New York City is missing its commuters. On today’s Plain English, how America’s biggest city is coping with an empty feeling inside
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with lessons about current events and trending topics. Sure, you could read a textbook. But it’s more fun when you’re listening English that you actually want to listen to. And that’s why we focus on what’s going on in the world. It’s a great way to improve your English and learn about the world at the same time.
Coming up today: New York has a population of about eight million people. But those are the people who rest their heads on pillows in the city at night—the people who live there, in other words . Before COVID-19, New York had an additional population—one million people who came to the city during the day to work.
But a lot of those people are not coming into the city anymore, or they’re not coming as often. And that poses a problem for America’s biggest city.
In the second half of the lesson, we’ll talk about the English expression “inflection point.” And we have a quote of the week. Let’s dive in.
New York confronts its post-pandemic future
The morning commute in the New York City region is intense. Some people hop on the subway and get to the office in just a few minutes. When I lived there, I walked 20 minutes.
But for the hundreds of thousands of people who come from suburban areas of Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, and upstate New York, the commute is a lot more stressful.
It involves an early-morning alarm, typically driving to a train or a bus station, a long and expensive ride into the city, and then either walking or taking a subway to the office. A 60- or even 90-minute commute is not unusual.
And that’s on a good day: throw in a snowstorm or an unexpected delay in service, and it’s even worse. So it should come as no surprise that Manhattan office workers are saying “no thanks” to that long commute every day, even now three years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. One estimate says that on an average weekday, only about half of commuters with jobs in Manhattan actually come into the office.
It’s not true that people aren’t going to the office, or to Manhattan. They are. But they’re not doing it five days a week.
This is nice for workers, but presents a number of challenges to America’s biggest economic engine. We’ll focus on three ways the city is struggling because of work from home. First, the vacancy in the office market. Second is the financial situation of public transit agencies. And finally, the service industry that caters to commuters.
Start with the office market. With fewer workers coming into the office, companies need less office space. America’s national office vacancy rate is 17 percent, the highest since records began. But even that might mask the true problem. Office leases are long-term, often ten years, so many leases in place now were signed before the pandemic. When they come up for renewal, the tenants may choose to take less space, pushing the vacancy rate even higher.
This is bad because city governments are funded with property taxes. When office vacancies are high, the building values go down. And when building values go down, cities receive less money in taxes. When they have less tax revenue, they have to cut public services, which hurts everyone.
So the first problem is empty offices—and the lower tax revenue they’ll provide to the city.
The second problem is the transit agencies. It’s miserable to drive in New York, and most New Yorkers don’t have cars. The region has by far the biggest transit system in America; it’s one of the biggest in the world.
But with ridership down 25 or 30 percent, transit agencies have a big hole in their budgets. These include the New York City subway system, the commuter train services in New York state and New Jersey, and a regional subway system called the PATH. All have suffered sharp drops in ridership, and therefore money.
Until now, the national government has come to the rescue , plugging holes in budget with stimulus money from Washington. But that won’t last forever. And if transit agencies cut services, it could cause fewer rides to take the trains and buses if the service isn’t frequent enough. And that would make the whole region less desirable to live in.
The cuts in public transit are a real threat to the long-term health of America’s busiest region. An this, by the way, is not just a New York problem: the same story is playing out in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.
Finally, spare a thought for the huge industry that serves commuters. Restaurants, delis, coffee carts, dry cleaners, shoe shiners, messenger services, copy shops, caterers, flower shops, office cleaners, nail salons, barbershops, newsstands—all the people who serve the bustling office scene are now suddenly with 30 percent or less demand. A lot of businesses have closed, and the workers have left the region.
And that’s not all. High-end restaurants and Broadway shows may be big tourist attractions, and many New York residents enjoy them, but a lot of those tables in expensive restaurants and a lot of those seats in Broadway shows are taken by commuters. Attendance at Broadway shows is way down. The Metropolitan Opera is producing the fewest shows in forty years.
New York is at an inflection point . It has survived many crises before—the September 11 attacks, Hurricane Sandy, the financial crisis. It can survive another. Luckily, the mayor, Eric Adams, and the state governor, Kathy Hochul, are working together on a plan to make Manhattan more of a live-work-play destination, transforming business districts into areas that are friendlier to residents.
A 15-minute city?
There’s a term in English—a 24-hour city. And that term is reserved for those few cities that seem to be alive all twenty-four hours of a day. New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, but also Cairo, Beirut, and Montevideo.
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, turned that phrase on its head and said she wants Paris to be a 15-minute city. And by that she means, whatever you need—park, school, restaurant, office—should be within 15 minutes of your house, by transit or bicycle. So you can live in a huge city without these long soul-sucking commutes common in other big cities.
It’s a good idea, and that might be the future for New York. But it’s going to take a lot of work to get there—and New York has a lot of old office buildings. On Thursday, we’ll talk about what can be done with an old and empty office building in a big city.
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