Mayor Eric Adams wants you back in the office. Last week, he said of New Yorkers working from home, “I need them to do one more job, go back to their job. Let’s get our city up.” The mayor is pitching to lapsed commuters’ charitable impulses — but that’s not what will work. He needs them to think that coming to the office is in their own interests.
Adams is correct to remind that, hey, Midtown is still here. As with many of the mayor’s initiatives, this concept may seem obvious. But it wasn’t obvious to his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, who maintained that Manhattan and its office workers don’t matter that much, as long as working-class neighborhoods are fine.
Yet they won’t be fine as long as the core of the city remains hollow. Before COVID, 1.1 million people from Connecticut, New Jersey and elsewhere in New York came to Manhattan to work at a desk each day. Now, only about 28.6% percent are back, most not every day.
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post