Few people know that when Giovanni da Verrazano sailed into New York Harbor in 1524 he first landed on Staten Island. Though the Island was possibly the first place that European explorers arrived on land, Staten Island often seems last when it comes to implementing public policies that improve the quality of city living. Staten Island has all the problems facing the rest of the city--unplanned and uncoordinated growth, traffic congestion, and disappearing open and public space.
But nestled in this borough bounded by bays and kills are a few model solutions as well. The Staten Island Bluebelt, for instance, uses wetlands to capture stormwater runoff and, with nature's help, treats this tainted water for half the cost of the mechanical treatment that is necessary in more densely paved parts of the city. The Island has the only ferry in New York City that truly functions as public transportation: it runs 24 hours a day and is free (yes, FREE) to all riders. Just north of Fresh Kills landfill sits a paper re-manufacturing plant that takes a portion of the city's solid waste stream and uses these scraps to produce marketable goods, in large quantities. Looking ahead, the island is poised to become a choice borough if it can capitalize on its most famous assets, particularly its geographic proximity to (gasp!) New Jersey.
The island nature creates an insular feeling among residents and visitors alike. When viewed with Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, it seems to many people that only Staten is an island, when in fact four of the five boroughs really rest on islands as well. This psychological sense of non-belonging last culminated in a referendum question in 1993 in which islanders voted to form their own city, though the State Legislature never approved the secession. Three years later Fresh Kills landfill closed.
For a half century Fresh Kills landfill was both the largest physical landmark as well as psychological burden which islanders carried with them wherever they went. The closure of the landfill, while a mental boon for islanders and a boost to property owners, has not yet brought about a sustainable or even sane solid waste management policy for the city. But we are getting closer. Recently, officials from VISY paper organized a tour for borough leadership of a solid waste handling and sorting facility in Germany that is as close to the state of the art as anything in existence in the U.S. While garbage is not pretty business, the reality is that it is New York City's largest export as well as an expense item that accounts for nearly three percent of the city's annual budget. It is a problem we will have to solve to survive as a city.
In many ways the landfill's swing from open to closed is characteristic of the highly politicized nature of land use decision-making that afflicts US cities with the urban planning equivalent of bipolar disorder: now it is wide open, now it is sealed shut. Rarely is there any in-between. But fortunately for New York there is Staten Island.
The latest instance of this bi-polar disorder was diagnosed this past July, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the creation of a task force to examine "growth management" on the island. Often derisively referred to as an overdevelopment task force, this entire effort, and the land use debate on the island, should instead be framed as an under-transit task force. It is a well-known fact that islanders feel alienated from much of the rest of the city. While they have only two linkages (a bridge to Brooklyn and a ferry to Manhattan) they have three connections to New Jersey in the form of the Outerbridge, the Goethals, and the Bayonne Bridges.
But as the population of the island has doubled since the time the Verrazano Bridge opened in 1964, the island has not added any new physical connections to surrounding boroughs or cities. Sure new funds are being tapped for additional express buses to Manhattan, but what the island needs desperately are new transit options that reduce pressures on the bridge and ferry crossing already jammed to capacity. For instance, the congestion on the Staten Island Expressway will not be solved with widened on-and off ramps here and there, but if there were other options such as passenger ferries or even truck ferries between New Jersey and Brooklyn the commuters and goods would actually have an option of how to travel.
A borough of nearly half a million people needs better transit not just between boroughs but within Staten Island itself. With rail lines along the west and north shores of the island now sitting idle for decades, how long can it be before policymakers realize that the solution to the island's development pressures woes are the mostly intact rail rights-of-way that are staring them in the face?
Perhaps the most visionary thinking for Staten Island has originated outside the state. Just a couple of years ago the executive director of New Jersey Transit suggested that the new Hudson Bergen Light Rail that now ends just across the Bayonne Bridge might someday pass over the Bayonne Bridge and all the way down to Tottenville at the southern tip of Staten Island. Such imaginative and apolitical thinking is what this congested island will need to prosper in the future. Beholden to a city and state so fixated on Lower Manhattan, perhaps Staten Islanders would be better off taking their case to Trenton.
Carter Craft, an urban planner, is program director of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance.
![]() Leaving New YorkWhile some New Yorkers are leaving the city, citing bad schools, high housing costs or the daily stresses of urban life, analysts debate whether the exodus is anything alarming or unusual, and what to do about it.![]() Why New Yorkers Are Leaving: ![]() The City Is Too Expensive by E.J. McMahon ![]() City Schools and Housing Are Inadequate by David Kallick ![]() New Yorkers Who Left: ![]() Allison Woods Struggling with Strollers and Schools ![]() David Bassine Fear of Terrorism ![]() Stefan Kochi Bad for Business |
What finally took me over the edge was the act of going out and looking for an apartment. I recently got married and had a son, so I needed to find a new place. I had lived in the same apartment for 26 years - my whole life. When I actually started looking I saw how hard it was to find a place to live. I only found one good deal, but even that good deal was a bad one. It was on Fresh Pond Road in Queens, right next to the subway station. Besides the fact that the subway was so loud that it would wake my baby, the floor slanted.
That was the last straw. I have a friend from Brooklyn who lives in Maryland. He had told me about how things were for him there. When he left, he struggled, but now he is a lot more comfortable. And he has kids too. So I said, "Why don't we try it?" My wife, my son and I moved down on July 4.
Maryland is different, and I am having issues trying to get used to it. The slower pace of everything is hard to adjust to. Compared to New York, anything is slow, but this is really slow. I get bored. My wife likes it less than I do, because she is at home taking care of our son all day. We don't get out much because we don't have transportation. No outdoorsy things -- really the only place we can walk to is the mall. Or we go to my friend's house. If I didn't have him out here, I wouldn't have come.
I have been back to New York once since the move, and it wasn't that great. My neighborhood - Williamsburg just outside the gentrified part -- is stagnant.
I felt that way before we moved, but when I came back, the feeling was magnified. It is the feeling that every day is just the same -- it never changes. When you are young, you hang out, play basketball -- all types of things to keep yourself busy. But when you grow up and everyone you know is older, people don't want to do anything. There's nothing to do, the basketball court is empty, no one is around. It's weird.
The way I look at it, if I can't live in Manhattan, then I won't live in New York. I'm from Brooklyn, but there's nothing good in Brooklyn unless you have Manhattan money. If I have to pay Manhattan money to live in a nice place in Brooklyn, I might as well live in Manhattan - or Maryland.
Rondrae Hunter was born in Brooklyn and moved out of New York in 2003. For three years, he was office administrator of Citizens Union Foundation, the publisher of Gotham Gazette.
Leaving New York While some New Yorkers are leaving the city, citing bad schools, high housing costs or the daily stresses of urban life, analysts debate whether the exodus is anything alarming or unusual, and what to do about it. ![]() Why New Yorkers Are Leaving: ![]() The City Is Too Expensive by E.J. McMahon ![]() City Schools and Housing Are Inadequate by David Kallick ![]() New Yorkers Who Left: ![]() Rondrae Hunter A Frustrating Apartment Search ![]() Allison Woods Struggling with Strollers and Schools ![]() David Bassine Fear of Terrorism ![]() Stefan Kochi Bad for Business |
The combined effect of people coming to and leaving the city, factoring in "natural increase" (more births than deaths), resulted in an expansion of the population by about 3.5 percent in the 1980s, and a further increase of 9.4 percent between 1990 and 2000. For the period since 2000 the data is incomplete, but early signs seem to show population between 2000 and 2002 holding about steady.
People leave the city for all kinds of reasons, including job opportunities, retirement, family and friends. These are all positive events in people's lives; population loss for these reasons should not be seen as negative.
More worrisome, however, is that roughly half the departing population stays in the metropolitan area, but moves to the ever-expanding suburbs of the city. Some movement in this direction is perfectly healthy. But the city should not be complacent about people who may be "voting with their feet," and the region has reason to be concerned about the resulting suburban sprawl.
There is little hard data on why people move to the suburbs. Conservatives often say it is taxes. More likely explanations, however, are the inadequacy of New York City schools and housing. A recently released poll by the Drum Major Institute points in this direction. When New York City voters were asked about what personally worried them, 82 percent said the quality of public schools, top answer, and 68 percent said affordable housing. Health insurance and making ends meet also ranked high; the level of taxation did not.
This is very far from the "white flight" the city experienced in the 1970s. "First of all, how could you have white flight from a city with our composition?" asks Joseph Salvo, director of the population division at the Department of City Planning. "If you look at who's leaving, you have white population, but there are also black and Hispanic and Asian."
Whatever their ethnicity, many New Yorkers who are leaving do so in search of more space and better schools.
A convoluted argument has surfaced recently that ties together a narrow interpretation of the recently released census data and a reflexive tendency for conservatives to pin everything on taxes.
"New Yorkers Fleeing City, State," hyped the front-page headline in the New York Sun on September 2. The New York Post followed in an editorial the next day, saying "more Americans moved out of the city than moved in between 1995 and 2000," and that New York State "is losing residents faster than any of the other 49."
Before taking a breath to analyze the data, both papers had a ready rationale. "High taxes may be fueling" the trend, suggested the Post. High taxes, housing policies, and unions are the culprits named in the Sun and in the article this week in Gotham Gazette by Manhattan Institute analyst E.J. McMahon.
First of all: population increased significantly throughout the 1990s. But the county-to-county census data the newspapers reported includes only domestic migration. It excludes from the picture international migration.
"Like many large cities in this country, we shed more people than we gain through domestic migration," explains Salvo from City Planning. "What makes New York different is that we have the benefit of a large number of immigrants." Immigration, plus natural increase (more births than deaths), are the reasons the city has seen an overall increase in population at the same time as it experiences a net loss in domestic migration.
Indeed, says Salvo, the net loss the city experiences in domestic migration is not a new trend. It has been the status quo "since at least the middle of the last century."
The pernicious argument that high taxes are the root of all evil is far afield in relation to population change.
"If high taxes caused out-migration, why did upstate counties -- with some of the state's lowest combined taxes -- experience significant losses of total population, while New York City, with the state's highest combined tax, grew at a fast clip?" asks Lava Thimmayya, co-author of the Fiscal Policy Institute's report, State of Working New York 2003. Indeed, the areas with highest taxes also showed the strongest economic growth, notes Thimmayya.
Even billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg seems to agree that taxes don't push people out. Earlier this year, when arguing for a tax hike to close the budget gap, Bloomberg said: "I don't believe that people will leave this city because of higher taxes." He then went on to say, "I do believe they would leave this city very quickly because of lower services."
Over and over, the perception of problems in the schools, the lack of affordable housing, and downturns in the job market emerge as the key "negative" factors that push people out of New York. Taxes don't even rate on the scale.
The message to city officials from ex-urbanites is: make real steps to improve city schools, expand the supply of truly affordable housing, and then let's talk.
David Kallick is senior fellow of the Fiscal Policy Institute.