How Will the COVID-19 Crisis Shape the Future of New York City?
Q&A with Carl Weisbrod, HR&A Senior Advisor
Written by Adam Tanaka
This article is the second in a series of HR&A interviews with urban leaders across the country exploring how the COVID-19 crisis is impacting every aspect of urban life.
For more than 40 years, Carl Weisbrod has shaped the revitalization of urban neighborhoods through senior posts in government, the private sector, and philanthropy, including most recently as Chairman of the New York City Planning Commission from 2014 to 2017. He led the transformation of Times Square following the city’s last major fiscal crisis as President of the 42nd Street Development Project. As President of the Alliance for Downtown New York and as a Director of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, he also helped lead the post-9/11 recovery of downtown neighborhoods. On Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Carl’s appointment to the Fair Recovery Task Force, tasked with developing a road map that will inform the City’s recovery efforts.
Over the course of your career, you’ve seen New York City go through many crises, from the fiscal crisis to Hurricane Sandy. What can we learn from those past crises to better inform our response today?
The one thing that is common to all of these crises is that they affect the poor more than anyone else. Not only do the poor have fewer resources to weather the crisis, but they are the ones who are losing their jobs first. Mostly, they can’t work from home. Our essential service workers are also disproportionately lower-income, minority, and lower-paid workers, including undocumented New Yorkers. Jesse Jackson gave a speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention and spoke movingly about the people who took “the early bus” to work, including maids, home health care workers, and others. Today we’re witnessing a whole new dimension of what taking “the early bus” means.
One major lesson I took from 9/11 is that we have to focus our recovery efforts both on the emergency today and on recovery three months to a year from now. Immediate aid is essential to keep residents in place, especially those living hand to mouth. But it will also be important to reemphasize the advantages of urban life. That was very important after 9/11 when a lot of people were saying that cities would lose their appeal, that decentralization was the order of the day. But we have seen over the last 20 years that urban areas are compelling magnets.
You note that the current crisis will not affect all populations in the city evenly. How should this discrepancy inform New York City’s response?
The City should have a two-tiered response. We have to remember that New York is the preeminent global city, and it is going to be very important to preserve that status. It drives our economy. On the other hand, we also have to help the people who are most in need. How these two objectives are linked is very important and will require a great deal of thought from all of us who are engaged in the recovery effort.
Given your tenure leading the country’s largest Business Improvement District, what do you think the implications of this crisis will be for retail corridors and the small businesses that populate them?
First, Business Improvement Districts will be among the most important delivery mechanisms to address the recovery of small business. They know their neighborhoods, they know the businesses that are essential to their neighborhoods, and they know the businesses that are most likely to survive and have the managerial and entrepreneurial creativity to grow.
Second, retail was changing long before this crisis and will continue to change. Something we learned after 9/11 was that the relationship between property owners and their retail tenants was changing, leading to new and more creative financial arrangements. Now, that change is only going to accelerate, with property owners more likely to take ownership stakes in retail businesses, for instance.
Clearly, we are getting more used to working and purchasing online. But we will also to have to come up with new ways of offering existing services. Restaurants will continue to thrive; some current restaurants will go out of business, but new ones will take their place. Other retail businesses are going to have to learn how to provide an experiential environment that can’t simply be offered online. Those are the businesses that are going to be part of the future.
Urban planning and public health have a long and intertwined history, from the creation of urban park systems to combat airborne diseases to the development of public housing to improve dilapidated housing conditions. When we look back on this crisis in 20 or 30 years, do you think we will note a similar watershed moment in the development of cities?
I think we’re going to see the concept of public health transformed. All of us in New York should give credit to the Bloomberg Administration for its highly innovative approach to public health. Public health was viewed not simply as a means of limiting or preventing disease but also as a means of enabling the population to be healthier. In many ways what the Bloomberg Administration did was similar to the notion of building parks so that people didn’t get sick in the first place. Indeed, we forget now, but Bloomberg pioneered the ban on smoking indoors. Now, we take it for granted, but it was highly controversial when first introduced.
I think we will be rethinking our public health system, both on a national and a local level. What is the relationship between public and private hospitals? What are alternative ways of delivering healthcare? We’re already seeing that in terms of video consultations with doctors. Governor Cuomo has also talked about how the voluntary hospital system can be better integrated with the municipal hospital system.
On the physical side, we’re going to see less new construction and a lot of adaptive reuse. We’ll see this in the healthcare field, and certainly in the housing field. It makes perfect sense to take many of the smaller hotels that have cropped up in the city and transform them into workforce and affordable housing.
In the midst of a crisis, it can be difficult to think about the longer term. But, as they say, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” What opportunities might the pandemic provide for the City to invest in programs and policies that will have a positive longer-term impact?
I think it is now incumbent on the City to extend broadband and ensure it is physically and financially available to all city residents, particularly the poor. Currently hundreds of thousands of people who live in public housing don’t have access to Broadband. The same goes for many others in poor neighborhoods. Broadband is now an essential service, up there with water and electricity. To me, that is the single most important thing that the City should be investing in.
In the medium term, the City will also have to figure out how to deliver essential services at a time when the City and State are going to be extremely strapped for money. How will they provide services in different ways? We will have to rethink our regulatory framework in a way that protects people and assures equity and at the same time provides services more efficiently.
