While supporters trumpeted the new jobs they said the store would bring to the city, opponents said the jobs would not be good ones. And opponents blocked a Wal-Mart in Inglewood, California, near Los Angeles, when they got the issue put on the ballot.
It remains unclear what Wal-Mart will have to do to get its New York project approved. Whether the New York City Planning Commission and City Council get to review the store depends on the zoning of the site and Wal-Mart's specifics plans, such as parking facilities, according to the Department of City Planning.
Not all chain stores succeed. The Wiz electronics chain closed. In 2001, the Gap shut six Manhattan stores. A Waldenbooks and a Gap on Montage Street in Brooklyn Heights are now abandoned storefronts, though other chains may move in. The proposed merger of K-mart and Sears, both with outlets in the city, could result in stores being closed.
And some individual merchants will always strive to offer something different. Unusual stores remain dotted throughout the city, with many in ethnic neighborhoods that serve as magnets to people eager for that spice, vegetable or piece of clothing that reminds them of their heritage."New York is a place of specialty shops," said Joshua Russ Tupper, a member of the fourth generation to run Russ and Daughters, which sells smoked fish, caviar, exotic cheeses and other treats on Houston Street.
Jamaica, Queens, once a victim of decline, now lures shoppers, most of them African American or Caribbean, from as far away as Detroit. They like the clothing, the prices, the crowds, and the stores that sell products geared to the black community that they may find hard to get at home. Of course, Jamaica could fall victim to its own success. Last year both Old Navy and The Gap opened in the neighborhood.
For More Information:
Retail Council of New York State. Represents 5,000 stores throughout the state
NYC Retail Trade Sector: Labor Market Profile Fiscal Policy Institute
Unionization and Poverty The Case of New York City Retail Workers (in pdf format)
The Economic Impact of Wal-Mart: An Assessment of the Wal-Mart Store Proposed for Chicago's West Side Center for Urban Economic Development, University of Illinois at Chicago
New York's Missing Megastores City Journal
Erica Pearson contributed to this article.
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![]() Mayor Michael Bloomberg's development plan will remake neighborhoods like Long Island City, Throgs Neck, and downtown Jamaica. Articles in this Feature: |
When we think about development and planning in New York, we need to remember that ours is a boom and bust economy. Since the days of the Dutch, New York has consistently moved in great cycles of enormous prosperity that eventually give way to bad times. Our most recent catastrophically bad times were the 1970s. On April 1, 1975, Standard and Poor's withdrew the credit rating on the city’s bonds, which nearly led to the city’s declaring bankruptcy. We are in boom times now and it is hard to grasp that they are not going to last. We need policies in New York that will work in the bad times as well as the good.
The most important thing we can do in New York to secure our future in housing and development is to bring down construction costs.
New York City is the uncontested holder of the nation’s “Building Cost Heavy-Weight Championship title.” Nationally, the average hard cost per square foot for a high-rise building is $113. That same building in New York costs $154, or 36 percent more. A building in Chicago would cost about $125 per square foot or about 19 percent less than New York. Think about that differential as a subsidy. We wouldn’t need building subsidy programs in New York if we didn’t have enormous differential in building costs.
We have to bring building costs down. I say “we” because public policies are part of what have driven these costs up.
Recently, the City Council held a hearing on the Bloomberg administration’s proposal to adopt International Building Codes in place of the city’s 700-page, voluminous, idiosyncratic, and arcane building code. Everybody who studies housing and development in New York knows that we have to reform the building code, and that the easiest way to do that is to adopt the International Building Code, which is already operational in 44 states.
This should be a slam-dunk. But at 6:30 in the morning the day of the hearings the plumbers union and a few housing advocates lined up to pack the City Council chambers because they objected to the International Building Code, which would eliminate some arcane, uncompetitive, and ludicrously costly measures. One is “plumbers home rule,” which requires that plumbing be done by firms owned by New York licensed master plumbers. I bring this up because it is just one of many thousands of factors that push New York’s building costs up.
Another factor that will drive up building costs is the political campaign against what the mayor calls overdevelopment. For many reasons, new private-market construction in older neighborhoods tends to be homelier housing than what is already there. But it’s also housing that new homeowners can afford.
Most of the housing that the mayor has been condemning in Staten Island, Bay Ridge, Bayside, and Throgs Neck is fully occupied, which is an indication of the housing demand we have in New York. And all of it is occupied by people who are spending a great deal of money to live there. In other words, the housing that is being denigrated as overdevelopment is supplying housing to households who choose it happily. These are also hard-working, tax-paying people - frequently immigrants - whom we want to keep in New York. Without affordable housing - including what’s called overdevelopment - they will cross the bridges to New Jersey.
Except on the issue of the overdevelopment, this particular mayoral administration is the best administration on the subject of housing since the second Koch administration.
Julia Vitullo-Martin is director of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Rethinking Development
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