How the 1% lives?
Yesterday on on WNYC (the local public radio station), I heard a report by Andrea Bernstein on “Super-Commuters.” These are people – a growing group, she says – who commute into the city by plane to work every week. Her main example was a man who lives in Florida and works in New York City. The tone of the story was light and bemused: “How are YOU getting to work this morning?” asked the host, introducing the piece in the tone you would use to read a storybook to children. And I suppose there is a legitimate New Yorkers-do-the-darndest-things angle to chuckle over. But to me the piece was most notable for what it left out: there was hardly any discussion of the price of this lifestyle, economic, social, or environmental. That commuting this way is possible only for certain people with certain kinds of jobs went without saying. “You probably know someone who commutes like this,” Bernstein insists. I wouldn’t say that’s true of everyone who lives in the WNYC listening area, but I take it as an indication of who WNYC listeners are presumed to be (and whom they are presumed to know).
The money-is-no-object viewpoint was annoying but not surprising. And if the families in question say it’s worth the time apart, I’ll take them at their word. I was taken aback, however, by the piece’s total avoidance of the question of the environment, and the impact thereon of a weekly air commute. I will very likely never be in a position to fly to and from work. I don’t think I’d accept the cost to my family of such a commute even if I had the option. But I’m fairly certain I couldn’t justify the environmental impact, the outsized use of resources, even if I could afford it. And yet Bernstein’s piece did not even gesture toward this cost. The number of miles flown were referenced as a fun fact (one man has flown the distance to the moon and back!) or an additional perk (families can use the frequent-flier miles to take trips), but not an environmental worry.
This seemed like a particularly glaring omission because I had Richard Miller’s Commonweal article on the threat of climate change still vivid in my mind. (Have you read it yet?) The WNYC story also reminded me of another magazine article I read last week, one that covered the territory of “crazy things wealthy New Yorkers do to make their lives easier, because they can,” but also raised some serious questions about how the privileges of the very rich can affect us all. It was James B. Stewart’s article “Tax Me if You Can” in the March 19 New Yorker, a study of how people who work and live in New York at least part-time manage to avoid paying taxes here. Commuting enters the picture in this story, too – quoting from the online abstract: “The problem is especially acute for cities like New York, which are geographically close to nearby lower-tax jurisdictions. People who want to avoid both New York State and New York City income taxes are permitted to own a residence and work in the city and the state but must maintain a primary residence outside the state.” The story focuses on people who, if they spent a few more days in the city each year, would be paying a lot of money in taxes to New York. They are also people who can afford to pay a lot of money in taxes to New York. And, most significantly, they are people who can afford to go to the trouble not to pay that money while enjoying the benefits of more-or-less living in New York. The account of how someone like Martha Stewart establishes that she is not a New York resident, despite owning two homes in the state, is comedy of the absurd with an instructive edge.
NYC lost more than $200 million annually when the State legislature eliminated our commuter tax. Even more galling, the legislature still won’t let us require that certain public employees- like policemen – live in NYC. So we can’t even insist that our own taxpayer-funded jobs pay local taxes.
Another spin on the extended commute and its environmental impact: think of all of our moderate income workers- bus drivers and the like- who commute daily back and forth from the Poconos and from exurban counties. They do it out of a desire to have a reasonable standard of living- a private house, etc- that they could not afford in NYC.
Something I thought of when I read the post on climate change: An environmentally sustainable US is going to pivot on sustainable cities. For the US to become carbon neutral, I think even more of us will have to live in cities, planning policies will have to reverse the flight to the suburbs and attract people back to the urban centers. We need to invest a lot more in our cities and especially in transportation alternatives to turn this situation around. It seems like planners and environmentalists have been saying this for a long time and a lot of smart people are working hard on these issues, but there still doesn’t seem to be a great deal of political will to make it happen.
That commuting this way is possible only for certain people with certain kinds of jobs went without saying.
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Disagree.
This trend is not a marker of “the 1%”.
See, e.g. this morning’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch for news about the many thousands of ordinary working people who fly to work in St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbia, etc. It’s closer to 10%
From that:
Regardless, said Mitchell Moss, the NYU professor who authored the study, the trend speaks to both the increased flexibility of modern-day workers — for whom “the office” can be almost anyplace — and the challenges facing two-income families in a weak job market: Why uproot your family when your spouse can’t get a job in the new city?
http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/commuters-covering-long-distances-multiple-cities/article_d762e848-72a8-11e1-8fa4-001a4bcf6878.html
It’s kinda hard to imagine what a 1 percenter does for a living that requires any sort of commuting whatsoever. Even I, who am in the top 95% income bracket, work from home most days.
Jim, I find so much of this picture hard to imagine! Reading the New Yorker article I had to wonder why, if my annual income was in the tens or hundreds of millions, I would waste any energy at all counting how many days I spent at each of my various homes. What good is an unfathomably large fortune if it doesn’t free you from stinginess?
Mollie: Mitt Romney’s eldest son described him as “enormously cheap.” Nobody in the family contradicted him. What is Mitt Romney’s estimated wealth? How many homes does he own?
It’s not so hard for me to imagine. Couples who both put their careers first may have to live so far apart that one of them has to fly to work.
Where in your very expensive city would you force your police people to live, Irene? Seems likely that might considerably shrink the pool of applicants.
David, There are areas within NYC that are livable for public employees: 3 bdrm houses in Queens for less than 200k for example. The commute might still be an hour though.
“The problem is especially acute for cities like New York, which are geographically close to nearby lower-tax jurisdictions. People who want to avoid both New York State and New York City income taxes are permitted to own a residence and work in the city and the state but must maintain a primary residence outside the state.”
It really is a rats-in-the-maze game, though. If the maze is reconfigured, the rats will find another path.
Presumably, the owners of residences, even if they are in residence less than 183 days per year, are paying property taxes? And when they are in residence, whatever expenditures they make – restaurants, shopping, etc. – generate sales tax? (I’m just guessing that these taxes exist in New York).
If New York City lowered its tax rates, such that they are the same, or lower, than surrounding municipalities, then the wealthy tax evaders would no longer have an incentive to evade, or lie about, residency requirements.
There are many, many moderate income (and poor) people living in NYC. I have no doubt that we could ably fill the vacancies from the more than 8 million people who DO live in the City. The reason we don’t have a residency requirement is because the politicians in the suburbs won’t allow it, it doesn’t serve their own constituency- all of those suburbanites with NYC jobs.
What are you, Mollie – anti-capitalist? This is the American way of life at its most Horatio Alger best. It is supported by a certain strain of Christianity: the ability to have the wherewithal is a sign of God’s favor.
Sheesh! Stop being a pinko.
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Actually knowing a few folks who commute to NYC (and LA) by plane, I find the author’s description of this group almost unrecognizable.
Look at the facts of life. Family is the highest social priority of the Catholic worker. To live decently in Manhattan one has to be a multimillionaire or a fool. Hence, parents who commute to suburban NJ, CT, or Long Island arrive home long after the kids are in bed, and leave for work long before they rise.
Does it matter to the child whether his father is fifty miles away or five hundred?
Another sad fact: the ‘burbs of NYC are, by and large, disaster areas pocked here and there by virtually gated communities of zillionaires. Alternately, a commuter can live an hour from Dulles or Atlanta or Orlando airport in relative peace, in attractive and even beautiful surroundings, with very low-overhead housing and other expenses compared to NYC. In fact, in calculating the differences between these expenses and those required to live in or near NYC, you almost have to add a zero to do NYC.
There’s another boon: many of those whom I know who avail themselves of this arrangement work in NYC Monday through Thursday — often enough, even Monday through Wednesday. That’s because they have nothing else to do in NYC but work, so they work long hours (no commute). There is nothing inhuman about this routine: our local firemen do the same thing.
Such workers can be home late Thursday or early Friday morning, and fly to NYC on Monday oh-dark-hundred. Three day weekends in normal towns, with normal people, without abnormal (sorry, NYC) New Yorkers – what’s not to like, especially when telecommuting can stretch those days out even more (hence, by work-weeks alternating 4, 3, 4 nights a week in NYC, one even preserves his low-tax Florida residency).
Such plans are the result of prudential choices. One can disagree, to be sure, but it’s hardly Christian to allow your disagreement to lead to using a government entity to make mandatory your view of how people should live, work, and raise their families, and force it on everybody else. Big Brother does that. Catholics don’t.
Commuting, of some sort is probably how the 99%ers get to work. People choose to live close, or far, from work for a variety of reasons. I find it sad that Commonweal continues to publish articles on the old, class warfare theme. Surely there must be something more worthy of such a magazine.
Mr. Manion: We must consider that if we do not become “One Nation, Under God, indivisble with liberty and justice for all” we are doomed as a nation. The curret “War between the states”, each striving to achieve the lowest level of taxes etc to attract residents and businesses. I have repeatedly told my repubican friends in Wisconsin that they wll soon be like Mississippi under Walkers repeated assults on the middle class. I for one will not oppose the “Big Pipeline” that will come up soon transporting water from the lower Mississippi to the southwest because Ill AND Missisippi, etal, will be very wealthy charging a “free market” price for that water. Poor old Abe must be turning in his grave seeing the Great Country He saved turn into the “Un-United States” with the big Corps all heading to Dixie where they can pay “Slave Wages.
The rich get richer and the poor get children.
Well, definitely it does not apply only to the 1%. I know 2 young families who do this, one of which happens to be my son’s. He, a research scientist and his wife a doctor were both working in Los Angeles. Then his company shut up shop in L.A and moved that whole dept to San Francisco. So till my daughter-in-law can find a job in SF, he is in SF Monday to Thursday and works from home in LA on Friday, flying early morning on Monday and back late on Thursday. Not ideal, not what they want, but what else to do?