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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. New York City is facing multiple challenges post-pandemic, as I don't have to tell you. Think about the topics we talk about on this show. Congestion pricing, funding of city services like the MTA and libraries, e-bike and moped traffic, shoplifting, the influx of asylum seekers moving in while New Yorkers stressed by housing costs and some others who just don't like it here anymore, moving out. Are things really so bad? The journal Vital City is out with a new issue in which leading urbanists, journalists, and thinkers from a number of disciplines try to answer that question. Most of them actually think the city is bouncing back.

Even the economists who popularize the theory of the "urban doom loop," you know that phrase? That's the idea that many people who can in the remote work era will leave the city for the suburbs and not come back, crashing the city's commercial real estate economy, the office building economy and the rest of the economy follows. Well, the doomers are looking at the young Zoomers and they have reassessed their thinking. Joining me now to discuss the latest issue titled, Is The Urban Doom Loop For Real is Elizabeth Glazer, founder of the journal Vital City, and former director of the New York City Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice under Mayor de Blasio.

Joining us a little later in the interview will be none other than Jennifer Egan, the author of many books, including Manhattan Beach and The Candy House. She's a contributor to this vital city issue with an essay on why she, Jennifer Egan, will never leave New York. Hi, Liz. Welcome back to WNYC.

Elizabeth Glazer: Thanks so much, Brian. Great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: For listeners who may not be familiar with the work that you do over at Vital City, can you give us a brief introduction to the journal and the issues that you cover?

Elizabeth Glazer: Sure. It's really all in our name, Vital City. We want to understand with real specificity, what makes a great city tick. We cover public safety in a pretty intense way, but housing, public places, transportation and we try and get the best and brightest minds from every discipline to talk to us and to tell us their ideas.

Brian Lehrer: In your editor's note for this issue, you refer to the Urban Doom Loop as the mother of all crisis narratives. For people who aren't familiar, is there anything you want to add to my very brief thumbnail definition of the Urban Doom Loop theory there?

Elizabeth Glazer: No, I think you had it exactly. I think what these two scholars say, and it seems to resonate with a lot of New Yorkers is that the pandemic really shifted the way we work and live. A lot of people left the cities that is the tax base. We have an empty central business district that leads to falling revenues. If cities don't have money, then you either have to increase taxes or decrease services, which maybe makes more people leave and further drives decline. It's a pretty Eor view of the world and our future.

Brian Lehrer: Well, let's go through some of the essays in the issue. The researchers who actually popularized the idea of the "urban doom loop," Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh and Arpit Gupta assessed the state of the evidence today in two essays for this issue. Are they moving from doom times to boom times in their assessment?

Elizabeth Glazer: I think that they are still pretty worried about it because they think that the cycle that they forecast has played out and that we actually haven't even seen the full effect of it. They really focus a lot on real estate and taxes. They say the reason we haven't seen the full effect is that many real estate leases are long-term, and only half of the pre-pandemic leases have come up for renewal, and that we face, New York City, a $7 to $8 billion budget gap. They cite another contributor, the Citizens Budget Commission. That's even before you consider the impact of declining property tax revenues.

I think they think that we're in a perilous state, but they also think that it's not that this is a foregone crash, that there are things that can be done. They focus a lot on upgrading office stock, how you figure out how to convert office buildings to alternate uses. Public safety is important. Investing in public safety and reliable transit. It then gets to some gooshier things that some of our other contributors address that are actually quite important, which is, what is the climate of the city that actually encourages innovation and attracts high-quality talent? There's a sliver of light.

One of the things that I thought at least was most interesting about really the great range of people who wrote for this issue and a range of people in so many different roles, people who run startups and nonprofits, great scholars, major figures in the cultural world, as you mentioned, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, is actually an enormous sense of optimism and not a fool's paradise sense of optimism, meaning, what they all seem to converge on is that there is an electricity in the city, that people make the city, and that the talent that the city can attract, how they connect to one another, their own smarts and ingenuity is actually what reinvents the city over and over.

How does the city continue to attract people? Well, all these things that maybe folks think about as nice to haves, culture, parks, retail, all the social infrastructure that connects us aren't nice to haves, they are the thing that make a city. I thought it was actually quite an optimistic look. A lot of work ahead for sure.

Brian Lehrer: What you just said to describe the electricity of the city and how it results in innovation, here we are in 2024, somebody could have said that on WNYC in its first year in 1924. Somebody could have said the same thing in 1954, 1984, 2004, just after 9/11. Are we seeing it with the Zoomers? Are there still young adults all over the country, or even just in the New York suburbs who don't want to sit in their childhood bedroom and they want a life in Manhattan, they want a life in Brooklyn, they want a life in Queens or the Bronx, Staten Island's in another category. Not that we don't love it. [laughter]

I know plenty of people in their 20s who are having trouble finding affordable rents. Why? Because there's so much demand among their peers for those same apartments.

Elizabeth Glazer: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Am I overperceiving this?

Elizabeth Glazer: No, I don't think so at all. I think that's what makes New York different. Ed Glaeser, the great urbanist, New York-born, now at Harvard, talks about this in his essay, which is that people are continually drawn to New York, just as you say. You think about what Brooklyn looks like now and what it was even 30 years ago. It is a hub of activity and industry and arts and food. Yes, the rents reflect that. If you think about the other crises that this city has gone through, when you think about the 1970s, huge loss of manufacturing, and you had all of Soho standing empty.

Spoiler alert, it wasn't called Soho then, it's a sign of its reinvention, maybe that it now has a name. Then the conversion of all that manufacturing space, or you think about the financial district after 9/11 when it was a ghost town and the demand for office space just collapsed. Think about then what happened, the conversion of much of the older office buildings into apartments. The creation of a pretty vibrant street life. There is this capacity for eternal reinvention. It does come down to people and to smarts and to the way we are able to connect with one another. It doesn't mean we can just sit back and light a cigarette and see it all happen. There's a ton of work to be done, and it's all in the particulars and the specifics but the bones are there.

Brian Lehrer: With Elizabeth Glazer, founder of the journal Vital City. Their latest issue titled, Is The Urban Doom Loop For Real? Also joining us now is one of their contributors who we're so happy to have, Jennifer Egan, the author of many books, including Manhattan Beach, maybe her best-known, and her latest, The Candy House. She's got an essay on why she will never leave New York. Jennifer, thank you so much. It's so great to have you on for a few minutes. Welcome to WNYC.

Jennifer Egan: Happy to be here. Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: So many of your books take place in or around New York City. For listeners who may not be familiar with you, what's your personal relationship with New York and why will you never leave?

Jennifer Egan: I moved here in 1987, so a long time ago, and I've really spent my whole adult life here. I can read an excerpt from my piece which is an impressionistic account of why I-- the title is Why, if I Were Prone to Saying Never, I Would Say I’ll Never Leave New York. Here are the reasons.

Brian Lehrer: What a treat. We are all ears.

Jennifer Egan: Because it has sidewalks. Because the tap water is delicious. Because my husband and I raised two kids in Brooklyn without ever owning a car and they both played travel baseball. Because it’s an eavesdropper’s paradise. Two women on the subway, “Have you done skimboarding?” “I’ve done skimboarders.” Girl riding a scooter, talking to herself, “I’m on a mission. That’s all I can say right now and that’s all I need to say right now.” Because I chose New York before I'd ever seen it and the city took me in. Because 19th century New York is still present, often wedged between skyscrapers, and imagine the New York stubbornness that went into those refusals.

Because beneath the hardscape are still wetlands and native paths and rocky towers and coursing streams that our grid erased. Because I heard the first plane hit, and that evening, pushed our son on the baby swings while a fluorescent void hung in the distance. Because I still get lost in the West Village. Because New York is the only place I’ve been able to write about while also living in it. Because New Yorkers are tough and kind and smart. Because at every edge, there is water. Because my whole adult life winks at me now as I move through its streets. Those are some reasons.

Brian Lehrer: Best three minutes we've had on the show this week. Listeners, who wants to chime in with reasons you will never leave New York City or because we deal in realism here, reasons you might? 212-433-WNYC. Who feels you're affected by the Urban Doom Loop or maybe what people call the Urban Doom Loop is actually improving the quality of life in New York City, or anything else you want to say? 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. Jennifer, how does the city feel to you? I love that about getting lost in the East Village. In what other city can Fourth Street intersect with 10th Street?

It makes no sense, but can you say how you feel about things right now? There's so much talk about crime and threats and subway dysfunction and everything else. How do you feel today?

Jennifer Egan: I think all of those things are true, but they're probably true of every city in America in this moment or most of them. I recognize those qualities, but I guess one thing I really feel is New York is my city. It's given me my adult life, and it's given me, as you pointed out, so much creative material. The fact that it's struggling does not make me want to leave. It makes me want to help. I feel like this is my place and I will stick by it. Feeling that it's vulnerable just adds to that sense of allegiance that I feel to the city and everyone else in it.

Brian Lehrer: Why, if I Were Prone to Saying Never, I Would Say I’ll Never Leave New York, the essay by Jennifer Egan in this issue of Vital City. Thanks for coming on for a few minutes and doing that awesome reading. Thank you.

Jennifer Egan: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Let's go to the phone. We don't have a caller ready quite yet, even though our phones are really lighting up. Listener is quoting the writer Dawn Powell who writes, "There is really one city for everyone. New York is my city because I have an investment I can always draw on, a bottomless investment of building up an idea of New York, so no matter what happens here, I have the rock of my dreams of it that nothing can destroy." That's an interesting one, Liz. It's like the city of reinvention.

Elizabeth Glazer: Yes. Absolutely. Which is a theme repeated over and over again. I love what Jenny said about New York is my city, which is that sense of loyalty and kinship. One of our writers, a man named Adem Bunkeddeko, who's a former executive director of Coro, was a refugee from Uganda. He describes this incredibly challenging childhood growing up in New York City. What it actually meant and how connected he felt to the city and to the people in the city even as he and his family were trying to build a life here and I think it comes through over and over again from so many different backgrounds and experiences.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "You all sound diluted. The city is too expensive and it's financially a mistake to raise a child here. We spend $50,000 a year just on a nanny alone with almost no tax relief. We pay $15,000 in taxes to the city alone. We don't want to leave, but we might." Talk to that listener.

Elizabeth Glazer: A huge affordability crisis. There's no question about it. I think that we're at the lowest vacancy rate for rentals that the city has had in maybe 50 years. It's like 1.4%. People who are poor spend more than 50% of their income on rent and you can't have a thriving city if people don't have a place to live. This is an enormous problem. Two of our writers, Vicki Been and Ingrid Ellen who are experts on housing lay out a whole series of things that have to happen in order to ensure that housing can be built and part of that has to do with changing the zoning laws which are enormously restrictive and pretty ancient.

Brian Lehrer: Your line is breaking up a little bit.

Elizabeth Glazer: Oh, sorry.

Brian Lehrer: I think you made that point pretty clearly so let me go to a caller. Janine in Brooklyn you're on WNYC. Hi, Janine.

Janine: Hey. Hi, Mr. Brian Lehrer. I've missed you. I'm back in New York City. I don't know. I had to leave during the pandemic unexpectedly. I went for two weeks to help take care of my mom in February of 2020. She had a horrible diagnosis. I ended up staying and I would come back up to New York to work. Both of my parents passed. I was blessed to be their death doula. I was trying to keep the family home because we are Black homeowners and so forth, but being in the suburbs was just-- As a single person I had no community. It was a house I grew up in but it wasn't the people that I grew up with.

My mom would make pies for people. Nobody was there for me, but my New York friends were there for me. My New York friends came down for the funeral during the pandemic. My community is here. Even though it's very expensive, it doesn't smell so good, it's hot, it's slightly dangerous, there is no place in this world like New York City for me. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: If you moved out in 2020 and I'm glad you missed me and you just moved back, have you found it to be different?

Janine: Yes, it's very different. Financially, I actually got better during the pandemic. I have friends who own property. I've been able to support Black folks who have property in New York by renting from them coming back. In Brooklyn, it's hard because a lot of the places that I used to go to are now gone. There is a different sense of danger. It's not the New York that I knew when I was younger here. I moved here in '97. It's a new energy. I just know from my lifestyle as an artist, being in the Washington, DC area I was a total outsider.

There's just nothing like New York energy, like the conversation-- I randomly had this deep conversation with two other people who had just recently lost their parents on the One Train going to Harlem. You don't get that in other cities. I have to say with expense, all of the cities are expensive. No matter where you go, there's the same issues that you see in New York, but you're isolated because you have to drive everywhere. Particularly with this-- I don't know what's going to happen in the world. If things happen and Trump gets in, I would rather be in New York than any place else in this country. That's all I have to say.

Brian: Janine, thank you so much for your call. Glad you're back. Keep calling us now that you are. Elizabeth Glazer, that was such a beautiful rendition of the pros and the cons and the ambiguity and the ambivalence, although she's not really ambivalent about being back. Any last thing you want to say before we wrap it up and we just tell people that this issue of Vital City, your journal, on whether the Urban Doom Loop is real is out and people can see it online. Right?

Elizabeth: Absolutely. I thought that was a beautiful way to end with your last caller.

Brian: Elizabeth Glazer, founder of Vital City. Thanks for coming on with us. Obviously this conversation goes on.

Elizabeth: Great. Thanks so much, Brian.

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