Ed Ou/The New York Times
Alexandra Ben Othman, 29, of Sunnyside, Queens, has spent six months working in temporary positions since being laid off from her job at a publishing company.
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
Published: August 30, 2010
By most standard measures of economic health, New York City’s recovery from the financial crisis and the recession it started is well under way.
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Marcus Yam/The New York Times
Selina Sharmin, 37, a librarian for the Queensborough Public Library system, has been told she is among 46 employees that will lose their jobs on Sept. 2.
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The typical New Yorker is less likely to be unemployed or facing foreclosure or bankruptcy than the average American. Homes in the metropolitan area have held their value better than in most other big cities as more people are moving to the region than deserting it. Tourists continue to flock to the city, filling hotel rooms at the highest rate in the country, and at rising prices.
Wall Street — still the engine that powers the city — roared back faster than expected, eliminated far fewer jobs than forecast, resumed paying out big bonuses and has begun to hire again. Despite a faltering stock market and recent signals that the national economy is losing steam, economists expect New York to remain on the rebound.
“We have been feeling on more solid footing the last six months,” said Marcia Van Wagner, the city’s assistant comptroller for budget. “If there’s no major shock, I think we’re going to have a slow, relatively steady recovery.”
There were some major shocks two years ago, most notably the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank, which heralded the end of the boom years of the mid-2000s. Lehman’s failure, in September 2008, caused a panic in financial markets that spurred predictions of another Great Depression.
But the city lost far fewer jobs than had been forecast and has been adding them back at a fast clip for the last six months. In July, the number of jobs in the city was down 108,000, or less than 3 percent, from July 2008. Over the same 24 months, the nation has lost 6.7 million jobs, or more than 4.5 percent. The city’s unemployment rate slipped last month to 9.4 percent, slightly lower than the national rate.
Still, experts on the city’s economy said the effects of the recession were spread unevenly across the local landscape, leaving many people in dire financial condition. David R. Jones, the chief executive of the Community Service Society of New York, said the farther away from Midtown Manhattan one wanders, the more ravaged the city appears.
“While we’re seeing in Manhattan that things are going relatively well and there’s been a sharp rebound, in some neighborhoods of New York things are not going well,” Mr. Jones said.
Away from the office towers and rooftop cocktail lounges, long-term unemployment is a persistent problem and young job seekers are losing hope, Mr. Jones said. A survey in late July of city residents who meet or barely exceed the definition of poor found that only about one-fifth of them thought the city’s economy was improving, he said.
The city’s construction industry, which practically ground to a halt in 2009, is still mired in a deep slump. The total value of building projects begun in the second quarter was less than half the level of two years earlier.
And so, while economists now agree that the recession is over in the city and that it did not last as long or exact as harsh a toll as on the rest of the country, the key determinant of people’s current well-being appears to be whether they came out of the recession with a job.
Those who remained employed, especially if they had professional or managerial positions, were the fortunate ones. James A. Parrott, chief economist of the Fiscal Policy Institute, found that in New York City, the income data masked a deep divide: the pay of managers rose at a healthy clip through the recession while lower-level workers took significant cuts in pay.
According to Mr. Parrott’s analysis of local wage data, the median pay of managerial workers in the city was $990 a week in the first four months of this year, up 11 percent in three years. But the median weekly pay for non-managers was $472, or 10.4 percent less than they earned in the first four months of 2007.
The growing gap “indicates a worrisome weakening in the ability of less-skilled New York workers to maintain their wage-earning power,” Mr. Parrott said. “That doesn’t bode well for the recovery in consumer spending in New York’s neighborhoods.”
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