If there is one group of people who should be pleased with New Jersey Governor Christie's cancellation of the ARC Tunnel, it is Long Island homeowners and businesses. New Jersey Transit's ridership to Manhattan has been soaring and now, according to the Wall Street Journal, more people are riding MetroNorth in the Northern Suburbs than are riding the Long Island Railroad, as LIRR ridership falls. The article implies that poor LIRR service is to blame, and Long Islanders are choosing other ways to commute to Manhattan, while reverse ridership has boosted MetroNorth. But based on anecdotal evidence I suggest something different: those who hold high-wage jobs in Manhattan, which has the largest concentration of high wage jobs in the country, and want to live in the suburbs, are not choosing to live on Long Island. In fact, they are not even considering living on Long Island, unless they are from there. And the importance of this can be explained with a question: do people on Long Island want to sell their homes to those who are about as well off as they were at the same point in their life, someone better off, or someone worse off who can’t afford someplace better?
Back in the 1990s, when the City and State of New York used the New York City schools and the state funding formula to drive many college-educated parents of pre-schoolers out of the city, I can’t think of any members of my babysitting swap club that moved to Long Island. Some moved to Westchester, and more moved to New Jersey (some left the metro area entirely). Long Island wasn’t even considered an option. It’s no wonder commutation from New Jersey to Manhattan soared. It isn't just the college educated either. You hire an electrican, solar installer or a cabient buy to do work in your house, and you'll find that they might very well be from New Jersey of thinking of moving there.
Long Island has good schools, low crime, lots of houses and beaches, and high property taxes, just like New Jersey. I have shown that the overall tax burden is significantly higher as a share of income in New York State, but commuters from New Jersey who work in New York also have to pay the New York State income tax (their share, based on netting out, is spent upstate) as well as taxes in their own state. So that isn’t really and advantage for New Jersey.
Transportation isn’t the sole difference between Long Island and New Jersey. The latter has done better in creating and maintaining local jobs to go along with the option of commuting to the city, which can be important for two-career couples. Long Island’s aerospace industry is long gone, but New Jersey’s bio-tech/chemical complex is still there.
Long Island has also been clobbered in the popular culture category, despite the best efforts of Ray Romano, which may be one reason that people who aren’t from there would never think of moving there – even as some people who are from there want out. The last big pop culture phenomenon from Long Island? Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco. And unfortunately that’s the image of Long Islanders – a bunch of Buttafuocos. It’s worse than the anonymity of Upstate New York.
Nor does it help to have gangs of low grade thugs beating and in one cases killing immigrants, or running them down on the road. As research from the Department of City Planning has shown, New York City’s immigrants are far more likely to be legal, and to match or exceed the educational distribution of the native born, than the rest of the country. Increasingly, many college-educated immigrants are bypassing the city entirely and moving directly to the suburbs. Specifically to New Jersey. Somehow the idea that on Long Island it is only illegal immigrants and day laborers who face hostility hasn’t sunk in. And for native born people who moved to the city and work in Manhattan but are looking to buy a house, having local politicians disparage the city and all who live in it is hardly an inducement to move there. New Jersey’s parochial pols don’t do so, perhaps because they don’t go to Albany.
Image matters – just ask Rudy Giuliani. Overall New York City crime wasn’t as bad as its image when he took office, and didn’t improve as rapidly as it seemed. The former Mayor worked to turn around the image of crime as much of the reality, convinced the former could drive the latter as much as the other way around. I’d say the biggest positive change in for New York City in the Giuliani years was PR.
Image, local jobs or transportation, Long Island’s diminished position has affected its relative home price. For reasons that make little sense, the federal government divided the New York Metropolitan Area into a series of “Metropolitan Divisions” for statistical purposes. According to recently released data from the National Association of Realtors, the median one-family home price in the Metropolitan Division that includes much of Fairfield County Connecticut was $451,200. For the division that includes New York City’s one family homes, the lower Hudson Valley, and Hudson, Bergen and Passaic Counties in New Jersey, it was $470,100. For the Division that includes Essex, Union, Morris, Hunterdon, and Sussex Counties in New Jersey, it was $398,000. Nassau-Suffolk on Long Island brought up the rear at $385,500. Over the past year, the median price increased 2.8% to $404,100 in the broader New York metro area as a whole, while rising 0.2% on Long Island. The national average was $177,900. Why is it so much higher here? Because the New York area has yet to fully deflate its housing bubble, and much further to fall, and because of high wage jobs in Manhattan. The better the connection to Manhattan, the smaller the upcoming decline.
So Long Island can benefit if it becomes increasingly difficult to commute from New Jersey to New York, but only if its own transportation situation improves. That means completing the East Side Access project and the third track on the main line to improve commuting to Manhattan. Long Island cannot afford to have the project cancelled like ARC. New York State, however, cannot afford the ongoing delays as cost increases as contractors grab and grab. Getting that done and not getting so ripped off that we aren’t worse off even so is The Battle of Long Island.
Improving transportation also means doing something about the LIRR labor force which, I’ve been told, was one of the least productive in railroading dating back to its days in the private sector. According to the WSJ “between the beginning of 2010 and the end of September, 92.4% of its trains arrived at their destinations on time, compared with 97.9% of Metro-North trains during the same period. Passengers' fares cover 58% of the cost of operating Metro-North trains, while their Long Island counterparts cover 45.3% of the cost of their rides.” Evidently, the publication asked the LIRR why that is, and got the usual response about the problem of all the lines converging into Jamaica and only five tracks being set aside for the LIRR’s exclusive use at Penn Station. This is at best a partial explanation. You want a complicated railroad with lots of merges and diverges? How about the IND on the New York City Subway?
There are plenty of parochial pols who go around disparaging Manhattan, or New York City. Some of them are from New York City’s outer boroughs, in fact. What they miss is that many of their constituents, though they live locally, spend half their waking hours in Manhattan, where they work. And many of those who both live and work locally owe their jobs to the spending of those whose income comes from Manhattan, or taxes collected in Manhattan, which accounts for a huge share of the private sector earnings of all of New York State – and the work earnings of those living in outer borough and suburban counties. If New Jersey Governor Christie doesn’t get this, perhaps Long Island pols could stop being a bunch of Buttafuocos and take advantage.