Seth Pinsky

It isn't just large and beautiful and a benefit to New York, but it's become a model that's been replicated in other cities around the world and points to a strategy for redevelopment that really can work in lots of places in many different countries.

Dan Doktoroff was the first deputy mayor for economic development. His title was economic development and rebuilding relating to the World Trade Center. Hudson Yards was another project that came out of Dan's mind. And the issue that he was trying to address was the fact that there are two large open rail yards that are on the west side of Manhattan that are

or in many ways, a gaping hole that prevented development from occurring around them. And what was really innovative about the plan was that the biggest challenge to developing the Hudson Yards was a combination of two things. One was building a deck over the rail yard so that you could develop on top of them. And the other was that the neighborhood was off of the subway system.

it really was not accessible to people who were coming from most parts of the region. So what Dan understood was that if the city were to rezone the area and allow for high density development, which would also solve another problem the city was facing, which was that we didn't have enough modern office stock, that if we were to rezone the area,

that we could borrow against the future tax revenues that would be generated by that development and use that money up front to extend the subway to the Hudson Yards from what had then been its terminus at Times Square. And the city did exactly that.

It turned out that not only was the city able to use the tax revenues to pay for the subway, but it's been generating a surplus of tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars a year from that tax revenue. And it has a vital new central business district that previously had not existed.

I think that there are a few things. One is that it's very important when you're in government to stop and ask what the questions are that you're trying to answer before jumping to answers. And that upfront analysis is really key. Number two is that the key to economic development is talent. And the key to talent is quality of life.

And an important part of quality of life is magnetic infrastructure. And therefore, when people think about arts and culture and they think about entertainment and restaurants, those are not just nice to haves for a city. They are critical to attracting that talent and starting that virtuous cycle. And number three is that it's not just about announcing initiatives.

It's about making sure that you have the mechanics in place to actually deliver on your promise. And one of the things that I think we're seeing today when it comes to government, whether it be city, state, or federal, is a real skepticism that government can actually deliver on its promises. And focusing on competence is so important. for any government, and it is absolutely necessary.

It doesn't matter how much money you put into the system. If the system itself is not working, then nothing's going to come out the other end.

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Arts and culture are maybe the best example of what I think of as magnetic infrastructure. I remember when I was running the Economic Development Corporation, what I used to say about arts and culture in New York was that it was a unique industry because it played three different roles. The first role was that it is what gave the heart to New York. It produces beauty.

It produces works that are thought-provoking. It brings people together in important conversations. And so in and of itself, it's a good. In addition to that, arts and culture are an enormous economic sector in the city. They generate jobs. They bring tourists. They generate all sorts of economic activity just as businesses.

But what makes them really important to the city is that they are a key aspect of our magnetic infrastructure. That when people are thinking about coming to work in New York, when people are thinking about coming to live in New York, and they think of all the hassles that are associated with those decisions, And then they try to say to themselves, well, then why is it worth it for me to come?

It's things like the 92nd Street Y, like the Metropolitan Museum, like Lincoln Center that make it all worth putting up with. It is because of institutions like ours and all the other leading cultural institutions across the city, large and small. that people feel like it's worth it to be here.

And because they feel like it's worth it to be here, they bring their talent and their talent attracts business and businesses attract more talent. And that's what fuels our economy.

One is that the key to economic development is talent and the key to talent is quality of life. The second is that an important part of quality of life is magnetic infrastructure. And that when we think about arts and culture and entertainment, especially when we're thinking about the health of our cities, magnetic infrastructure is not a nice to have. It's a need to have.

And the third is that government can't just focus on creating new programs and spending money. It has to make sure that the programs that it's creating and the money that it's spending are actually achieving the goals that were established and that those goals are clear. And if we want people to believe in government, government has to give them a reason to believe.

It's been a pleasure.

I entered city government in 2003, which was not that long after the September 11th attacks on New York City. I joined the administration, which had actually started on January 1st, 2002. And as Mayor Bloomberg took his oath of office, the World Trade Center site was literally still smoldering.

So in many ways, what was the greatest challenge of the Bloomberg administration that is the September 11th tragedy and figuring out how to move the city forward beyond that was also the greatest opportunity for the city because it was clear to almost everyone that something significant had to be done if the city were to be saved, let alone were to grow again and become prosperous.

And actually, throughout Mayor Bloomberg's time in office over the 12 years that he was in office, there were several major catastrophes that befell the city that the administration had to respond to. September 11th, first, the 2008 financial crisis, second, Superstorm Sandy towards the end of his time in office. And each of those allowed the administration to look anew at

the way the city operated in its entirety, to question whether the way it had been operating before was the right way, and to build a consensus among multiple stakeholders as to what the direction forward would be.

I think the most important thing that distinguished the Bloomberg administration in trying to answer all of those questions was the very rigorous approach to analyzing what the needs of the city were and what

I think was really important and that a lot of people don't appreciate about the administration was the amount of time that we put into first framing the question of what is the problem before we jumped to the answers to the question. And in government, what tends to happen is the opposite, that everyone likes answers.

And so they jump to answers without necessarily knowing if the answers that they're giving are the answers to the real questions that are creating the problems in the first place.

Hurricane Sandy was a terrible tragedy. There were billions of dollars in property damage. Dozens of lives were lost. People were rendered homeless. It was a really terrible event in the history of the city. As the city was beginning to recover from the hurricane, I actually was on paternity leave.

And about two weeks into my paternity leave, I got a phone call from the deputy mayor to whom I reported, Bob Steele, who said that coming out of Superstorm Sandy, Mayor Bloomberg and the senior leadership at City Hall believed that there was a once in a generation opportunity to think about how climate change might impact New York City in the decades ahead.

What they saw was one, that people were now focused on the issue of climate change in a way that they had not been prior to the storm, and two, that there would be very significant federal funding coming into New York that we could use if we invested it strategically to strengthen the city and to make it more resilient.

So they asked me if I would come back from maternity leave and to hit up an effort called the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency that had as its goal to take the question first of what did we think over the coming decades would be the impact of climate change and what could the city do to ensure that it would be as resilient as possible as it rebuilt in the face of what we knew were going to be significant challenges that climate change would bring.

Eventually, we ended up putting together a $20 billion, 400 plus initiative blueprint, which has not been entirely followed since the Bloomberg administration left office. But many of the aspects have been followed. And I think as a result of it, the city is now better positioned for climate change than it would have been otherwise.

To start, we changed elements of the building code so that, for example, when buildings were built and had electric generators, those generators, instead of being put in the basement of buildings where if flooding occurred, they would be knocked out, had to be put at higher elevation in the buildings. We also looked at much more ambitious neighborhood-wide interventions.

For example, we proposed construction of a major seawall along the eastern frontage of Staten Island that faced the Atlantic Ocean, an area that had been devastated by the storm.

That project, as I understand it, is now moving forward under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers and should protect dozens of neighborhoods from the sort of really devastating impact that occurred in 2012 and ensure that that doesn't happen going forward.

From the very beginning of the Bloomberg administration, there was an acknowledgement that New York was too dependent on financial services. And just to be clear, the goal was never to reduce the size of the financial services industry in New York. It was to grow other industries so that they could account for an even larger percentage of the city's economy.

So in other words, we wanted to grow the pie, not shrink one piece of it. From the very early days, the administration had a decent amount of success with this diversification initiative. We increased the amount of film and television filming that occurred in the city. We increased tourism and there were a number of other industries that grew.

But when 2008 came around, it was very clear when the financial markets collapsed that we still were highly dependent

on wall street and it looked to us like the impacts of the 2008 downturn were going to be really devastating to the city as frankly they were to many parts of the country but especially here so the approach that we took was that first we started to study the issue and what we saw was that it was unlikely that the financial services industry was going to be growing anytime soon in fact it was likely that it was going to be shrinking

but that two things were going to be occurring in New York. One was that there was one part of the financial services industry that our studies indicated might be less impacted than the rest of the industry, which was venture capital. That was an area that New York had never been particularly successful in. And the second was that as people were being laid off in

more traditional New York industries like financial services and professional services, many of which are dependent on financial services, that a lot of talent would suddenly be let loose. And there was a risk that those people would leave the city. So our focus very quickly became two-pronged. One was that we had a goal of trying to tie those people back down to New York.

And two was that we wanted to grow the venture capital sector. And so what we landed on was the idea of trying to promote entrepreneurialism in the city.

We really focused on making new sources of capital available to entrepreneurs, training people who had never worked in an entrepreneurial environment before in the skills that they would need, not in a large corporation, but in a small startup, and creating spaces that would allow them to start these businesses and get support.

What we started to see, which really surprised us, was that the businesses that people were founding tended to be technology businesses. And so we began to really focus on growing the technology industry in the city. We eventually put together a roadmap for achieving that goal

the flagship initiative of which was the creation of a new engineering and applied sciences campus that was built by an Israeli university, the Technion in Cornell on Roseville Island, which is in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. It was a $2 million investment. And I'm pleased to say that today it has hundreds of students and

is turning out new businesses and new talent that's fueling the growth of what is now, by everyone's estimation, not only probably the second most important industry in the city behind Wall Street, but also an industry that has now made New York the number two center of technology anywhere in the country and maybe anywhere in the world.

A lot of it was about zoning and making sure that there were areas that were zoned so that they could become alternative central business districts for the city.

And so we looked at areas like the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront, Long Island City, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, places that today are thriving and booming areas, but back at the beginning of the administration had suffered from underinvestment for decades. We looked at areas like downtown Jamaica and downtown Brooklyn in the areas of the South Bronx and Harlem.

Another part of it was making strategic investments to spur development, to kind of get the flywheel turning in many of those areas, using city-owned land to attract developers, getting them to build buildings. Projects that then would spur further development around them, making investments in infrastructure around those neighborhoods from parks to schools to cultural institutions and such.

And then there were even more creative efforts. Like we looked at the fact that many of the city's own offices were located in lower Manhattan and buildings that were in terrible condition. So our own workforce were in terrible buildings. And what we did was we worked to move the workforce.

Out of those buildings to sell those buildings to private developers to spur new economic activity in lower Manhattan, and then to see new development and other communities with the workforce that had previously been in lower Manhattan again, as a way to get the flywheel turning. So, for example, we move the Department of health.

from lower Manhattan to Long Island City that allowed Tishman Spire to build a major new development at a huge transit node, which today is now one of the most densely developed areas of the city, but at the time was really a backwater.

The High Line was a project that had been discussed off and on outside of city government. Within city government, there was actually hostility under previous administrations to the idea of revitalization. This was an elevated railroad that ran from rail yards in the West 30s down the west side of Manhattan. previously brought supplies and goods to the factories that had once lined it.

By the time the Bloomberg administration came into office, those factories were all closed and the rail line was no longer running. And there had been an effort actually to tear the rail line down. The administration instead came up with a very innovative plan to redevelop the High Line itself as an elevated park. But in order to do that, the city needed to get the permission

of the landowners who owned the property around and the development rights around the High Line. And so an incentive program essentially was put in place that allowed the people who owned those development rights to transfer those development rights off of the High Line and onto the avenues that abutted the High Line. and then cleared the way for the city to make the investment in the High Line.

And today, the High Line not only is a huge tourist attraction and a beautiful work of architecture, but along the High Line has become one of the most vital and vibrant areas of the city with many offices of technology companies, as well as new housing and other investments that have been made. And

You know, again, it's an example of how with strategic investments in what I like to call magnetic infrastructure, the stuff that makes cities attractive, how you can then attract enormous amounts of private investment, which really gets things going for a neighborhood or a city.