Articles
"By 2025, Planners See a
Million New Stories in the Crowded City", New York Times, © Sam Roberts, 2/19/06
With higher birth rates among Hispanic and Asian New Yorkers, immigrants
continuing to gravitate to New York City and a housing boom transforming all
five boroughs, the city is struggling to cope with a phenomenon that few other
cities in the Northeast or Midwest now face: a growing population. It is
expected to pass nine million by 2020.
New York might need an extra million or so slices of cake for its 400th
birthday party in 2025.
Estimated today at a record 8.2 million, the population is expected to reach
nearly 9.4 million in 2025. But that projected growth poses potential problems
that New York is just starting to grapple with: ensuring that there are enough
places in which to live, work, attend school and play and that transportation
and energy are adequate.
Elaborating on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's disclosure last month that city
planners were drafting a strategy to cope with this expected growth, Daniel L.
Doctoroff, the deputy mayor for economic development, said the city could
accommodate a million additional people or more, but only if it began planning
for their needs now.
''We have the capacity through rezoning and underutilized land to go well
over that number,'' he said. ''But you cannot simply divorce the issue of growth
from the infrastructure required to support it. It opens up great opportunities
only if the growth is smart, if we have the things that make cities worth living
in.''
Mr. Doctoroff said the strategy would explore opportunities for growth both
citywide and in 188 individual neighborhoods. It would determine how land use
regulations and other constraints might be altered to create sufficient housing,
schools, subway routes and parks, preserve factory jobs and identify sites for
less desirable but necessary structures, including power plants.
Last month, the New York Building Congress, a trade group, estimated that
proposed development, including the World Trade Center site and the Hudson Yards
in Manhattan and the Atlantic Terminal area in Brooklyn, would generate a 21
percent increase in jobs by 2025. That, the group said, would require new
sources of electricity.
In his State of the City address last month, Mr. Bloomberg said that he would
present a ''strategic land use plan'' in April. That will explore the potential
for growth, identify the constraints and recommend how to provide the housing,
transportation, energy and other public works, including parks, to accommodate a
larger population, the mayor said.
''Making sure that every community shares in the New York we are building
also requires us to look to the future and plan for the future in ways we
haven't dared in decades,'' the mayor said.
Among the goals of the plan, Mr. Doctoroff said, are to produce greater
geographic diversity -- more jobs in Downtown Brooklyn, Flushing and Jamaica in
Queens, the South Bronx, Harlem and the Far West Side -- and to preserve
manufacturing jobs.
Except for the clothing industry, manufacturing jobs have not decreased year
to year for the first time since World War II.
City officials rarely engage in long-range planning, particularly for growth.
A short-lived proposal for ''planned shrinkage'' was advanced in the mid-1970's,
sandwiched between a comprehensive statement of urban challenges and potential
solutions in 1969 and a candid but still largely optimistic assessment in 1987.
''This will be different,'' Mr. Doctoroff said. ''Much more practical.''
New York has been the most populous American city since the first census in
1790. Almost steadily since the 1940's, more people have been leaving the city
for other parts of the country than have arrived here from other areas of the
nation.
Growth in the 1980's and especially the 1990's has been largely driven by
immigration. Foreigners are expected to account for much of the growth in the
next two decades, growth that, according to the forecasts, would keep New York
in first place among the nation's cities and maintain the New York metropolitan
region either as the largest or, at least, tied with Los Angeles.
One recent study, by Regina Armstrong of Urbanomics, a consultant to the New
York Metropolitan Transportation Council, an intergovernmental planning group,
also projects that by 2025, the Bronx will be home to 1.5 million people and
Brooklyn to 2.8 million -- surpassing their mid-20th century peaks.
Queens will have 2.8 million people, the study says, and Staten Island nearly
600,000 -- records for both boroughs. Manhattan, with 1.7 million, will still be
short of the more than two million people who lived there early in the last
century, many in densely packed tenements. Other projections computed by state
demographers suggest that by 2020, Queens will overtake Brooklyn as the most
populous borough.
The Urbanomics projections say that among non-Hispanic whites, births will
again outnumber deaths beginning after 2010 and that their net migration from
the city will peak by 2015 and that the number of black residents will begin to
decline in 2015. They also say that after 2010 more Hispanic people will be
leaving New York than arriving but that their birthrates will remain high, and
that the number from Asia will continue to increase. After 2025, the population
is projected to then expand more slowly, to nearly 9.5 million in 2030, for a 16
percent increase since 2005.
Compared to the last five years, according to the projections, between 2025
and 2030 among Asians the total of births over deaths will more than double, and
the net migration -- people arriving versus leaving -- will more than triple.
Population projections are notoriously subject to and variables -- no one can
predict the impact of terrorism, a possible resurgence in crime, medical
advances or epidemics, the global economy or the effects of technological
changes on jobs.
Historically, those predictions tend to have overestimated growth, inspired,
in part, by the optimism of the moment or to justify the ambitious agendas of
developers and utility executives.
''The overall driving concept is that a favorable employment situation in the
New York region will attract an increase in population,'' said Prof. Joel E.
Cohen, who heads the Laboratory of Populations at the Rockefeller University.
''I am not saying these projections are better or worse than lots of local
area projections. They just should be taken with large grains of salt.
Historical analyses of how projections made in the past have done when the
future came around have shown much larger errors than anticipated by the people
who made the projections.''
The latest official census figures actually showed a slight decline in New
York State's population. But, on the basis of housing construction, the city has
successfully challenged recent estimates, and the Census Bureau has accepted the
city's figure of 8,168,338 as of 2004. New census estimates are due out next
month.
While some demographers question how long growth will continue, state and
city officials say they generally agree with the overall projections.
''We're in the same ballpark,'' said Joseph J. Salvo, director of the
Department of City Planning's population division.
Robert D. Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, said that with
nearby suburbs nearly saturated, the city was no longer at as much of a
competitive disadvantage. Still, he said, ''New York's got to find a place to
put another 1.2 to 1.5 million New Yorkers,'' adding, ''One way to keep these
forecasts from happening is to make it prohibitively expensive to live and work
here.''
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