Census Estimates for 2011 Show Population Growth in New York - Sam Roberts via NYTimes.com

New York is growing faster than projected, a combination of increased immigration, higher birthrates, and decreased emigration.

Sam Roberts via NYTimes.com

New York City gained nearly 70,000 residents in the 15 months ended July 1, 2011, almost matching the growth of the 1990s, when an influx of foreigners set annual records, according to census estimates released on Wednesday.

[…]

In the estimates by the Census Bureau for July 1, 2011, the biggest gains were recorded in Brooklyn and Queens. Brooklyn had gained nearly 28,000 people since April 1, 2010, and Queens had gained more than 17,000.

Those gains, combined with increases in every other borough, boosted the city’s population by 69,777, to 8,244,910.

Remember that Brooklyn is an area with growing numbers of Hispanic and Asian immigrants, Hasidic Jews, and the largest concentration of ‘artists’ in the history of the world.

Also keep in mind that they faster that humanity crams itself into cities, the better for the environment, as well as for human social innovation. So the increase in New York and other US cities is largely a move in the right direction (although the US southwest has a long term water problem).

Greek Yogurt a Boon for New York State - William Neuman via NYTimes.com

Greek Yogurt consumption is up — that sinfully rich mouth feel — and mostly it’s made in New York State:

William Neuman via NYTimes.com

Greek yogurt has certainly been healthy for the economy in New York. Two of the leading brands, Chobani and Fage, have their main production plants in upstate New York and are expanding their operations.

Alpina Foods, the United States arm of a major South American dairy company, is building a $20 million plant in Batavia to make Greek yogurt topped with granola. And state economic development officials are said to be negotiating with another major food maker to set up a dairy products plant in the same area, creating the possibility for what one executive called a “yogurt cluster.”

Often twice as expensive as regular yogurt, Greek yogurt has most of the water and whey strained out, making it richer in protein and giving it the density of sour cream.

National retail sales of the thicker style of yogurt more than doubled last year, jumping to $821 million for a 52-week period ending in October, excluding Walmart stores, according to Mintel. The research firm projects that the strong sales growth will most likely continue this year.

New York’s dairy farmers are among the biggest beneficiaries of the public’s love affair with Greek yogurt, because it takes much more milk to make Greek yogurt than regular yogurt. “This is a ‘once every two or three generations’ situation,” said Bruce Krupke, executive vice president of the Northeast Dairy Foods Association. “All of the right forces have come together to make it very attractive to build in New York state.”

Now if we can only convince a manufacturer to use a non-plastic container.

New York Now Allows Benefit Corporations

New York has passed legislation to allo the formation of a new sort of corporation — a Benefit Corporation, or B Corp:

Kyle Westaway, New Legal Structures for ‘Social Entrepreneurs’

The Benefit Corporation is a new class of corporation with a corporate purpose to create public benefit, a broader fiduciary duty and is transparent about its overall social and environmental performance.

By definition, it must operate for the general public benefit – defined as a material positive impact on society and the environment. Every benefit corporation is required to publish an assessment using an independent, third-party assessment tool. To create a material positive benefit, a benefit corporation operates in a manner that not only creates value for the company’s shareholders, but also its community, environment, employees and suppliers.

The structure also calls for a high level of transparency and accountability. Within 120 days after the end of each fiscal year, a benefit corporation is required to publish a “Benefit Report,” which states how it performed that year on a social and environmental axis.

The press release, received by email:

NY Law Creates New Kind of Corporation

Spurs Investment to Create High Quality Jobs and

Use Business to Solve Social Problems

State Legislators from Wall Street Sponsored the Bill

Albany, NY: At midnight last night a law was enacted creating benefit corporations, a new class of corporations required to create benefit for society as well as shareholders.  Unlike traditional corporations, benefit corporations are required to create a material positive impact on society and the environment; consider how decisions affect employees, community and the environment; and publicly report their social and environmental performance using established third-party standards. 

Continuing a national trend of strong bi-partisan support for benefit corporation legislation, the New York bill (S79-A and A4692-A), sponsored by Senators Daniel Squadron (D-25) and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-64) and co-sponsored by William Larkin (R, C-39), passed both houses of the New York legislature unanimously.

“Political leaders like Speaker Silver, and Senators Squadron and Larkin understand that New York needs to attract businesses whose core purpose is to create more high quality jobs and to improve the quality of life in communities across the state,” said Andrew Kassoy, co founder of B Lab, the nonprofit organization that drafted the model legislation.  “The benefit corporation bill will unlock billions of dollars in impact investment capital and enable entrepreneurs across the state to start businesses that solve some of society’s greatest challenges.”

“Benefit corporations will mean New York is open for business in an important new way. Benefit corporations will unlock billions of dollars in new investments in New York while empowering companies to do well and do good,” said Senator Squadron. “By offering this opportunity to entrepreneurs and investors, New York will bring new businesses into the state, new investors into the market and a new socially-minded approach for our entrepreneurs.”

“By bringing benefit corporations to New York, we are showing that profit and social responsibility are not mutually exclusive,” said Speaker Silver.  “This law will continue our efforts to strengthen and diversify our economy while ensuring that New York remains a national leader in progressive policies that help our environment, protect consumers and bolster the rights of working men and women.”

“I am very happy to see that this bill has finally become law.  It will enable businesses to grow without the infringement of state government, and will help New York become a more business friendly state,” added Senator Larkin.

The new law addresses a long time concern among entrepreneurs who need to raise growth capital but fear losing control of the social or environmental mission of their business. These entrepreneurs and other shareholders of benefit corporations now have additional rights to hold directors accountable for failure to create a material positive impact on society, to consider the impact of decisions on employees, community, and the environment, or to inform the public about the company’s overall social and environmental impact as assessed against a credible, independent third party standard.

New York is the seventh state to pass benefit corporation legislation, joining Maryland, Vermont, New Jersey, Virginia, Hawaii, and most recently, California.  The legislation has enjoyed broad bi-partisan support nationally, with a vote tally of 892 ayes and 62 nays, and the signatures of both Republican and Democratic governors. The New York bill had significant support from business (partial list below), including Eileen Fisher, City Light Capital, and UncommonGoods; and from more than 2,600 New York citizens, all interested in creating better choices for the growing number of entrepreneurs and investors who seek to create businesses that create both social and shareholder value.

“The passage of benefit corporation legislation is an important and much needed step forward to grow our New York state economy and create more jobs which can also provide greater social and environmental benefit,” says David Levine, co-founder of the American Sustainable Business Council whose members’ organizations represent over 100,000 businesses. “At a time when the country is looking for solutions to build the economy, New York is helping to lead the way with an innovative and sustainable business strategy.”

The City that is a Goal

bobulate

E.B. White outlines that there are roughly three New Yorks:

1) The New York of the man or woman who was born here
2) The New York of the commuter
3) The New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something

On the third:

[T]he greatest is the last — the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

I returned to visit the place I grew up this weekend to take a trip with my family. “Home” is how I’d referred to the place for years. Yet slowly there was that tension between the place you lived and the place you live, the “were” and the “is,” the past, the present, and perhaps the future. And “home” — a four-letter word of a different kind — transforms.

More than a decade ago, I arrived in New York, but never intended to stay. I might (if I may), say then there are roughly four New Yorks:

Fourth, there is the New York of the man or woman who was born somewhere else and came to New York never intending to stay. Of these four incomparable cities, it may be the fourth that is the most unflappable, the most infallible, the most loyal. You see it is she who has understood love of a city, of its natives, and its commuters, of its messy seams and its buttoned-up asphalt, of its uptown arts and its devoted downtown. And she’s been spat on and praised, she’s been carried home, and cheered on. It is she, who embraces the city, knowing she had a choice otherwise. Yet her goal is to make this her home.

new york
Steven Johnson, What A Hundred Million Calls To 311 Reveal About New York New Yorkers are accustomed to strong odors, but several years ago a new aroma began wafting through the city’s streets, a smell that was more unnerving than the usual offenders (trash, sweat, urine) precisely because it was so delightful: the sweet, unmistakable scent of maple syrup. It was a fickle miasma, though, draping itself over Morningside Heights one afternoon, disappearing for weeks, reemerging in Chelsea for a few passing hours before vanishing again. Fearing a chemical warfare attack, perhaps from the Aunt Jemima wing of al Qaeda, hundreds of New Yorkers reported the smell to authorities. The New York Times first wrote about it in October 2005; local blogs covered each outbreak, augmented by firsthand reports in their comment threads. The city quickly determined that the odor was harmless, but the mystery of its origin persisted for four years. During maple syrup events, as they came to be called, operators at the city’s popular NYC311 call center—set up to field complaints and provide information on school closings and the like—were instructed to reassure callers that they could go about their business as usual. But then city officials had an idea. Those calls into the 311 line, they realized, weren’t simply queries from an edgy populace. They were clues. On January 29, 2009, another maple syrup event commenced in northern Manhattan. The first reports triggered a new protocol that routed all complaints to the Office of Emergency Management and Department of Environmental Protection, which took precise location data from each syrup smeller. Within hours, inspectors were taking air quality samples in the affected regions. The reports were tagged by location and mapped against previous complaints. A working group gathered atmospheric data from past syrup events: temperature, humidity, wind direction, velocity. Seen all together, the data formed a giant arrow aiming at a group of industrial plants in northeastern New Jersey. A quick bit of shoe-leather detective work led the authorities to a flavor compound manufacturer named Frutarom, which had been processing fenugreek seeds on January 29. Fenugreek is a versatile spice used in many cuisines around the world, but in American supermarkets, it’s most commonly found in the products on one shelf—the one where they sell cheap maple-syrup substitutes. This piece reminds me of the fantastic presentation Paul Kedrosky gave at Defrag a few weeks back on his ‘Ladder Index’ — the frequency of ladders found on southern California’s highways — as a leading indicator of the housing market. Big data is everywhere, and can be tapped in mysterious — and smelly — ways.
Zoom

Steven Johnson, What A Hundred Million Calls To 311 Reveal About New York

New Yorkers are accustomed to strong odors, but several years ago a new aroma began wafting through the city’s streets, a smell that was more unnerving than the usual offenders (trash, sweat, urine) precisely because it was so delightful: the sweet, unmistakable scent of maple syrup. It was a fickle miasma, though, draping itself over Morningside Heights one afternoon, disappearing for weeks, reemerging in Chelsea for a few passing hours before vanishing again. Fearing a chemical warfare attack, perhaps from the Aunt Jemima wing of al Qaeda, hundreds of New Yorkers reported the smell to authorities. The New York Times first wrote about it in October 2005; local blogs covered each outbreak, augmented by firsthand reports in their comment threads.

The city quickly determined that the odor was harmless, but the mystery of its origin persisted for four years. During maple syrup events, as they came to be called, operators at the city’s popular NYC311 call center—set up to field complaints and provide information on school closings and the like—were instructed to reassure callers that they could go about their business as usual.

But then city officials had an idea. Those calls into the 311 line, they realized, weren’t simply queries from an edgy populace. They were clues.

On January 29, 2009, another maple syrup event commenced in northern Manhattan. The first reports triggered a new protocol that routed all complaints to the Office of Emergency Management and Department of Environmental Protection, which took precise location data from each syrup smeller. Within hours, inspectors were taking air quality samples in the affected regions. The reports were tagged by location and mapped against previous complaints. A working group gathered atmospheric data from past syrup events: temperature, humidity, wind direction, velocity.

Seen all together, the data formed a giant arrow aiming at a group of industrial plants in northeastern New Jersey. A quick bit of shoe-leather detective work led the authorities to a flavor compound manufacturer named Frutarom, which had been processing fenugreek seeds on January 29. Fenugreek is a versatile spice used in many cuisines around the world, but in American supermarkets, it’s most commonly found in the products on one shelf—the one where they sell cheap maple-syrup substitutes.

This piece reminds me of the fantastic presentation Paul Kedrosky gave at Defrag a few weeks back on his ‘Ladder Index’ — the frequency of ladders found on southern California’s highways — as a leading indicator of the housing market.

Big data is everywhere, and can be tapped in mysterious — and smelly — ways.

More Pension Fraud In NY

Fraud isn’t used when describing the ‘responsible’ officials in the cities, countries and other agencies of New York that have systematically ignored their obligations to fund health care benefits for retirees, but it should be.

Mary Williams Walsh, New York Confronts $200 Billion Bill for Retiree Health

The cities, counties and authorities of New York have promised more than $200 billion worth of health benefits to their retirees while setting aside almost nothing, putting the public work force on a collision course with the taxpayers who are expected to foot the bill.

The total cost appears in a report to be issued on Wednesday by the Empire Center for New York State Policy, a research organization that studies fiscal policy.

It does not suggest that New York must somehow come up with $200 billion right away.

But the report casts serious doubt over whether medical benefits for New York’s retirees will be sustainable, given the sputtering economy and today’s climate of hostility toward new taxes and taxpayer bailouts.

The daunting size of the health care obligation raises the possibility that localities will be forced at some point to choose between paying their retirees’ medical costs and paying the investors who hold their bonds. Government officials aim to satisfy both groups, and have even made painful cuts in local services when necessary to keep up with both sets of payments.

Only a few places have tried to rein in their costs, by billing retirees for a portion of the premiums, for example. Retirees have responded with lawsuits, but ratings agencies and municipal bond buyers have shrugged off these warning signs.

“So far, the market doesn’t care,” said Edmund J. McMahon, the director of the Empire Center. “The market seems to assume, on the basis of nothing, that at some point all of these places are simply going to stop paying retiree health benefits.”

The health benefits are entirely separate from the pensions that New York’s public workers have earned. Governments have reported their pension obligations for years, but their retiree medical obligations have been building up unseen, because governments were not required to account for them. The information is starting to come to light because of a new accounting requirement.

So, the rule is ‘if you don’t have to report it, you don’t have to fund it,’ apparently.

This is just another element of the coming realignment of politics around pension default and trade populism (see Blame The Pensioners And The Democrats, One Billion Will Reach Retirement Age By 2050, Trade Populism As The Defining Issue Of 2012). And one of the major drivers for that realignment is widespread pension and health benefits default by governments and corporations.

And as Edmund McMahon said, the markets are assuming default is coming.

Where’s the Attorney General? Isn’t this illegal? We should start by throwing these people out of office, and into jail.

Christie Nixes Commuter Rail Tunnel

Everything is wrong with this story: anti-environment, anti-stimulus, and anti-new- infrastructure.

Patrick McGeehan, Christie Kills Hudson Train Tunnel

The largest public transit project in the nation, a commuter train tunnel under the Hudson River to Manhattan, was halted on Thursday by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey because, he said, the state could not afford its share of the project’s rising cost.

Mr. Christie’s decision stunned other government officials and advocates of public transportation because work on the tunnel was under way and $3 billion of federal financing had already been arranged — more money than had been committed to any other transit project in America.

The governor, a Republican, said he decided to withdraw his support for the project on Thursday after hearing from state transportation officials that the project would cost at least $2.5 billion more than its original price of $8.7 billion. He said that New Jersey would have been responsible for the overrun and that he could not put the taxpayers of the state “on what would be a never-ending hook.”

In scrapping the project, Mr. Christie is forfeiting the $3 billion from the federal government and jeopardizing as much from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The state may also have to repay the federal government for its share of the $600 million that has already been spent on the tunnel.

The tunnel, which would have stretched under the Hudson from North Bergen, N.J., to a new station deep below 34th Street in Manhattan, was intended to double the number of trains that could enter the city from the west each day. The project’s planners said the additional trains would alleviate congestion on local roads, reduce pollution, help the growth of the region’s economy and raise property values for suburban homeowners.

The tunnel was also supposed to provide jobs for 6,000 construction workers just as some other big transit infrastructure projects in the city, like the Second Avenue subway, were winding down.

Instead, the contractors hired to dig the tunnel will soon start laying off workers.

Leaving aside the near term impacts of laying off workers in a terrible economy, what about New Jersey commuters? New Jersey Transit has real transport problems, already:

Michael Grynbaum and Robert Gebeloff, Digging Into On-Time Figures for New York Trains

At the peak of the rush, from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m., about 25 percent of New Jersey Transit trains entering Manhattan arrived late; about 2 in 5 of the late trains were tardy by at least 15 minutes.

[…] morning commuters on New Jersey Transit who passed through the Summit station were late on 1 of every 6 trips, nearly a third by more than 20 minutes.

The fact that there is only a single tunnel to NJ from NYC, shared with Amtrak, makes it functionally impossible to increase the number of trains.

Christie critics suggest he is planning to divert the funds from highway tolls to road and bridge repairs.

Access to the Region's Core Project Map, via www.arctunnel.com

Access to the Region’s Core Project Map, via www.arctunnel.com

In a nutshell, we have a classic failure of the American system. Large and forward-thinking projects are considered and reconsidered for decades, only to be delayed or stopped when conditions turn down, or ideological considerations intrude.

Here, we have a large metropolitan area, with three (or more) states having a serious interest in the public transportation system, but there is no overarching management or political entity that is clearly in control. It’s like some jerk water country with a fragile power-sharing arrangement among various tribes who don’t like each other, and nothing serious can be accomplished because all of the groups have the veto.

Raising the fares to pay for the tunnel is just wrong. Businesses get a huge benefit from the existence of public transport, so the expense — only 50% of which is paid for historically by fares — should be spread out over the tax base.

Our only real hope is that Ray LaHood can step in and divert some more federal money into this mix. Otherwise, New Jersey, New York, millions of commuters, and thousands of workers will all suffer.

Update 8:27am: Krugman weighs in on this question:

Transit Economics

The usual suspects on the comment board are, inevitably, arguing that rail transit should pay for itself. The obvious response is that road transit doesn’t; why should only public transit have to self-finance, when private vehicles generally drive on free roads built and maintained out of taxes?

But in a way that misses the larger point: urban transportation is an area in which we know that market prices bear very little relationship to true social costs. Even if you ignore environmental impacts and the national security implications of oil imports, the fact is that driving in an urban area, especially in rush hour, imposes huge congestion externalities on other people.

He cites a piece by Felix Salmon, calculating the real costs of driving in NYC at rush hour, based on Charles Komanoff’s Balanced Transportation Analyzer, a 3.5 MB excel spreadsheet:

After crunching the numbers, he calculates that on a weekday, the average car driven into Manhattan south of 60th Street causes a total of 3.26 hours of delays to everybody else. (At weekends, the equivalent number is just over 2 hours.) No one car is likely to suffer excess delays of more than a few seconds, of course, but if you add up all those seconds for the thousands of affected cars and trucks, it comes to a significant amount of time.

Many of those hours are very valuable things, especially when you consider big trucks, staffed with two or three professionals, just idling in traffic. Komanoff calculates (check out the “Value of Time” tab) that the average vehicle has 1.97 people in it, and that the average value of an hour of saved vehicle time south of 60th Street in Manhattan on a weekday is $48.89. Which means, basically, that driving a car into Manhattan on a weekday causes about $160 of negative externalities to everybody else.

Komanoff wants to use his analysis for another run at congestion pricing for NYC, but one that is based on the actual impacts that the pricing has on the system as a whole. For example, he suggests that buses should always be free, to avoid delays caused by fumbling for fare cards: the delay is worse that the loss of a fare. (A reader mentions the alternative of random checks for fare cards, as done in Europe, or on Caltrain.) Likewise he wants to impose a 33% surcharge on taxi fares, with 10% of the surcharge going to the taxi drivers and owners, and 90% going to the MTA.

Very innovative thinking, and therefore, likely to get nowhere in today’s know-nothing atmosphere.

related articles

There are roughly three New Yorks.

There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and turbulence as natural and inevitable.

Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night.

Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

E.B. White, Here Is New York

(via @cdixon)