New York Politics: A Tale of Two States

By Edward V. Schneier, Antoinette Pole and Anthony Maniscalco

New York Politics examines aspects of state government that are often hidden in the secret sessions of the parties' legislative conferences: the closed-door budget; a complicated array of opaque agencies, authorities, and local governments; and a campaign finance system that lacks transparency. New York is unique among the American states in the existence of regional and demographic divisions, making it difficult to govern. Edward V. Schneier, Antoinette Pole, and Anthony Maniscalco bring clarity and understanding to the politics of the Empire State.

This third edition of the leading textbook on New York politics combines historical, legal, statistical, and journalistic sources with the candid perspectives of legislators, lobbyists, and other public officials. Critical updates and new information include an analysis of the rise and fall of Governor Andrew Cuomo, coverage of growing demographic diversity in New York State and its government, and the impact of unified government when the legislature and executive branch are both controlled by the Democratic Party.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501767289

Book preview

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

The famous opening lines of Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities describe the people of France as living on the eve of revolution: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Much the same could be said about the people of New York in the years following the pandemic of 2020–2022. While COVID-19 affected everyone, its disproportionate impact on seniors, the poor, and members of minority groups was symbolic of the deep divisions that continue to make the story of New York a tale of two states. In New York, the stock market soared, corporations recorded record profits, and hundreds of thousands of city dwellers found or retreated to second homes. Yet residents in crowded homes and neighborhoods—often conditions coinciding with poverty—were disproportionately affected by both the disease and its economic impact. These dichotomies served to underscore and exaggerate the socioeconomic and political divisions that have long characterized the state.

New York is the third-richest state in the United States and among the top twenty in its percentage of people below the federal poverty line. The state ranks fifth in the percentage of its residents who have advanced college degrees but also ranks fourteenth in the number of high school dropouts. Half of New York’s population lives in the nation’s most densely populated urban area, but the state also ranks twenty-fifth in agriculture and has the largest wilderness area east of the Mississippi River. In the 2020 elections, the Democratic candidate for president (Biden) won New York County (Manhattan) with 87 percent of the vote; the Republican (Trump) won 72 percent in rural Wyoming County (Warsaw, New York). The state is number one in health funding per family but ranks seventh in the percentage of its population described as medically underserviced. While New York is often described as a state low on family values, it has the second-lowest divorce rate of the fifty states.

New York is not America, the novelist Sinclair Lewis once said, to which the residents of many other states would add a fervent amen. For more than half a century, more Americans have been moving out of New York than moving to it. Yet there is a simultaneous sense in which the Empire State is seen as the quintessence of the United States—not so much as it is as what it is becoming. From the Metropolitan Opera to Saturday Night Live; Saratoga horse racing to Madison Square Garden; theater on Broadway to Chautauqua; the art galleries of SoHo and the Museum of Modern Art to Cooperstown and Lake Placid—New York has endured, for better or worse, as the cultural capital of the New World. New York has more colleges than any other state. Wall Street remains the financial capital of the nation and the global economy. At the same time, the state’s upstate cities remain virtually detached from the economic boom of the twenty-first century. New York’s farms are disappearing at an accelerating rate, and its accumulated debt is the nation’s highest.

New York’s history is studded with innovations: the Erie Canal was the young nation’s largest public works project in its early years. Al Smith’s initiatives in enacting minimum wage and worker safety rules anticipated the New Deal by twenty years. Robert Moses’s empire of highways, bridges, and tunnels and a governing structure to go with them became prototypes for all fifty states. The state was a pioneer in creating the first equal opportunity commission. New York has earned its share of dubious achievement awards as well. The financial collapse of New York City in the 1970s continues to serve as a symbol of urban decline. Although state taxes are comparatively low, New York’s combined state and local tax burdens are among the nation’s highest.

Were New York a country, it would have the world’s thirteenth-highest gross domestic product (just behind South Korea and ahead of Australia). If the state were a corporation, it would be tenth in Fortune magazine’s ranking of the country’s top five hundred corporations. Yet more books have been published on Nigerian politics in the past ten years than on New York’s. The state does not require either its secondary or college students to study its government (as two larger states, Texas and California, do). Only thirty-six of the state’s media outlets have full-time correspondents in the state capitol. Moreover, New York’s political system is almost uniquely opaque. Its disciplined legislative parties conduct most of their business in the closed confines of the party conferences. The state’s budgets are increasingly unreadable. An unusually large part of its funds are delegated to so-called public authorities that largely govern themselves beyond the view of most citizens. It is not a coincidence that New Yorkers probably know less about their own state’s government than do the residents of any other state.

This Book

The normal challenge of writing a text on New York politics—and of keeping it current—is one of combining the academic approach of the traditional literature on state politics with more journalistic attempts to look behind the facade of an increasingly closed system. The typical state politics text is a largely descriptive account of state institutions, researched almost entirely from statistics, government documents, and other public sources. New York Politics combines this kind of research with a series of continuing interviews with public officials, policy advocates, and journalists involved in day-to-day governance. John Brian Murtaugh, one of the original coauthors of this book, was a committee chair and member of the State Assembly for twenty-one years. This book was his idea. Asked by Ned Schneier, then chair of the Political Science Department at the City College of New York, to teach a course on New York politics, Murtaugh was disappointed to find that the existing textbooks—while technically accurate—conveyed little of what he saw on the ground. As a student of legislatures, sometime Albany lobbyist, and professor-in-residence for the state Assembly’s internship committee, Schneier was glad to establish the connection. Murtaugh not only brought the insights of twenty years in the backrooms of the state capitol to the project, but he also provided access to people who would not otherwise have spoken candidly to most academics. As the longtime chair of the unusually bipartisan Committee on Alcohol and Substance Abuse, moreover, his personal and political friendships crossed party lines. Although we have followed academic conventions in not quoting people in ways that reveal their identities, we gratefully acknowledge their candor and insights. Former Senate majority leader Ralph Marino and onetime Speaker Mel Miller—though not all of their particular insights remain cogent—helped inform the content of the book and educated us on the kinds of questions we needed to ask. For the first two editions, we conducted more than sixty interviews with legislators, government workers, lobbyists, and members of the press. Many of these dialogues have continued and found their way into this third edition.

When Schneier and Murtaugh were asked to write the 2010 second edition of New York Politics, the task seemed daunting. Brian was no longer active in politics, and Ned had moved into other fields of research. We were fortunate to recruit Toni Pole, who was not only teaching courses on state politics but was adept and comfortable in the new area of electronic media and its impact on politics. After Brian’s death, Toni and Ned reached out to Tony Maniscalco, whose work on local governments deepened our insights along that dimension and whose work with internship programs in both Albany and New York City brought new sources and insights into our work.

This remains a tale of two states. The dichotomies persist, as does the system’s basic anatomy (and many of its persistent pathologies). After almost forty years of divided government, the political game has changed, with solid Democratic majorities now in seemingly firm control of both houses of the legislature and every statewide elected position. For most of those four decades, the beginning of wisdom in Albany was that the core of state politics occurred in the convening of three men in a room—the governor, Senate majority leader, and Speaker of the Assembly. It was never quite that simple. At the time of this writing in 2022, it was even more complicated, if only because one of the key players—for the first time in state history—was a woman: Governor Kathy Hochul. Moreover, the dynamic of both politics and policy has changed. The budget adopted in 2021 included the largest increase in spending in modern history. By staying in touch with key players in the Albany community, we are comfortable in our understanding of its normal operations and power profiles, but these are not normal times. In early 2021, as we were putting the finishing touches on the manuscript, preliminary numbers on the pandemic-influenced budget estimated the potential deficit at anywhere from $2 to $20 billion. A few weeks later, the state’s seemingly invincible Governor Andrew Cuomo—who faced numerous charges of sexual harassment, ethics violations while writing a book, and covering up COVID-19 death rates in senior citizen homes—was under investigation by the Justice Department, with calls for his resignation and even possible impeachment. Writing about contemporary affairs always entails the risk of being overtaken by events, and there is every reason to believe that the next few years, at least, will continue to be unusually unstable, if only in terms of the economic aftershocks of the pandemic. As difficult as it is to anticipate the force and direction of these changes, the rules of the game are likely to remain pretty much the same, and these are what the core of this book is all about.

In the preface to the second edition, we wrote that for the first time in perhaps a century New York stands upon the fault lines of real change. Those fault lines took nearly a decade actually to move the earth, but move it they have, and we have done our best in the pages that follow to describe this emerging political landscape. If parts of this book are outdated (almost as they were written), our goal is to provide a road map to understanding the change. Like an online map, we hope it can tell you how to get from A to B. It is up to you to discover what scenes you record along the way. We offer this volume as an effort to facilitate your understanding of New York’s government: what’s right about it, what’s wrong, and what can be done to make it better.

In addition to our many sources in and around the government, we owe particular debts to our families and friends, colleagues, and research assistants who commented or lent support on particular chapters or ideas. We also want to share our gratitude with the many students who have asked hard questions about New York’s political establishment, animating and informing this volume. Above all is our debt to Brian Murtaugh, whose basic idea this book was.

CHAPTER 1

The States of New York

In 1524, a Florentine explorer, Giovanni da Verrazano, sailed through the narrows that now bear his name and discovered New York Harbor. Despite his glowing reports, some eighty-five years went by without further European exploration. As Mark Twain wrote of a comparable period in the history of the Mississippi River, the Hudson, along with its magnificent harbor, was left unvisited by whites during a term of years which seems incredible in our energetic days.¹ Between Verrazano’s first sighting and Henry Hudson’s more fruitful venture in 1609, Copernicus revolutionized our view of the solar system, Shakespeare wrote most of his plays, Henry VIII divorced or executed all of his wives, and the Reformation began in Europe. In those same years, Ivan the Terrible began and ended his bloody rule as czar of Russia, Rubens and Rembrandt painted their greatest masterpieces, and Machiavelli’s The Prince was published. By 1609, the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of South America were nearly complete and Magellan’s feat of circumnavigating the globe had become almost commonplace. Only then did a small group of Dutch settlers arrive at the southern tip of Manhattan Island.

Growth and Development: The People of New York

Given the riches of North America, it is difficult to understand why the Europeans took so long to appreciate them. Distracted by the more obvious wealth of the Incas and Aztecs, diverted by the lure of spices and other exotic products from the Orient, and encumbered by religious conflict, Europeans came to North America almost as an afterthought. The Dutch, in particular, never paid much attention to their outpost in the New Netherlands, leaving it largely in the hands of the privately held Dutch West India Company, whose settlements were almost exclusively maintained as points of contact for the fur trade with the Native Americans.

The Dutch did not arrive on virgin lands. Human beings had lived in what is now New York for five thousand years. Although it is tempting to contrast, the ravages of European settlement with an age of unsullied wilderness, as Henry Thoreau did at Walden Pond, the real choice is not between two landscapes, one with and one without a human influence; it is between two human ways of living, two ways of belonging to the ecosystem.² The Native Americans first contacted by the Europeans—the ones from whom Peter Minuet allegedly bought Manhattan Island—were largely Algonquians along the Eastern Seaboard. As the Dutch pushed up the Hudson River, they encountered the feistier Nations of the Iroquois—Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks—then approaching the height of their influence. As the lust for furs and land increased, conflicts intensified, and the more aggressive English and French settlers eventually pushed the Iroquois and Algonquian Nations into a long period of decline.

Patterns of Settlement and Their Legacies

If the Dutch were slow to settle in the New World, the British were not. By 1664, when they captured New Amsterdam, the population of the city had reached barely 1,500, but there were close to 50,000 settlers in New England, including 9,000 in Boston alone. And while the Dutch confined their settlements largely to the Hudson Valley between New Amsterdam and Albany, British colonists were encroaching from Long Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. When the British fleet demanded and received Governor Stuyvesant’s surrender of the New Netherlands, it was as much a reflection of demographics as of military might.

Box 1.1 The Purchase of Manhattan Island

The origins of most great cities are wrapped in stories and myths of heroic sacrifice and divine guidance. The enduring story of New York City is that of a mercantile transaction in which the wily Dutch supposedly bought Manhattan Island for $24. The amount and nature of this transaction have been questioned in a variety of ways. Because the Native Americans who allegedly made the deal had no tradition of land ownership and were not even residents of the island they supposedly sold, it is not clear that the Dutch actually got the best deal.

Sometimes, however, the real meaning of myths and rituals is best discerned not by focusing on the stories and events themselves but on those who observe and recount them. The story of New York’s purchase, as it contrasts the cunning of the white settler with the primitive lust of the natives for beads and trinkets, resonates enduringly with tales of the shrewd city slicker conning the rural rube. It also serves to at least partly absolve subsequent New Yorkers from potential feelings of guilt: unlike other colonies, the tale implies, New York was founded in a commercial deal rather than through violent conquest.

Finally, as Burrows and Wallace point out, as is usually the case with myths and legends, the notion that New York is rooted in a commercial transaction gets at a deeper kind of truth.³ Unlike many of the world’s great cities, New York was to become neither the military base of an empire nor the seat of religion or government. Its civic chieftains would be merchants, bankers, landlords, lawyers; its mightiest buildings, office towers.… As the $24 saga suggests, New York would become a city of deal-makers, a city of commerce, a City of Capital.

THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS

Despite their minority status and rather swift assimilation into the dominant Anglo culture, the Dutch legacy is important. New York City had a unique sequence of development among American colonial cities which cannot be understood without recognizing the enduring impact of the Dutch society and culture.… The Dutch introduced institutions, laws, and customary practices, altered the landscape, set the pattern for interaction with native peoples and imported Africans, and selectively transplanted their culture.⁴ The Dutch culture of New York was an amalgam in which, as early as 1644, eighteen distinct languages were spoken.⁵ Indeed, the fledgling city called New Amsterdam was a true melting pot, less distinctively Dutch or British than prototypically American. Unlike the settlers in New England, the Dutch did not arrive as religious communities and tended to be more tolerant of diversity, separating religion from citizenship. This spirit of tolerance became a defining characteristic of New York City, where the pluralistic nature of New York’s social structure virtually assured a similarly heterogeneous immigrant population.⁶

No other English colony in the Americas faced the challenge of absorbing and including an already established European culture. In further contrast with the New England colonies or neighboring Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the governors of New York inherited a system in which slavery was firmly established but with the added quirk of including more freedmen of African descent than any other colony. In its vast northern regions, New York also was a frontier state constantly encroaching upon the Native Americans, forging westward into new settlements. In developing his frontier theory of American democracy, Frederick Jackson Turner placed particular emphasis on its roots in the middle region of the Atlantic coast, with New York—more than any other state—providing the multicultural, commercial, and industrial base from which the new society would emerge.⁷

New York City’s combination of a magnificent natural harbor and a historic tradition of commerce soon made it a world trade center on a par with the great commercial cities of the world, but the primacy of trade also helped put New Yorkers at odds with those in other colonies (and even at times with the rest of the state). Beyond commerce, the city attracted the cultural amenities that come with it, from opera and ballet to brothels and burlesque. New York City also became the port of entry for millions of immigrants. There were immigrants who arrived in the United States without passing through Ellis Island, but for almost a century a majority of the settlers entered through the port of New York.

FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE CIVIL WAR

On the eve of the American Revolution, New York already had begun to differentiate itself from the emerging new nation and to embody what it was becoming. Because it was a center of commerce, most of it with Britain, many of New York’s leading citizens were appalled by the idea of rebellion. Once the War of Independence had begun, the British sent their main force to New York and used the city as their headquarters. With the city the seat of British power and hub of Loyalist settlement and the Iroquois allied with the British, no other state suffered more for the cause of independence than did New York.… Nearly one-third of the engagements of the war were fought on New York soil. New York City, which controlled most of the commerce of the state, was continuously in enemy hands from 1776 to 1783. Two major fires destroyed many buildings in the great seaport. After British evacuation the population of the city fell to ten thousand, half of what it had been on the eve of revolution.⁸

Both city and state were quick to recover. Lands confiscated from Loyalists were widely distributed. The tribes of the Iroquois—loosed from British protection—lost virtually all of their territory. But independence did not dramatically affect the distribution of political power. A constitution adopted at the outset of the revolution created an elected legislature, eliminated the veto power of the royal governor, and secured the basic legal rights of citizens. The constitution, however, was silent on the issue of slavery, conferred no rights on Native Americans, and restricted voting rights to a handful of male property owners. Nor did it modify the aristocratic land distribution of the Dutch patroon system in the Hudson Valley. While homesteaders were setting up small farms across confiscated Native American lands in the west, and others claimed the estates of fleeing Loyalists, one New York farmer in six remained a tenant. The huge estates of the Livingstons, Van Rensselaers, and Clarks remained intact until the 1840s.

The death of the leasehold system came less from political agitation than from the move west that superseded it. The trickle of New Englanders who began settling in New York became a torrent. The acreage of improved land increased from about a million in 1784 to 5.5 million in 1821, almost all of it on owner-occupied homesteads.⁹ Meanwhile, urban areas were exploding in size with the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825. Rochester quadrupled its population in a single decade and became the nation’s first boomtown. Buffalo and Syracuse grew almost as rapidly as the canal linked the riches of the Great Lakes basin with the Atlantic Ocean, and New York City soon became the nation’s largest metropolis.

The canal route connecting the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers with the Great Lakes has had a continuing impact. As the state’s commerce developed along this corridor, it became the logical route for major railbeds and—a century later—the New York State Thruway. Excluding Long Island, more than 80 percent of the state’s citizens still reside in counties that lie along this inverted L-shaped route. Once it became the first state to burst through the Appalachian Mountain barrier that divided coastal cities from the farms and mineral resources of the Midwest, New York’s ascension to commercial and industrial preeminence was swift. By the eve of the Civil War, New York City was the banking capital of the nation and its industrial leader. Access to capital was a factor in this rise, as was transportation, but nothing fed the boom more than the flow of cheap labor through Ellis Island.

As a commercial center for the nation, New York was as ambivalent about the Civil War as it had been about the Revolutionary War. Slavery was not abolished until 1827, and the state’s Black population had declined by 1860 to less than 2 percent. Three times between 1846 and 1867, the state’s voters refused to approve a constitutional amendment giving Blacks the right to vote.¹⁰ Small wonder that the draft riots of 1863, which began as a protest against the ability of the rich to buy exemptions from the military, quickly turned into racist lynch parties. New York had its share of abolitionists and contributed more men and materials to the Union cause than any other state, but the race tensions manifested in the draft riots remain a seldom-acknowledged part of the state heritage.

THE GILDED AGE

Early in the nineteenth century, the state’s largely Dutch and English population was supplemented by a steady flow of Germans escaping war and upheaval in Europe. The Irish potato blight of 1845–1854, which sent more than three million immigrants across the ocean, brought even greater change, adding a largely Catholic group to New York’s religious mix. By the 1880 census, the Irish constituted nearly one-third of the city’s residents and had become the first of New York’s ethnic groups to arrive in large enough numbers to establish themselves as a coherent political force.¹¹ In 1880, self-made millionaire William Grace became New York City’s first mayor of Irish ancestry. Few of his compatriots did so well. While the Irish and other immigrant groups were able to penetrate the city’s political and economic elites, the gap between rich and poor loomed large. The difference between the wealth of the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Morgans, on the one hand, and the miseries of the urban poor, on the other, was probably as great in late nineteenth-century New York City as anywhere. At the same time upstate New York—and to some extent New York City—saw the growth of a middle class that was perhaps equally unprecedented. In 1870 New York led all other states in the number of farms and the value of farm property … and its farm population of over one million constituted the largest single occupational group and nearly one-fourth of the total population of the state.¹² Even in cities there was a rising middle class of skilled artisans; merchants; and, toward the end of the century, clerks and junior executives. But it was manufacturing—labor-intensive, profitable industrial enterprise—that symbolized the future of the nation and increasingly characterized New York. The 1880 census shows that New York became the first state to manifest an urban majority. The United States did not officially become an urban nation until 1920. For more than 150 years, New York was the nation’s leading industrial state, sometimes accounting for as much as one-sixth of the country’s total output.¹³ By the turn of the century, when the United States passed Great Britain and Germany to become the world’s leading economic power, New York was the engine that pulled the train.

The influx of industrial wage earners was accompanied by a withering of the farm population. By 1860, more than 800,000 New Yorkers (one-fourth of those born in the state as of that date) had resettled in the West.¹⁴ A century later, New York had fallen from first to twenty-fifth in farm income, focused on such specialty crops as apples and grapes along with dairy products and fresh produce for local markets. If the movement of farmers to the flatter, fertile lands of the Midwest was the logical by-product of improved transportation and storage systems, the decline in manufacturing had more complex roots.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

In the 1920s, Congress virtually shut off the flow of new immigration to the United States and New York. Many of the immigrants who arrived in the 1890s and early 1900s, meanwhile, came out of the socialist and trade union movements of central Europe. As the supply of new labor diminished and the militancy of the existing workforce increased, the state became both a cradle of an emerging US union movement and an incubator of legislation protecting working people. In the 1920s, even as the Harding and Coolidge administrations were taking the national government in a strongly pro-business direction, Governor Al Smith of New York submitted bills reducing the workweek to forty-eight hours, limiting child labor, and creating a workers’ compensation system he described—with considerable justification—as perhaps the most liberal statute of its kind in the world.¹⁵ The Smith administration also dramatically increased expenditures on education, public works, and parks, with higher taxes an inevitable result. Although the growth of government slowed in the Depression under Governor Franklin Roosevelt, it took off again when Roosevelt became president and Herbert Lehman brought a so-called Little New Deal to Albany. Laws establishing a welfare system, strengthening unions, mandating public education until age sixteen, and establishing a minimum wage both complemented and extended similar programs adopted during Roosevelt’s New Deal in Washington. The election of Thomas E. Dewey in 1943—the state’s first Republican governor since World War I—did not significantly derail this progressive tradition. Extending the system of parkways developed during the Smith, Roosevelt, and Lehman years, Dewey developed a turnpike system (including the state thruway that now bears his name) that became a model for other states. A decade later, another progressive Republican—Governor Nelson Rockefeller—brought New York up to the standards of many other states, making the State University of New York (SUNY) a comprehensive system of higher education. Ironically, it was the Republican Rockefeller who put through the big tax increases that brought New York into the ranks of the nation’s higher-burden states.

The election of Hugh Carey in 1975 began a period of twenty years in which the Democrats controlled the executive mansion (see table 1.1). The Carey-Cuomo years were not marked by the kinds of policy initiatives evident during the tenures of Smith or Rockefeller, but they essentially continued the state’s support for public works, social welfare, and education. These years also were distinguished by a series of fiscal crises unmatched since the Great Depression. New York City’s near bankruptcy in 1975 was the first shock wave of an almost steady series of economic tremors at both state and local levels. Elected in 1994, Republican governor George Pataki was reelected twice on platforms promising tax cuts to stimulate economic development, but his policies did little to stem the loss of well-paying jobs that increasingly have afflicted the upstate economy in particular. Riding a tide of resentment against these failures and a national tilt toward the Democrats, Governor Elliot Spitzer won 71 percent of the statewide major party vote in 2006, carrying all but two counties. Like his predecessors Governors Cuomo and Pataki, Governor Spitzer also had to work with a legislature divided between the Republicans who controlled the State Senate and the Democrats who controlled the Assembly. Thus, despite his impressive election victory, his abbreviated term as governor (ended by scandal in 2008) was short on major achievements. Spitzer was replaced by Lieutenant Governor David Paterson, who had continuing problems dealing with the major recession of 2009, which forced some of the largest cutbacks in spending the state had ever seen. Add some minor scandals, and his 2010 bid for a full term was doomed from the start. Andrew Cuomo—the state’s attorney general and son of a former governor—easily won the first of his three terms until he was felled by scandal and replaced by Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul.

Despite the relatively austere budgets of the past four decades, New York’s progressive tradition remains relatively secure. Despite his fiscal conservatism, Governor Pataki was ahead of his party and much of the nation on environmental issues, particularly in preserving open lands. David Paterson was the first governor in the nation to openly advocate for laws protecting gay rights (although without success). Andrew Cuomo not only secured passage of a gay rights law but also made New York one of the first states to permit gay marriages. The state’s environmental laws, consumer protection laws, and rules governing civil rights and liberties remain among the nation’s most progressive.

NEW YORK IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

If the Industrial Revolution in the United States began in New York, the country’s industrial decline started there as well. The massive and continuing shift from the production of goods to the provision of services—characteristic of what has been called postindustrial society—hit New York first, and it hit hard. The total number of production workers in manufacturing industries fell from roughly two million in the 1960s to fewer than one million in 1990, five hundred thousand in 2010, and four hundred thousand in 2020. As industry continues to decline, the service sector’s share of nonfarm employment—led by health care and hospitality—has grown to 91 percent of total employment.¹⁶ The decline in manufacturing—particularly the virtual demise of industrial production from once-giant firms such as Kodak, General Electric, and IBM—was especially hard on upstate New York. Buffalo fell from being one of the ten largest metropolitan areas in 1900 to seventy-second today.¹⁷ Unlike the areas surrounding New York City, upstate’s service sector growth has not been vigorous. In part, the decline of manufacturing results from a combination of its high average annual wages, high unemployment and workers’ compensation benefits, high state taxes, and poor education systems.¹⁸ Without underestimating these factors, the decline is a more complex mixture of global and state economic and demographic transformations that have become the central preoccupation of the state’s twenty-first century politics. New York is not America. It is more diverse and more divided in many ways than any of its forty-nine counterparts (table 1.2).

Ethnicity, Class, and Race

The economic changes described above did not occur in a vacuum. Every important aspect of the United States demographic situation is linked to every other.¹⁹ Immigrants came to New York because there were jobs; their presence as a pool of cheap labor attracted new employers; their fertility rates, economic achievements, marriages, divorces, and death rates changed the roles of governments and further altered the opportunity structures for new immigrants. At both state and national levels, the policy consequences of such transformations continue to resonate, and as Washington increasingly shifts the financial burden and policy responsibility for many spending programs to the states, regional variations loom larger. The composition of a state’s population strongly affects its government’s willingness and ability to deal with policy problems. As the population ages, for example, the taxpaying workforce shrinks at the same time as costs for programs for senior citizens grow. New York’s nonimmigrant population continues to age. In rural Hamilton County, for example, nearly one person in three is over sixty-five years of age. In contrast with that of most other states, however, the aging of New York has been increasingly offset by a continuing influx of immigrants, the vast majority of whom are between twenty-one and sixty-five. Seniors are seldom immigrants, and the proportion of the foreign-born who are over sixty-five is significantly lowered by a tendency for many of them to return home for their golden years. At the other end of the age spectrum, more than one-third of those under eighteen have at least one immigrant parent.

Politically and economically, this makes for a volatile mix. The young, largely foreign-born newcomers live mainly in large urban areas, while older, nonimmigrant groups are scattered throughout urban, rural, and suburban areas. Only 11 percent of New York City residents are over sixty-five, compared to 13 percent in the rest of the state. The competition for government resources thus takes on geographic and ethnic as well as political dimensions.

Old Newcomers and New Immigrants

The major ancestral groups succeeding the early Dutch and British settlers were largely German and Irish in the mid-nineteenth century; Italian and Eastern European around the turn of the century; and African American and Puerto Rican in the years surrounding World War II. Liberalization of the immigration laws in 1965 brought a new wave dominated by Asians, Caribbean Blacks, and a highly diverse group of Latinos. None of these groups has been randomly distributed either occupationally or by place of residence. As recently as 1950, more than half of the New York City’s residents were foreign-born or of foreign or mixed parentage. Although the city was the home to more than 70 percent of the state’s foreign-born white inhabitants, upstate cities such as Rochester (45 percent) and Buffalo (44 percent) also were the homes of first- and second-generation immigrants. These figures have changed dramatically. New York City is still 36 percent foreign-born, and some of its older suburbs, such as Port Chester (46 percent), Yonkers (30 percent), and Brentwood (37 percent), have comparable numbers of foreign-born residents, but the proportions of foreign-born residents in Buffalo and Rochester have fallen below 10 percent.

In recent years, the state’s overall population has been deceptively stable, growing by a modest 4 percent from 1980 to 2000 and by slightly more to a total of 20.2 million in 2020. This seeming stability masks two decades of enormous mobility. As the number of Asians nearly tripled and Latinos increased to 19 percent from 9 percent, these two groups alone added nearly 1.5 million persons to the state’s total, while a similar number of non-Hispanics and non-Asians left the state. Upstate, in rural areas in particular, young people are seeking economic opportunity elsewhere. Only a handful of upstate counties are attracting new residents, and many are losing population. In the wake of the 2009 recession and the devastating Hurricane Sandy, the population north of the metropolitan area actually declined between 2010 and 2018, with twelve upstate counties each losing more than 2 percent of its population. Around New York City and in some upstate areas, there have been dramatic demographic shifts. While some of the more successful older immigrants moved up to nearby suburbs in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, a number of those who were less successful—African Americans and Puerto Ricans in particular—moved back to their southern and Caribbean roots. In both cases, their places were taken by new immigrants, who have settled almost entirely in and around New York City; more than 90 percent of the state’s foreign-born reside in the metropolitan area. They are a very diverse group. Although almost half of today’s immigrants come from South America and the Caribbean, recent immigrants hail from more than 150 nations.

In the short term, the COVID-19 crisis produced a new and unpredictable shift in population mobility. Rather than work at home from cramped city apartments, many individuals and families moved to or bought country homes and resettled elsewhere. Relatively stable real estate markets in counties such as Columbia, Delaware, and Greene—many more than two hours from New York City—saw sales (and prices) rise dramatically in 2020. How many of these exurbanites will remain in these new residences, return to the city, or maintain two homes is unclear, but there is little doubt that the impact on office spaces, the residential market, schools, and the overall economy of both urban and rural areas is significant.

Wealth and Poverty

In the half century from the late 1960s to the present, the incomes of the wealthiest Americans rose dramatically while those of the less affluent remained relatively stagnant. The average income of the poorest 20 percent of the population—$19,305 in 1967—rose to $24,368 in 2017, an annual gain of just over $100 dollars a year.²⁰ Meanwhile, the top 10 percent increased their household income from $96,781 in 1967 to $179,072 in 2017, an annual increase of $1,645. The same pattern appeared in New York State but to an even greater degree, especially at the highest levels, where the top 1 percent averaged more than $2 million in income, almost fifty times that of the remaining 99 percent. Between the 2009 recession and 2018, the top 1 percent captured every dollar of income growth in the state.²¹ The gap between the earnings of the highest-income families and lower-income groups in New York is the highest in the fifty states. Wealth is even more concentrated than income, with the top 1 percent holding nearly 40 percent of household assets. These disparities have important regional and ethnic correlatives. Long Island’s suburban Nassau County, at one extreme, contains significant pockets of poverty, but its 2017 median (the number at which half are above and half below) household income of $105,744 was $27,000 above the state average, roughly three times that of the Bronx ($36,593) and nearly two and a half times that of rural Chautauqua County ($44,304). And the income differentials within counties or even within towns are even more striking. In Suffolk County, for example, household median income ranged from as high as $208,750 in Old Field to as low as $39,571 in Riverside.

These variations in income reinforce related differences of nearby census tracts. (A census tract is an area of roughly one or two thousand households forming a distinct neighborhood.) In the city of Troy, for example, residents of one east-side tract with a median income of more than $70,000 had an average life expectancy of eighty-five years. More than 90 percent were high school graduates. A mile to the north, median income was less than $25,000, 29 percent did not complete high school, and expected life spans were seventy years. Beyond statistics, unstable housing, low income, unsafe neighborhoods and substandard education are all associated with poorer health and poorer quality of life, as well as with racial and ethnic minorities.²²

Local variations aside, the state’s basic economic division appears most pronounced between upstate and downstate. As the nation’s financial center, Manhattan (New York County) leads the way, with more than half of its residents earning $146,019. The Bronx aside, the counties surrounding the city also are well-off with household incomes in five counties averaging more than $90,000. Upstate, only one county (Saratoga) boasts a median income of more than $90,000, and in ten counties, the median income falls below $50,000. Nathan Glazer, whose early studies of race and ethnicity virtually defined the field, once reflected on his own work and others as follows:

In the 1950s and 1960s, it was reasonable to project that the newest entrants into New York’s complex ethnic mix, blacks and Puerto Ricans, would in time rise in the city’s economic structure and become only modestly differentiated, in economic position and political power, from those who had preceded them—just as the Jews and Italians before them rose, in the economic and political spheres, to the level of the Irish and Germans who had preceded them. This was the expectation voiced by Oscar Handlin in The Newcomers, and it was my expectation in Beyond the Melting Pot. But it hasn’t happened.²³

Just as civil rights laws were changing the job atmosphere for minorities, the market changed. Between 1950 and 1970, the net job increase in New York City was 275,000, with 575,000 new jobs in the service sector more than offsetting the loss of close to 300,000 jobs in industries that traditionally served as springboards to the success of less-educated immigrant groups.²⁴ The largely unskilled Blacks and Latinos who flooded the city seeking industrial jobs were left out in the cold. Thus, while the median income of non-Hispanic whites was $68,000 in 2017, the comparable figures for Blacks ($42,500) and Latinos ($41,700) were considerably lower. By the 1990s, as John Mollenkopf writes, class had colors, in the sense that whites worked predominantly in the professional and managerial occupations and most skilled trades, whereas African Americans and Puerto Ricans were clustered in service work.²⁵ These changes had other implications in rural areas and smaller upstate cities, such as Elmira and Utica, similarly suffering from a changing job market. Those with college degrees continue to enjoy a considerable bump in income when they move to urban areas, as many upstate residents did. For the less educated, conversely, middle-skill jobs as clerks, salespersons, and factory workers no longer offer that promise, especially with the demand for high-skilled technology jobs.²⁶

Upstate, Downstate, and In Between

The north-south split in California is cultural and increasingly ethnic but has few economic correlatives; Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, and Pennsylvania display significant conflicts between urban centers with large minority populations and surrounding areas of very different ethnic, economic, and political hues. But New York City stands alone among American cities in its relationship to the state of which it is a part. Size alone distinguishes it: New York City’s population exceeds that of the nation’s next three largest cities combined and has accounted for roughly half of the state’s population for more than a century. In almost every way—in its wealth as in its poverty, in its culture and its diversity—the city is a force too large to ignore.

Although there are persistent differences between the city and the rest of the state, the boundaries between upstate and downstate, as New Yorkers use these terms, are elusive. The core of New York City, Manhattan Island, is relatively as small in population (about one-fifth of the city’s total) as it is large in image. Its surrounding boroughs are often at odds with Manhattan, and the boundaries between Eastern Queens and neighboring communities in Nassau County or between the North Bronx and Westchester are virtually indiscernible. The larger upstate cities such as Rochester and Buffalo have more in common with the Big Apple in some ways than with the small towns surrounding them, while the city’s smallest borough—Staten Island—identifies somewhat tenuously with the metropolis and has voted to secede. But if New Yorkers find it difficult to trace the precise geographic boundary between upstate and downstate, chances are most residents have a fairly precise cultural concept of the division. A citizen of Staten Island—whatever his feelings about secession—feels a far closer identity with Manhattan than with Buffalo. And even the resident of Yonkers—though bordering on the New York City line—is likely to take a certain satisfaction in the fact that he lives in Westchester and not the Bronx. Ninety percent of the newer immigrants live in or near the city. Almost all of the state’s substantial Jewish population lives within fifty miles of Times Square. And the bulk of the state’s openly gay community is in the city. Unlike the residents of any other US city, New Yorkers are tightly packed into a staggering 66,835 persons per square mile.²⁷ New York City, unlike any other place in the state or in the United States, is a vertical city, in which people live on top of and under one another instead of next door. In a nation sometimes said to be governed by the automobile, fewer than half of the city’s adults have drivers’ licenses.

Box 1.2 Ah, Wilderness!

While New York is among the most urbanized states in the union, even its own