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| Construction cranes rising over Hudson Yards on Saturday. Residential and office construction have boomed since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in 2014. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times |
NY TIMES
When Bill de Blasio was running for mayor on a starkly liberal platform in 2013, some of New York’s business leaders feared the city’s economic well-being was doomed.
“There was definitely something in the ether,” said Alicia Glen, a deputy mayor whom Mr. de Blasio recruited from Wall Street. “‘The lefties are taking over.’ ‘This is not a pro-business mayor.’ ‘They’re going to ruin the economy.’ I heard a lot of that myself.”
It did not help that Mr. de Blasio was hoping to succeed Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a self-made billionaire and a darling of business elites. Mr. Bloomberg was a political independent whose businesslike approach to running New York was heralded as helping to rescue it from the depths of the recession.
But as Mr. de Blasio settles into the second half of his four-year term, the opposite has happened. Even amid national and global concerns about teetering economies, New York City has rarely been in better financial shape. Indeed, the city added more jobs in Mr. de Blasio’s first two years in office — 248,000 — than in any two-year period in the last half-century, according to data released last week by the State Labor Department.
Along with the steady increases in employment, the wages of workers in the city have risen at a fast pace over the last two years, helping them cope with the dizzying cost of living. Residential and office construction are booming. Tourism is at a high.
Of course, a roaring real estate market has left many New Yorkers struggling to pay for housing and has fed a homelessness problem that has bedeviled Mr. de Blasio.
Still, by virtually any measure, the city continues to do better than the rest of the country in rebounding from the financial crisis, economists said.
In fact, the city has a record number of jobs (4.2 million) and a record number of employed residents (four million), and attracted a record number of tourists last year (58.3 million). The share of the city’s population that is employed is at its highest level — 58 percent – in at least four decades.
In the early years of the recovery, the bulk of the hiring was in lower-paying fields like retail and health care. But it has broadened to all sectors, including Wall Street, construction and even manufacturing.
Wages, too, have begun to surge, and not just for white-collar workers at the upper end of the pay spectrum, said James Parrott, chief economist with the Fiscal Policy Institute, a union-backed research group. Mr. Parrott said that average wages for workers at all levels of pay had risen faster than inflation in the last two years, after being flat for the previous three years.
Mr. de Blasio has forged ahead, embracing the “Fight for $15” movement and promising that all city government employees would earn at least $15 an hour by the end of 2018 (the current statewide minimum is $9).
Helping to raise the wages of the city’s lowest-paid residents is a priority for his administration, said Ms. Glen, who was an executive at Goldman Sachs before leaving for City Hall.
Kathryn S. Wylde, chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, an influential group that includes most of the city’s biggest employers, stated that Mr. de Blasio tamped down some fears about his liberal bent last year when he overhauled the city’s corporate tax system and reduced tax rates for small businesses.
The mayor may not have won over all of the doubters yet, Ms. Wylde said, but he had scored points with them by being “very fiscally responsible,” referring to the mayor’s budgeting process and the contracts his administration had reached with unions.
Mr. de Blasio has also sought to diversify the economy and encourage job creation beyond Manhattan. Since Mr. de Blasio took office, employment has risen faster in the other boroughs as the city’s unemployment rate has steadily declined, to 5.3 percent in January, from 8 percent in January 2014.