Selling the Lower East Side

 

The City in the Boom Economy of the 1980s

After the city’s near bankruptcy in the late 1970s, and with considerable help from a corporate-friendly political administration, New York emerged as a global city in finance, banking, insurance and real estate.While light manufacturing industries continued to vanish from the city’s landscape the development of producer services industries trebled, causing significant changes in the composition of employment. Growth in the specialized services sector created more skilled occupations and mid-level positions in finance, insurance, international commerce, law and communications.

The divisions between the city’s richest and its poorest classes widened. The increase in the number of new corporate service positions was outmatched by the disappearance of semi-skilled jobs, creating a condition that drove parts of the city’s poor and minority labor force into an expanding formal and informal low-wage service economy.

The early 1980s witnessed a surge in the construction of office towers and luxury housing and conversions of existing units into owner-occupied condominiums and cooperatives. Overall, the city’s housing market tightened as increases in luxury conversions removed middle-class rental units from the housing stock. As the supply of desirable rental units dwindled, existing housing in low-income neighborhoods within or near the core became targeted for upgrading, pushing those who could no longer afford Manhattan rents to "less desirable" areas within the city.

 

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The book upon which this web site is based,

Selling the Lower East Side,

is available directly through University of Minnesota Press
or order through Amazon.com

Site design © 2000: Kurt Reymers and Dan Webb.
(University at Buffalo, Department of Sociology)