Covid-19 has cast a dark shadow over global New York City, as it triggered a dark narrative of urban decline. As the epi-center of the national pandemic the story-line revolved around the shutting down of the city’s economy and the massive outmigration of professional/managerial employees.
City statistics narrate a dismal picture. Shuttering and outmigration decreased by 25% the market value of Manhattan office towers. While on the residential side, one in ten of Manhattan’s apartments are vacant. In a real estate-driven city, the demise of real estate values negatively impacted tax revenue flows, limiting the city’s New York’s fiscal ability to sustain crucial short- and long- term expenditures. Thus, further undermining the city’s complex urban structure that oxygenated high-end densely clustered economic activities that scaffolded the city’s speculative economic growth.
The city’s current economic crisis will not be adequately addressed if the issue is exclusively linked to the loss of upper middle-class knowledge producers. First- and second-generation working-class immigrants play a key role in sustaining the city’s global economy. Consequently, immigrants must be included as crucial elements in the macro-economic analysis. Immigrants, in short, are the proverbial shadow support workers that maintain the nuts and bolts of the global urban growth machine. They provide the requisite mundane everyday low-wage services – from office maintenance, food provision, transportation and child/elder care – that lubricate the work and life-styles of elite professionals. Absent working-class immigrant labor inputs, the urban global economic goliath would go limp.
New York’s pandemic driven population loss has two inter-related migratory flows. In the initial flow, fear of illness and the ability to work remotely, via advanced telecommunication networks, facilitated techno adept high-end population movements to the suburbs and the surrounding metropolitan region. During the second flow, there emerged a discernable movement of well-educated and financially stable households – in search of cheaper housing and more space – to incipient gentrifying neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn. Combined, these two demographic shifts negatively restructured the city’s socio-economic geography by turbo charging the economic fissures between the well-off and the struggling majorities. In effect, the city’s core spatial locales are hollowing out while immigrant and native-born working-class communities are undergoing accelerated residential dispossession and economic displacement.
New York’s dual economies: upper-middle-class and immigrant spaces are not separate autonomous locales. They are intertwined economically in a dynamic process of combined and unequitable growth. Low-wage immigrant workers subsidize the high-end economy by accessing resources from the informal migrant economy. Immigrant’s anemic purchasing power is augmented by residential doubling up, access to cheap informal goods and services, and unreported income generated from the unregulated subterranean migrant economy. The extraction of economic value is then indirectly recycled to the core economy. In this unequal relationship, slivers of wealth and growth of the core economy, are subsidized and structurally connected to immigrant immiseration.
This exploitive process is unravelling as immigrant neighborhoods are devasted by the pandemic induced influx of high-income interlopers. It’s clearly a dark panorama. Yet, paraphrasing the poet, Dylan Thomas: We must not go gently into the shadows of the night.
Contradictions abound. Structurally, the unequal relationship between the two economies is fraying. Thus, opening the prospect for organizing around the notion of a socially just city. It would therefore behoove immigrant activist and their allies to continue their struggle in creating the cross- class/racial/ethnic coalitions that will restructure and revitalize post-Covid New York.
Arturo-Ignacio Sánchez, Ph.D. is an urban planner and the former chairperson of the “Newest New Yorker Committee” of Community Board 3, Queens. He has taught at Barnard College, City University of New York, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, Pratt Institute, and various Latin American universities