Hang around Rockefeller Center’s tree, and you’re as likely to hear Mandarin as English. Jet-lagged foreigners walk slowly with their wheelie bags as they look for Abercrombie. But they’re responsible for Gotham’s fast recovery since 2008.
New York escaped what killed the country’s economy: broke consumers.
In most of the country, if you couldn’t refinance your house, you couldn’t go to Olive Garden.
If your employer was cutting people, you couldn’t take that Vegas business trip.
It took until earlier this year for America to replace the 8.8 million private-sector jobs lost. The city is way ahead: We recovered our lost 187,000 private jobs by 2011.
Wall Street hasn’t added jobs. Instead, New York’s service economy thrived. Hotels and restaurants added 72,200 jobs — 30 percent above the pre-crisis total. New York’s retailers added 58,300 jobs, a 20 percent increase.
The arts sector added 8,500 jobs, 13 percent more.
Our restaurants and hotels don’t depend as much as they once did on locals and Americans to fill tables and rooms. The whole world wants to eat our food and sleep in our beds.
Between 2008 and 2013, our tourism boomed among newly well-off people from parts of the world that avoided the worst of the crash. Annual visitors from China quadrupled, to 646,000. Brazilian visitors tripled, to 895,000.
Global travel to Gotham is up 20 percent, outpacing 14 percent growth in domestic travel.
And these foreigners stay longer, and drop more cash.
The 11.4 million foreign visitors who flocked here last year made up 21 percent of tourists, but nearly half of spending.
From Louis Vuitton bags to the minibar, they drop $18.6 billion a year here, MasterCard found, spending more here than anyplace else save London.
Last year, world tourists made up 23 percent of Broadway visitors, the highest figure ever. Oh, and 18.4 percent of operagoers, up from 15.2 percent in 2008. These ticket-buyers support good jobs.
At hotels, too: Mike Ryder, 37, “works the door” at the Upper West Side’s Empire Hotel. His income is $32,000, plus benefits. That’s before tips, which net the average bellhop tens of thousands more.
That income let him buy a Williamsburg condo. He feels secure knowing that his wife and son have health insurance. “Everything that I have is because of my union job,” says Ryder.
That’s the private-sector Hotel Trades Council, which has inked lucrative agreements thanks to the city’s $270 peak room rate, twice as high as the average for the top 25 US cities.
The union has added 4,400 new members to its ranks over the past decade, earning an average $52,042.
Hotel housekeepers are the union’s biggest workforce. “It used to be Polish [and] Greek,” says Josh Gold, political director. “Now they’re Caribbean, African, Asian.”
The jobs aren’t just in Manhattan. If you’re taking an overseas flight, you’re eating a meal up in the air. Olaf Straube runs the Flying Food Servair kitchen at JFK – overseeing people who make 22,000 daily meals during peak season.
Five hundred people work at Flying Food, up from 380 half a decade ago. The company offers low-skill job opportunities for immigrants. “You don’t need to speak English to plate food,” says Straube.
Sixty-five percent of the company’s jobs are in the food-assembly area, where unionized workers start at $19,000 to $22,000. But there’s upward mobility, too: People can stay, learn and move up to positions like executive chef.
Can tourism keep expanding?
- We’ve got to keep crime down. Mike Stengel, who spent 20 years managing New York’s Marriott hotels, said that when he arrived in 1990, “we would never tell customers that the Marquiswas in Times Square.” Today, “everyone’s saying that they’re in Times Square, even if they’re not.”
- We’ve got to upgrade our infrastructure. Straube of Flying Food notes that the only time airlines can add flights is in the middle of the day. Until the airports expand, coveted early-morning and evening slots are gone. Another obstacle is lousy ground transportation from JFK. And “getting your employees to work at a reasonable price” and on time “is really important,” says Marriott’s Stengel.
- Another challenge is keeping New York unique. Success in non-tourist industries like the arts and media makes New York an interesting place.
The immediate risk is the global economy. If Beijing sneezes, Fifth Avenue will get the flu.
Adapted from the autumn City Journal, available soon at city-journal.org.