Is the “New” Brooklyn Economy For Real?
We put the matter to a group of Brooklyn academics, activists, authors, politicians, and businesspeople to hear what they thought. The short answer? Probably not. The slightly longer but perhaps more to the point answer? Probably not… but have you got a better idea?
“Brooklyn is a blueprint for the country,” wrote Sara Horowitz, founder and director of the DUMBO-based Freelancers Union. The borough, she noted, has been at the forefront of a shift toward independent work—“freelancing, part-time, consulting, temping, self-employment”—that’s recently emerged nationwide.
The question, though, Horowitz pointed out, is just how well positioned are workers to ride this trend?
“Just because the future-economy is here today doesn’t mean our support system has caught up,” she said. “Freelancers still struggle with challenges that ‘traditional’ workers don’t have to: unpaid wages, a lack of unemployment insurance, finding affordable health care, and unfair taxation.”
Then there’s the simple fact that being a successful entrepreneur—or an unsuccessful one—involves a significant amount of risk and a ridiculous amount of work. Likewise, the notion of a small-scale, localist economy no doubt has its appeal, but it’s tough to beat the salaries and benefits offered by corporate and union jobs.
Indeed, despite Brooklyn’s relatively rosy employment figures, incomes have been basically stagnant for the last two decades. According to numbers from the Center for the Study of Brooklyn’s 2012 Brooklyn Neighborhood Report, the borough’s median household income in 1990, adjusted for inflation, was $42,444. In 2009 it was $43,755—a three-percent bump spread over nearly 20 years. Meanwhile, median monthly rents have spiked 25 percent, to $1,002 in 2009 from $802 in 1990, and the percentage of the borough’s residents paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent has jumped to 52 percent in 2009 from 42 percent in 1990.
“At best, the news is marginally non-negative—for some,” said Neil Smith, an anthropologist at CUNY. “There are still lots of jobs in stores and offices and garages and restaurants and small manufactories… but a lot of jobs have also vanished and a lot of people are out of work.”
Independent, artisanal, small-batch Brooklyn has done relatively little to mitigate these trends. Of the 50,000 jobs the borough netted in the last 10 years, more than 30,000 were in health care and social assistance. Another 9,000 came from hotels and food service, while another 8,000 came from education. The borough lost in that time more than 23,000 manufacturing jobs, as well as 1,400 construction jobs. The story of Brooklyn’s labor market over the last decade is largely the story of those sectors, none of which figure prominently in typical celebrations of the area’s boom.
Nonetheless, the idea of Brooklyn as test kitchen for an exciting new economic model has taken root in the public’s and—perhaps more importantly—the media’s imaginations.