Greater than Ever by Daniel Doctoroff

Author:Daniel Doctoroff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2017-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

BROOKLYN DREAMS

THE DAY I started as Deputy Mayor, I changed my commute, of course. Instead of heading inland to Midtown Manhattan’s towering office district, I started riding my bike down to the office at around five-thirty a.m. from our brownstone on the Upper West Side along the waterfront bike path in the new Hudson River Park before crossing to City Hall near the bottom of Manhattan Island.

The six-and-a-half-mile ride in the dark, with no one else around, took about twenty minutes. As I rode along the river early in the morning, the lights would twinkle onto the river from the forest of new towers sprouting on the other bank in Hoboken and Jersey City. Suddenly, I was shadowed by a truth about the regional economy that I had only sensed earlier: New York City was getting its lunch eaten by its neighbor to the west.

During the 1990s, as New York put its resources into battling crime, New Jersey greedily lured our businesses with tax breaks and new, affordable, glass and stainless steel towers. It was enticing our young families with spacious new three-room condos with spectacular views of Downtown. Census data show that Hoboken increased its total number of housing units by nearly 14 percent and its total number of households by 29 percent from 1990 to 2000. During the same period, Jersey City built twelve million square feet of office space on the Hudson waterfront—or about as much as Lower Manhattan lost on 9/11. Thirty-two firms moved from Manhattan to Jersey City in 2000 alone.

New Jersey’s relentless bid for our business and families highlights another aspect of New York’s competitive dilemma. As an international capital of finance, our competitors were London and Hong Kong. In theory, it might have made sense to work with New Jersey to strengthen the entire region as a destination compared with these other world capitals, or other regional business centers, and we both might have benefited. After all, we shared such tourist attractions as the Statue of Liberty and sports teams such as the Giants and Jets. The Port Authority was established to enable just such cooperation. But the fact is that it is just too hard to get things done well across state lines. It is challenging enough to get things done in any one city or state alone. Each has its own agenda, each its own time frame, each its own allocation of capital, and they rarely sync up.

Before I entered City Hall, I had tried to work with officials from New Jersey on the Olympic bid and realized one thing: it was hard to get them to respond. That wasn’t necessarily because they disagreed with what we wanted to do—although they might have—but because they didn’t see what a New York Olympics would do for them.

In fact, while in office, I came up with only a semi-jokey formula that I immodestly called Doctoroff’s Theorem, to calculate the degree of difficulty of getting anything done: degree of difficulty = x +

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