Lower Manhattan has come back from the 9/11 attacks with a much larger population than it had before, creating new capital spending challenges for New York City.
"We've done something more than recover," Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday, commemorating the federal government's return to One World Trade Center. "Lower Manhattan – a booming neighborhood, both economically and now as a residential center," he said. "This place came back literally stronger than ever."
Three days earlier, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli met with reporters at Lower Manhattan Headquarters on nearby 150 Broadway.
The 20th-floor collaboration space, known as LMHQ and barely a year old, features a coffee bar, a pencil-sketch mural and sofas with funky pillows. No longer is the area merely an enclave for investment and bond bankers.
"This workspace is indicative of the changes that we've seen here in lower Manhattan," DiNapoli said. "This is a home to entrepreneurs doing businesses, to young startups, and established businesses. The men and women who use this space run the gamut of lower Manhattan's new and growing workforce."
The nation's fourth-largest business district is now also a neighborhood.
New mass transit infrastructure, the completion of new towers and the conversion of older office buildings have filled streets with young professionals and growing families to supplement bankers and tourists.
That will profoundly affect future capital spending and bonding on new needs, including education.
"There's been great progress in that area, but tremendous capital dollars are needed. More to come down the road," DiNapoli said in an interview. "It needs to be a partnership with the city, the state and the federal governments. So we're hoping that our report and our analysis will bring attention on that issue."
DiNapoli that day released an
More than three-quarters of the population is below age 45. The number of children has tripled. More than one-third of the families have incomes exceeding $200,000, compared with 7% citywide.
While the financial sector accounted for more than half of the jobs in 2000, that ratio dropped to one-third in 2015. Even as the number of finance jobs dropped in half, nonfinancial jobs have risen by more than one-quarter. The health-care and social services sectors have more than tripled.
"The success of lower Manhattan is very, very clear," said DiNapoli. "But there are still challenges, and in some ways more challenges when you have greater population that you have to support. Given that this is such a key driver of the city's economy and important to the state as well, we have to refocus our attention on how we address those challenges."
Challenges are many, said Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer.
"The job's not done. Even in success it continues to need more investment and support. More schools, more resiliency investments, more security investments, more transportation investments and more affordable housing."
Unanswered questions, said Brewer, include school space, safe routes to schools amid hectic downtown traffic, balancing development and preservation, resiliency and construction safety.
"Cranes are in the air. Hopefully they stay up there," she said.
Resiliency is a big concern, given the hit lower Manhattan took from Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 29, 2012 and reinforced earlier this month by the near-miss of Tropical Storm Hermine.
"Just because we dodged the bullet on the [latest] storm doesn't mean we have solved the resiliency needs in lower Manhattan. In fact, we haven't," said state Sen. Daniel Squadron, who represents the neighborhood and parts of Brooklyn's waterfront.
"We haven't gotten a fully funded resiliency plan. We haven't gotten full funding from the city, state and federal governments that we need."
Municipalities increasingly budget for emergencies such as a terrorist attack or a storm, according to Alan Rubin, a resiliency expert and director of business development at Tigress Financial Partners in New York.
"I sense that in the budgeting process, elected officials and budget directors have pockets of money for preparedness so that there's less scrambling with the time comes," said Rubin, who in the early 1990s helped design and underwrite Florida's hurricane relief catastrophe fund on behalf of Lehman Brothers.
"Now budget requests by New York State, New York City and many states include emergency preparedness. It's usually never enough, but we've been smart," Rubin said.
"The amount could include bonding, or rainy-day fund or some other kind of emergency funds, but people are no longer just looking for help from the federal government."
Enhanced security measures today range from the use of social media to a dedicated broadband line for emergency first responders.
"It didn't exist in 2001," said Rubin. "Today, people have all kinds of alerts.
