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      How a ‘Golden Era for Large Cities’ Might Be Turning Into an ‘Urban Doom Loop’

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      The last thirty years “were a golden era for large cities,” Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor of real estate and finance at Columbia Business School, wrote in November 2022: “A virtuous cycle of improving amenities (educational and cultural institutions, entertainment, low crime) and job opportunities attracted employers, employees, young and old, to cities.”New York, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco, Van Nieuwerburgh continued, “became magnets for the highest-skilled employees and the top employers, with particular concentrations in finance and technology.” In late February and early March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic hit New York and other population hubs. In Van Nieuwerburgh’s telling, the Covid-19 crisis “triggered a massive migration response. Many households fled urban centers. Most of these Covid migrants moved to the suburbs.”As the pandemic endured and subsequent Covid variants prompted employers to postpone return-to-office plans, Van Nieuwerburgh noted, “Covid-induced migration patterns began to take on a more persistent character. Many households transitioned from temporarily renting a suburban home to purchasing a suburban home.”In Van Nieuwerburgh’s view — and that of many of his colleagues — what seemed like a transitory step to avoid infection has become a major force driving the future direction of urban America.Scholars are increasingly voicing concern that the shift to working from home, spurred by the coronavirus pandemic, will bring the three-decade renaissance of major cities to a halt, setting off an era of urban decline. They cite an exodus of the affluent, a surge in vacant offices and storefronts and the prospect of declining property taxes and public transit revenues.Insofar as fear of urban crime grows, as the number of homeless people increases, and as the fiscal ability of government to address these problems shrinks, the amenities of city life are very likely to diminish.Jacob Brown, a post- doctoral fellow at Princeton’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, elaborated in an email on the consequences for cities of the more than 20 percent of urban employees now working full- or part-time from home:With respect to crime, poverty and homelessness, Brown argued,One thing that may occur is that disinvestment in city downtowns will alter the spatial distribution of these elements in cities — i.e. in which neighborhoods or areas of a city is crime more likely, and homelessness more visible. Urban downtowns are often policed such that these visible elements of poverty are pushed to other parts of the city where they will not interfere with commercial activities. But absent these activities, there may be less political pressure to maintain these areas. This is not to say that the overall crime rate or homelessness levels will necessarily increase, but their spatial redistribution may further alter the trajectory of commercial downtowns — and the perception of city crime in the broader public.“The more dramatic effects on urban geography,” Brown continued,may be how this changes cities in terms of economic and racial segregation. One urban trend from the last couple of decades is young white middle- and upper-class people living in cities at higher rates than previous generations. But if these groups become less likely to live in cities, leaving a poorer, more disproportionately minority population, this will make metropolitan regions more polarized by race/class.My Times colleague Nicholas Fandos documented the damage that even the perception of rising crime can inflict on Democrats in a Nov. 27 article, “Meet the Voters Who Fueled New York’s Seismic Tilt Toward the G.O.P.”: “From Long Island to the Lower Hudson Valley, Republicans running predominantly on crime swept five of six suburban congressional seats, including three that President Biden won handily that encompass some of the nation’s most affluent, well-educated commuter towns.And on Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams of New York announced plans to potentially subject severely mentally ill people who are found on subways or city streets to involuntarily hospitalization.Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford, described some of the economic forces at work in an email:In big cities like New York and San Francisco we estimate large drops in retail spending because office workers are now coming into city centers typically 2.5 rather than 5 days a week. This is reducing business activity by billions of dollars — less lunches, drinks, dinners and shopping by office workers. This will reduce city hall tax revenues.Compounding the problem, Bloom continued,Public transit systems are facing massive permanent shortfalls as the surge in working from home cuts their revenues but has little impact on costs (as subway systems are mostly a fixed cost. This is leading to a permanent 30 percent drop in transit revenues on the New York Subway, San Francisco Bart, etc.These difficulties for cities will not go away anytime soon. Bloom provided data showing strong economic incentives for both corporations and their employees to continue the work-from-home revolution if their jobs allow it:First, “Saved commute time working from home averages about 70 minutes a day, of which about 40 percent (30 minutes) goes into extra work.” Second, “Research finds hybrid working from home increases average productivity around 5 percent and this is growing.” And third, “Employees also really value hybrid working from home, at about the same as an 8 percent pay increase on average.”In the case of New York, Bloom wrote that he is “reasonably optimistic in the long-run,” and “current office leasing markets are soft but not in collapse.”That view is not shared by three other experts in real estate economics, Arpit Gupta, of N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, Vrinda Mittal, both of the Columbia Business School, and Van Nieuwerburgh. They anticipate disaster in their September 2022 paper, “Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse.”“Our research,” Gupta wrote by email,emphasizes the possibility of an ‘urban doom loop’ by which decline of work in the center business district results in less foot traffic and consumption, which adversely affects the urban core in a variety of ways (less eyes on the street, so more crime; less consumption; less commuting) thereby lowering municipal revenues, and also making it more challenging to provide public goods and services absent tax increases. These challenges will predominantly hit blue cities in the coming years.In their paper, the three authors “revalue the stock of New York City commercial office buildings taking into account pandemic-induced cash flow and discount rate effects. We find a 45 percent decline in office values in 2020 and 39 percent in the longer run, the latter representing a $453 billion value destruction.”Extrapolating to all properties in the United States, Gupta, Mittal and Van Nieuwerburgh write, the “total decline in commercial office valuation might be around $518.71 billion in the short-run and $453.64 billion in the long-run.”Their conclusions are not necessarily cast in concrete but they are bleak:We estimate that remote work is likely to persist and result in long-run office valuations that are 39.18 percent below prepandemic levels. The decline in office values and the surrounding central business district retail properties, whose lease revenues have been hit at least as hard as office, has important implications for local public finances.For example, the share of real estate taxes in N.Y.C.’s budget was 53 percent in 2020, 24 percent of which comes from office and retail property taxes. Given budget balance requirements, the fiscal hole left by declining central business district office and retail tax revenues would need to be plugged by raising tax rates or cutting government spending.Both would affect the attractiveness of the city as a place of residence and work. These dynamics risk activating a fiscal doom loop. With more people being able to separate the location of work and home, the migration elasticity to local tax rates and amenities may be larger than in the past.In a separate email, Van Nieuwerburgh warned thatAs property values of urban office and urban retail fall, with the increased importance of work from home, so do the tax revenues generated from those buildings and the associated economic activity. Since local governments must balance their budget, this means that they need to raise tax revenues elsewhere or cut public spending. The former is bad for the business climate. The latter is bad for the quality of life in the city: cuts to public transit, schools, police departments, sanitation departments, etc. As the quality of public services deteriorates, crime could increase, making public transit potentially even less attractive. More generally, an urban doom loop could ensue, whereby lower property tax revenues beget lower spending and higher taxes, triggering more out-migration, lower property values, lower tax revenues, less public spending, more crime and worse schools/transit, more out-migration.In his November 2022 paper, “The Remote Work Revolution: Impact on Real Estate Values and the Urban Environment,” Van Nieuwerburgh writes:Since March 2020, Manhattan has lost 200,000 households, the most of any county in the U.S. Brooklyn (-88,000) and Queens (-51,000) also appear in the bottom 10. The cities of Chicago (-75,000), San Francisco (-67,000), Los Angeles (-64,000 for the city and -136,000 for the county), Washington DC (-33,000), Seattle (-31,500), Houston (-31,000), and Boston (-25,000) make up the rest of the bottom 10.As major cities are caught in a downward fiscal spiral, the forces driving the process will be felt in varying stages. The loss of transit ridership fares and sales taxes is immediate; declining residential, retail and office property taxes will take longer to phase in as new appraisals are performed; drops in income tax revenues will occur as families moving outside city limits change their legal residence.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesOne of the major consequences of these patterns, Jessica Trounstine, a political scientist at the University of California-Merced, wrote in an email, “has been segregation in fiscal capacity within metro areas.” In most cases, Trounstine suggested, “the people who will leave cities will likely be higher income and whiter than the people who stay. This means that prior patterns will only be amplified, not reversed.”There are a number of ways to describe the changing character of urban America and the ever-evolving nature of post-pandemic life.Tracey H. Loh, a Brookings fellow, wrote in an email that one way to view an urban downtown is like “a natural ecosystem” that has received a major shock:Prior to the pandemic, these ecosystems were designed to function based on huge surges in their daytime population from commuters and tourists. The shock of the sudden loss of a big chunk of this population caused a big disruption in the ecosystem.Just as the pandemic has caused a surge in telework, Loh wrote, “it also caused a huge surge in unsheltered homelessness because of existing flaws in America’s housing system, the end of federally-funded relief measures, a mental health care crisis, and the failure of policies of isolation and confinement to solve the pre-existing homelessness crisis.”The upshot, Loh continued,is that both the visibility and ratio of people in crisis relative to those engaged in commerce (whether working or shopping) has changed in a lot of U.S. downtowns, which has a big impact on how being downtown ‘feels’ and thus perceptions of downtown. These negative perceptions have become a real barrier to further recovery and are also shaping local elections, especially out west where homelessness is worse, such as last year’s Seattle mayoral election or the recent L.A. mayoral election.Some urban experts have a less pessimistic outlook.Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard and a co-author, with David Cutler, of the 2021 book “Survival of the City: The Future of Urban Life in an Age of Isolation,” wrote by email that “Conventional economic theory suggests that real estate markets will adjust to any reduction in demand by reducing price. Some of this has already happened in commercial real estate.” Glaeser also noted that “many businesses that thought that they were priced out of N.Y.C., San Francisco and Boston markets will reconsider if commercial prices are 30 percent lower.”In fact, Glaeser argued, whilea thirty percent drop in rents in N.Y.C. or S.F. would not lead to disaster, a similar drop in Buffalo or Cleveland might be more problematic because many landlords might just decide to walk away from their properties. In that case, a bleak spiral could begin where vacancies beget vacancies as the urban service providers that cater to local businesses shut down or relocate as well.The nation, Glaeser continued, isat an unusual confluence of trends which poses dangers for cities similar to those experienced in the 1970s. Event#1 is the rise of Zoom, which makes relocation easier even if it doesn’t mean that face-to-face is going away. Event#2 is a hunger to deal with past injustices, including police brutality, mass incarceration, high housing costs and limited upward mobility for the children of the poor.Progressive mayors, according to Glaeser,have a natural hunger to deal with these problems at the local level, but if they try to right injustices by imposing costs on businesses and the rich, then those taxpayers will just leave. I certainly remember New York and Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s, where the dreams of progressive mayors like John Lindsay and Jerome Patrick Cavanagh ran into fiscal realities.In the short run, Glaeser wrote,both the reduction in tax revenues and current political impulses are likely to lead to more crime and homelessness, which will in turn create more of an urban exodus. I am sufficiently optimistic about cities to think that they are likely to react relatively quickly to that exodus and then pivot to being smarter about urban management. In this more hopeful scenario, the likely medium term effect is to create a new generation of city manager-mayors, like Mike Bloomberg, who care about inequity but fight it in a smart way.Richard Florida, a professor of economic analysis and policy at the University of Toronto, stands out as one of the most resolutely optimistic urban scholars. In his August 2022 Bloomberg column, “Why Downtown Won’t Die,” Florida asks, “Can America’s iconic downtowns survive?” His answer:Great downtowns are not reducible to offices. Even if the office were to go the way of the horse-drawn carriage, the neighborhoods we refer to today as downtowns would endure. Downtowns and the cities they anchor are the most adaptive and resilient of human creations; they have survived far worse. Continual works in progress, they have been rebuilt and remade in the aftermaths of all manner of crises and catastrophes — epidemics and plagues; great fires, floods and natural disasters; wars and terrorist attacks. They’ve also adapted to great economic transformations like deindustrialization a half century ago.What the Covid-19 pandemic has done, Florida argues, “is to accelerate a set of changes in our downtowns that were already underway. Vestiges of the industrial age, they were gradually evolving from the one-dimensional, work-only central business districts of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.”In an email, Florida wrote that many urban central business districts are “relics of the past, the last gasp of the industrial age organization of knowledge work the veritable packing and stacking of knowledge workers in giant office towers, made obsolete and unnecessary by new technologies.”Now, he argued, “Downtowns are evolving away from centers for work to actual neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs titled her seminal 1957 essay, which led in fact to ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities,’ ‘Downtown Is for People’ — sounds about right to me.”Despite his optimism, Florida acknowledged in his email thatAmerican cities are uniquely vulnerable to social disorder — a consequence of our policies toward guns and lack of a social safety net. Compounding this is our longstanding educational dilemma, where urban schools generally lack the quality of suburban schools. American cities are simply much less family-friendly than cities in most other parts of the advanced world. So when people have kids they are more or less forced to move out of America’s cities.Florida made the case in his email that cities have become critically important incubators:What worries me in all of this, in addition to the impact on cities, is the impact on the American economy — on innovation. and competitiveness. Our great cities are home to the great clusters of talent and innovation that power our economy. Remote work has many advantages and even leads to improvements in some kinds of knowledge work productivity. But America’s huge lead in innovation, finances, entertainment and culture industries comes largely from its great cities. Innovation and advance in. these industries come from the clustering of talent, ideas and knowledge. If that gives out, I worry about our longer-run economic future and living standards.While the future path of cities remains uncertain, Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton, provided an overview of the problems they face:Cities that have lost revenue from commercial activity have received substantial support from the federal government over the last few years, but that assistance won’t be sustained in the future. What comes next is not clear, but big cities have to reinvent themselves in an era when the downtown business district seems to be permanently changing. The risk that comes with fiscal distress is clear: If city governments face budget shortfalls and begin to cut back on funding for public transit, policing, and street outreach, for the maintenance of parks, playgrounds, community centers, and schools, and for services for homelessness, addiction, and mental illness, then conditions in central cities will begin to deteriorate.The result?When support for the people and the basic institution of urban life is withdrawn, people suffer and public spaces start to empty out. This, along with the rising prevalence of guns across the country, creates the conditions for gun violence to worsen, reinforcing the process of decline. None of this is inevitable, and we know that investments in the people and institutions of cities are effective in creating safe, thriving public spaces. But it’s not entirely clear to me where those investments will come from if revenue falls in the years to come.In a paper from September, “Working from Home Around the World,” Nicholas Bloom, whom I cited earlier, and five colleagues, argue that “the implications for cities are more worrisome. The shift to working from home reduces the tax base in dense urban areas and raises the elasticity of the local tax base with respect to the quality of urban amenities and local governance.”There is reason for both apprehension and hope. Cities across time have proven remarkably resilient and have survived infectious diseases from bubonic plague to cholera to smallpox to polio. The world population, which stands today at eight billion people, is 57 percent urban, and because of the productivity, innovation and inventiveness that stems from the creativity of human beings in groups, the urbanization process is quite likely to continue into the foreseeable future. There appears to be no alternative, so we will have to make it work.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Can Republicans and Democrats Find a Way Forward on Immigration?

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      Any hope for immigration reform on undocumented Dreamers, border security or legal immigration will likely hinge on compromise, something that has eluded lawmakers for decades.WASHINGTON — A drug needle goes into a person’s arm; an adult and child walk through a graveyard; and footage of migrants walking along a sandy stretch of a border wall, in Yuma, Arizona, streams while ominous music plays in the background of this video.It is a 40-second political ad in support of Blake Masters, the Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona, who is running against Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat. The ad connects fatal overdoses of fentanyl and methamphetamines to a spike in illegal migration at the southwestern border. It is one of more than 400 political ads tying immigration to drugs this election cycle, according to America’s Voice, a pro-immigration advocacy group.And it is part of a false G.O.P. narrative that connects fatal overdoes of fentanyl to a spike in illegal migration and presents Republican immigration hard-line immigration policies as an answer to crime and the drug epidemic. Most of the fentanyl comes into the country through official ports of entry on the southwestern border, hidden in legitimate commerce.The false narrative, which resonates with voters across the country, is just one example of how toxic the issue of immigration has become. Republicans have stepped up attacks against President Biden as weak and ineffective on immigration, making it even more difficult for the Biden administration to secure any meaningful immigration reform after the midterm elections, especially if the G.O.P. controls at least one legislative chamber.But even if Republicans win control in Congress and want to advance their immigration policies, particularly on border security, they will have to find some compromise with Democrats to overcome the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate — something that has been elusive for years, regardless of party control.Here are some of the major immigration issues facing the Biden administration that would require striking a compromise with Republicans for any legislation to move forward.The DreamersImmigration advocates demonstrating in front of the Capitol to support protections for DACA recipients earlier this year.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesThe Obama-era program, known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, protects hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to the country as children and have grown up in the United States. Court challenges against the policy have been successful and appeals have largely been exhausted, leaving the fate of these immigrants — many of whom hold jobs in sectors that are already struggling to find workers, such as agriculture and manufacturing — in the hands of Congress.If Congress is unable to come to an agreement to enshrine the policy in law, and a judge stops allowing current participants, known as “Dreamers,” to renew their status, about 1,000 of them will lose the ability to work every business day over a two-year period, said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, an immigration reform advocacy group that draws support from the tech industry.“This would cause terrible, unneeded human and economic hardship for millions of individuals,” Mr. Schulte said in a recent letter to Democrats, referring to the Dreamers, others who would be eligible for the benefit and their family members. He said the results of so many forced out of the work force “would be extremely harmful” for the country’s economy.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.The top Republican in the House, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who is in line for the speaker role, has said that if the G.O.P. wins back control, striking a deal to protect DACA recipients in exchange for border security is a non-starter. But significant job losses in Republican districts among DACA recipients could force the Republicans’ hands if their employers put pressure on their elected officials to find a solution.There has been and continues to be bipartisan support to create a pathway to citizenship for the Dreamers, according to a recent poll commissioned by FWD.us. But previous efforts have failed without enough Republican support.“It’s put up or shut up time” for Republicans if they actually want to do something on border security, Mr. Schulte said in an interview with The New York Times.Democrats have already shown that they are open to some kind of compromise measure.Border SecurityA Border Patrol agent detaining migrants who crossed the border near Yuma, Ariz.John Moore/Getty ImagesFor Republicans, when it comes to immigration, border security is the top priority.During Mr. Biden’s time in office, there has been a record-breaking spike in illegal migration at the southwestern border, part of a global trend exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.Many migrants are fleeing violence and poverty with the hope that they will find work or asylum in the United States. They are coming across the southwest border illegally, because there are not enough legal pathways for them to come to the United States. Limits on visas were set based on the U.S. economy in the 1990s and have largely remained the same, even though the country’s economy has grown more than twice as large since then.Even so, Republicans blame the Biden administration. House Republicans have threatened to impeach the Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, should they retake the majority, blaming him for the extraordinary number of illegal border crossings. They have also threatened to impeach the attorney general, among other officials.For Republicans, improving border security starts with restoring former President Donald J. Trump’s restrictive immigration measures. Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said the first step is completing Mr. Trump’s border wall, a pricey project that Mr. Biden paused when he took office. Fights over the wall also led to a government shutdown in 2018. Democrats say the wall is ineffective and sends a message that the country does not want to let anyone in.Republicans also argue that restricting asylum and withholding welfare benefits for immigrants are two policy changes that would deter migrants from crossing the southwestern border illegally, though undocumented immigrants are not eligible for most federal public benefits.“We have plenty of welfare recipients; we need productive citizens instead,” Mr. Scott said on his campaign website.There may be room for movement. Legislation introduced last year by Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, had the support of two Democratic senators, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, and could provide a road map for compromise. The bill calls for hiring more people in the immigration agencies to address spikes in migration and speeding the process for determining an asylum case in immigration court. That proposal did not include a pathway to citizenship for the Dreamers, and the measure has yet to advance.So far, bills that included both border security and new pathways for legal immigration have hit dead-ends. Senator Dick Durban, Democrat of Illinois, recently reminded Republicans of a proposal in 2013 that had bipartisan support in the Senate. Mr. Durbin said if the legislation had passed, the country would not be in the current situation where there are not enough immigrants legally authorized to work in the agriculture sector. Legal ImmigrationFarm workers harvesting asparagus in Firebaugh, Calif.Ryan Christopher Jones for The New York TimesAnother challenge facing the Biden administration is the labor shortage across the country, which continues to worsen as the economy adds new jobs, even as fears of a recession grow. Democrats and many businesses that employ both low and high-skilled workers argue the labor shortage could be addressed through issuing work authorizations and paths to citizenship as well as expanding programs for immigrants to come work in the United States.Many businesses argue that allowing the expiration of work authorizations for Dreamers and other immigrants in the country on a temporary status would result in significant disruptions to the work force. Businesses pushing for immigration reform have pressed Congress to pass measures providing work authorizations that could give an immediate boost to the economy, lower food prices and fill critical job openings.Businesses, particularly in the agriculture industry, are also pushing to fix the country’s current farm labor shortages by passing new laws for immigrants to work in the agriculture work force.The House last year approved measures that would give about four million immigrants currently in the United States without documentation or with expiring permissions a path to citizenship. But the bills died without enough support in the Senate.While Democrats want to expand legal immigration, Republicans typically want to decrease it. Many Republicans see adding more paths to citizenship for immigrants already in the country on an expired or temporary status as a form of amnesty. They also argue that immigrants take jobs away from Americans.What’s NextMigrants seeking asylum wait to be processed by Border Patrol agents along a section of border wall near Yuma, Ariz.John Moore/Getty ImagesFor years, Republicans have largely owned the narrative on immigration, which is mostly focused on illegal immigrants and border crossings. In this election cycle, Republicans outspent Democrats on immigration-related ads on streaming services and traditional television nearly 15 to 1 — with $119.4 million compared to Democrats’ $8.1 million, according to BPI, a communications and marketing agency that tracks this data.Democrats see little political advantage in talking about immigration during the campaign. But letting Republicans fill that void means the G.O.P. message is often the only narrative Americans hear about immigration.In general, border and immigration policy are two of Mr. Biden’s least favorite issues to discuss, his staff has said, since it is an enormous challenge with no clear, quick solution. And there has been disagreement within the Biden administration over how to approach the border, with some aides supporting some of the restrictive policies of the last administration, according to two people familiar with the discussions.But immigration advocates say if Mr. Biden is serious about protecting Dreamers and pursuing other immigration reforms, Democrats must start reclaiming the narrative on immigration with a positive message that resonates with voters.“They’d better get on the messaging train,” said Beatriz Lopez, the chief political and communications officer with the advocacy group, Immigration Hub.There are brighter messages on immigration for Democrats to talk about, Ms. Lopez said. Her organization has found that voters in battleground states largely agree on protecting the Dreamers. She said they also approve of what the Biden administration has done to reunite immigrant families who were separated during the Trump administration. And voters support efforts to crack down on international drug cartels.Customs and Border Protection, for example, seized 14,700 pounds of fentanyl between October of last year and the end of September, which is more than five times the amount in 2019. About 80 percent of the fentanyl seized by the agency last year was done at ports of entry on the southwestern border.“Democrats have an opportunity to lean in,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, a pro-immigration group. “Talk about the fact that we can do big things, and get the ball rolling on affirmative positive immigration action, versus just playing into the right and talking about enforcement.”Jeanna Smialek More

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      The Battle for Blue-Collar White Voters Raging in Biden’s Birthplace

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      SCRANTON, Pa. — The fate of the Democratic Party in northeastern Pennsylvania lies in the hands of people like Steve Papp.A 30-year veteran carpenter, he describes his job almost poetically as “hanging out with your brothers, building America.” But there has been a harder labor in his life of late: selling his fellow carpenters, iron workers and masons on a Democratic Party that he sees as the protector of a “union way of life” but that they see as being increasingly out of step with their cultural values.“The guys aren’t hearing the message,” Mr. Papp said.Perhaps no place in the nation offers a more symbolic and consequential test of whether Democrats can win back some of the white working-class vote than Pennsylvania — and particularly the state’s northeastern corner, the birthplace of President Biden, where years of economic decline have scarred the coal-rich landscape. This region is where a pivotal Senate race could be decided, where two seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs and where a crucial governorship hangs in the balance.No single constituency, of course, will determine the outcome of these races in a state as big as Pennsylvania, let alone the 2022 midterms. Turning out Black voters in cities is critical for Democrats. Gaining ground in the swingy suburbs is a must for Republicans. But it is among white working-class voters in rural areas and smaller towns — places like Sugarloaf Township, where Mr. Papp lives — where the Democratic Party has, in some ways, both the furthest to fall and the most to gain.A highway sign outside Scranton, Pa.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesSitting in the Scranton carpenters’ union hall, where Democratic lawn signs leaned up against the walls, Mr. Papp said that he often brought stickers to the job site for those he converted, but that he had recently been giving away fewer than he would like. He ticked through what he feels he has been up against. Talk radio. Social media. The Fox News megaphone. “Misinformation and lies,” as he put it, about the Black Lives Matter movement and the L.G.B.T.Q. community.“It’s about cultural issues and social issues,” Mr. Papp lamented. “People don’t even care about their economics. They want to hate.”Republicans counter that Democratic elites are the ones alienating the working class by advocating a “woke” cultural agenda and by treating them as deplorables. And they also argue that the current economy overseen by Democrats has been the issue pushing voters toward the right.The stakes are far higher than one corner of one state in one election.White blue-collar voters are a large and crucial constituency in a number of top Senate battlegrounds this year, including in Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire and Ohio. And the need for Democrats to lose by less is already an urgent concern for party strategists heading into 2024, when Donald J. Trump, who accelerated the movement of blue-collar voters of all races away from Democrats, has signaled he plans to run again.Lt. Gov. John Fetterman boarding Air Force One after a meeting with President Biden.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesOne study from Pew Research Center showed that as recently as 2007, white voters without a college degree were about evenly divided in their party affiliations. But by 2020, Republicans had opened up an advantage of 59 percent over Democrats’ 35 percent.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Governor’s Races: Democrats and Republicans are heading into the final stretch of more than a dozen competitive contests for governor. Some battleground races could also determine who controls the Senate.Biden’s Agenda at Risk: If Republicans capture one or both chambers of Congress, the president’s opportunities on several issues will shrink. Here are some major areas where the two sides would clash.Ohio Senate Race: Polls show Representative Tim Ryan competing within the margin of error against his G.O.P. opponent, J.D. Vance. Mr. Ryan said the race would be “the upset of the night,” but there is still a cold reality tilting against Democrats.“You can’t get destroyed,” Christopher Borick, the director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion in Pennsylvania, said of the task in front of Democrats. “Cutting into Republican gains in the Trump era among white working-class voters is essential.”There are, quite simply, a lot of white voters without college degrees in America. Another Pew study found that such voters accounted for 42 percent of all voters in the 2020 presidential election. And, by some estimates, they could make up nearly half the vote in Pennsylvania this year.Luzerne County, just south of Scranton, had been reliably Democratic for years and years. Then, suddenly, in 2016, Mr. Trump won Luzerne in a nearly 20-point landslide. He won it again in 2020, but by 5 points fewer. There are Obama-Trump voters here, and Obama-Trump-Biden voters, too. The region may have tacked to the right politically in recent years, but it is still a place where the phrase “Irish Catholic Democrat” was long treated as almost a single word, and where it might be more possible to nudge at least some ancestral Democrats back toward the party.The Roosevelt Beer Hall in Dunmore, Pa.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesScranton, a former coal town nestled in the scenic Wyoming Valley, has become synonymous with this voting bloc. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who hopes to become the next House speaker, visited the region this fall to unveil the Republican agenda, and both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump traveled to the area for events kicking off the fall campaign.This year, the Pennsylvania Senate race looms especially large.The Democratic nominee, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, was seemingly engineered for the task of appealing to the working class. A bald and burly man with a political persona that revolves around Carhartt sweatshirts and tattoos, Mr. Fetterman has vowed from the start to compete in even the reddest corners of Pennsylvania. He is running against Mehmet Oz, a wealthy, out-of-state television celebrity who, according to polls, has been viewed skeptically from the start by the Republican base, and who talked of buying crudités at the grocery in a widely ridiculed video.Yet local Democrats said Mr. Fetterman was still facing an uphill climb among white working-class voters in the region, even before his halting debate performance as he recovers from a stroke. For those Democrats concerned about competing for the state’s biggest voting bloc, the success or failure of Mr. Fetterman’s candidacy has become an almost existential question: If not him and here, then who and where?Mr. Fetterman’s strategy to cut into Republican margins in red counties is displayed on his lawn signs: “Every county. Every vote.” But Republicans have worked relentlessly to undercut the blue-collar image Mr. Fetterman honed as the former mayor of Braddock, a downtrodden former steel town just outside Pittsburgh.Chris Tigue, a self-employed painter.Ruth Fremson/The New York Times“It’s a costume,” Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, said in one segment last month. Republicans have highlighted Mr. Fetterman’s Harvard degree, his middle-class suburban upbringing, the financial support he received from his parents into his 40s and, most recently, a barrage of advertising that has cast him as a soft-on-crime liberal.Both sides are targeting voters like Chris Tigue, a 39-year-old who runs a one-man painting company and lives in Dunmore, a town bordering Scranton known for its enormous landfill. Mr. Tigue, a registered Republican, has gone on a political journey that may seem uncommon in most of the country but is more familiar here.He voted twice for Barack Obama. Then he voted twice for Donald Trump.As Mr. Tigue sat outside Roosevelt Beer Garden, a watering hole where the portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt on the wall was a reminder of the area’s Democratic heritage, he explained that Mr. Fetterman had won him back, not just because of his working class “curb appeal,” but because of his stances on abortion and medical cannabis.Mr. Tigue said he was voting for Mr. Fetterman knowing that Mr. Fetterman would probably support the president’s economic agenda in the Senate, a prospect he called “a little scary.” But he said he was looking past that fact. “I’m focusing on the person,” he said.Justin Taylor, the mayor of nearby Carbondale, is another Obama-Trump voter. Elected as a 25-year-old Democrat almost two decades ago, he endorsed Mr. Trump in 2020 and grew increasingly more Republican, just like the city he serves.Mayor Justin Taylor of Carbondale, Pa., at the Anthracite Center, a former bank he converted into an event space.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesToday, he is adamantly opposed to Mr. Fetterman, calling him a liberal caricature and the kind of candidate the left thinks will appeal to the people of Carbondale, a shrinking town of under 10,000 people that was founded on anthracite coal. “I think, quite honestly, he is an empty Carhartt sweatshirt and the people who are working class in Pennsylvania see that,” Mr. Taylor said.Mr. Taylor is still technically a registered Democrat, he said, but he feels judged by his own party. “The Democratic Party forces it down your throat,” he said, “and they make you a bigot, they make you a racist, they make you a homophobe if you don’t understand a concept, or you don’t 100 percent agree.”Still, Mr. Taylor said he might not vote in the Senate race at all. Of his fellow Fetterman doubters, and of Oz skeptics, he asked, “Do they stay home? That becomes the big question.”Northeastern Pennsylvania is also home to two bellwether House races with embattled Democratic incumbents.One race features Representative Matt Cartwright, who is the rarest of political survivors — the only House Democrat nationwide running this year who held a district that Mr. Trump carried in both 2016 and 2020. The other includes Representative Susan Wild, who is defending a swing district that contains one of only two Pennsylvania counties that Mr. Biden flipped in 2020.Representative Matt Cartwright, left. Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesThe union hall of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners Local 445. Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesTo emphasize his cross-partisan appeal, Mr. Cartwright has run an ad this year featuring endorsements from one man in a Trump hat and another in a Biden shirt. In an interview, he said the area’s long-term economic downturn, which he traced to the free-trade deals of the 1990s, had caused many people to work multiple jobs, sapping morale and even affecting the region’s psyche.“When something like that happens, who do you vote for?” Mr. Cartwright said. “You vote for the change candidate. And that’s what we saw a lot of. They voted for Obama twice. They voted for Trump twice. And my own view of it is when they vote that way, it’s a cry for help.”Demographic shifts in politics happen in both directions. As Democrats have hemorrhaged white working-class voters, they have made large gains with college-educated white voters who were once the financial and electoral base of Republicans. In Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia suburbs have become strongly Democratic, while the state’s less populated areas have become more Republican.Alexis McFarland Kelly, a 59-year-old former owner of a gourmet market near Scranton, is the kind of voter Democrats are newly winning over. Raised as a Republican, she was often warned by her father, a business owner, and her grandfather, a corporate vice president, of the excesses of labor and the left. But now, she is planning to vote for Mr. Fetterman.Her biggest misgiving is the hoodie-wearing persona that might appeal to the working class. “I just wish he’d put a suit on once in a while,” she said.Last year, she went to the local Department of Motor Vehicles and declared that she wanted to change her party registration to become a Democrat. The clerk was shocked. “She basically dropped her pen and said, ‘What?! A Democrat!’” Ms. Kelly recalled. “‘Everyone is going the other way.’”Nina Feldman More

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      Don’t Buy the Republican Appeal to Workers

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      J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican Senate candidate, states on his campaign website that he “fiercely defended working-class Americans.” In Pennsylvania, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican Senate hopeful, sports a plaid shirt and jeans in a campaign ad, as he shoots guns of varying sizes. Guitar twangs in the background complete the scene.Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist and best-selling author, and Dr. Oz, the heart surgeon and TV personality, aren’t alone in their self-presentation as ordinary Joes. As November’s midterm elections near, many Republican candidates are all about pickup trucks, bluejeans and guns, as they perform the role of champions for the working stiff. Scratch the surface, though, and it’s a different story.This Republican working-class veneer is playacting. Their positions on workers’ rights make that crystal clear. Nationwide, most Republicans rail against liberal elites and then block a $15 an hour minimum wage, paid leave laws and workplace safety protections. They stymie bills to help workers unionize, and top it off by starving the National Labor Relations Board of funding, even as it faces a surge of union election requests. Several Republican attorneys general have sued to stop wage hikes for nearly 400,000 people working for federal contractors. Republicans also opposed extending the popular monthly child tax credit that helped so many working families afford basic necessities. The “issues” section on the campaign websites of Mr. Vance and Dr. Oz contain virtually no labor policy. Howling about China, as they do, isn’t a comprehensive labor plan.In other instances, what superficially seemed to be examples of Republican support for worker rights were really Trojan horse incursions to advance their culture war.For example, legislators or policymakers in at least six conservative states last year swiftly expanded eligibility for unemployment insurance to workers who quit or were fired for refusing to comply with employer Covid-19 vaccination mandates. The sudden largess was at odds with these states’ generally miserly approach to such benefits: They’d previously done most everything possible to limit the lifeline of unemployment insurance, including prematurely cutting off federally funded benefits in the summer of 2021.Only a sliver of the national work force dug in and refused to be vaccinated, including a small number of New York City employees recently granted reinstatement to their jobs by a Staten Island trial court judge. But anti-vax‌ workers were stark outliers in relation to the vast majority of their peers, from United Airlines employees to Massachusetts state employees, who overwhelmingly complied with mandates.Why did ‌these conservative Republicans suddenly want a safety net for unvaccinated workers? Because it served a culture war narrative, one that frames everything in divisive us-versus-them terms and in the case of vaccines, sees them as a nefarious liberal plot and vaccine-or-test mandates as one more example of government overreach.To that point, consider two legal cases, one brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when its enforcement arm was led by a Trump appointee, and another heard by the Supreme Court, where six of the nine justices are Republican appointees. Both cases involved workers — but neither touched on pocketbook or dignity issues central to most workers’ concerns.The E.E.O.C. case involved two Kroger workers who claimed religious discrimination after being fired for refusing to wear company-issued aprons bearing a heart-shaped logo they saw as promoting gay rights. (In pretrial depositions, both workers were shown a range of corporate logos, and the workers said several of them also represented gay rights and were incompatible with their religion; they included the logos of NBC, Google, Southwest and Apple, as well as the Olympic rings.) A Trump-appointed federal judge in Arkansas rejected Krogers’ motion to end the case, ordering the case to trial, and earlier this month, the company and commission said they had reached a deal to resolve the dispute.In a Supreme Court case that became a national right-wing cause célèbre, the six conservative justices ruled that a Washington State school district violated the free speech and religious rights of a public school football coach who insisted on praying very publicly after games with students at midfield, rejecting more private locations that were offered.In light of genuine worker struggles in our country, these are the workers conservatives go to bat for? It seems the trickle-down crowd finds their inner Norma Rae only if it helps them “own the libs.” These aren’t workers’ rights issues. They’re divisive culture war battles that happen to occur in the employment arena. For ordinary workers, living paycheck to paycheck, who just want a safe place to work, decent pay, and some dignity, conservatives are AWOL.The praying coach and Kroger worker cases involved First Amendment and religious rights. But the most common example of silenced expression occurs when workers get fired for reporting labor law violations or supporting a union. How many Republicans have spoken up to support the expressive rights of unionizing Starbucks or Amazon workers?Similarly, Republicans may prioritize benefits for their favored workers (such as people who are unvaccinated), but all workers need a functioning safety net, including an adequately funded and functional unemployment insurance system. What’s also essential are robust and broadly available programs for paid family and medical leave, paid sick leave and universal health care, measures most Republicans have repeatedly opposed. In this context, the rush to ensure unemployment benefits to people refusing a lifesaving vaccine is cynical, indeed.Workers need safe conditions, good wages, fair treatment and a collective voice on the job. The culture war labor incursions are divorced from what matters most to our country’s working people.As the midterms approach, Republican candidates may play dress-up in plaids and work boots, as they vie for the votes of our nation’s workers. But even a pickup truck laden with bluejeans and hard hats can’t camouflage the callous facts. The absurdity of the worker causes Republicans champion should drive home the truth to wavering voters: these candidates don’t care about the real needs of working people.Terri Gerstein is a fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and the Economic Policy Institute. She spent more than 17 years enforcing labor laws in New York State, working in the state attorney general’s office and as a deputy labor commissioner.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Workers at Trader Joe’s in Brooklyn Reject Union

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      Workers at a Trader Joe’s store in Brooklyn have voted against unionizing, handing a union its first loss at the company after two victories this year.The workers voted 94 to 66 against joining Trader Joe’s United, an independent union that represents employees at stores in Western Massachusetts and Minneapolis. Workers at a Trader Joe’s in Colorado filed for an election this summer but withdrew their petition shortly before a scheduled vote.“We are grateful that our crew members trust us to continue to do the work of listening and responding to their needs, as we always have,” Nakia Rohde, a company spokeswoman, said in a statement after the National Labor Relations Board announced the result on Thursday.The result raises questions about whether the uptick in union activity over the past year, in which unions won elections at several previously nonunion companies like Starbucks, Amazon and Apple, may be slowing.Union supporters recently lost an election at an Amazon warehouse near Albany, N.Y., and the pace of unionization at Starbucks has dropped in recent months, though the union has won elections at over 250 of the company’s 9,000 corporate-owned U.S. stores so far.Workers at a second Apple store recently won an election in Oklahoma City, however, and unions have upcoming votes at a Home Depot in Philadelphia and a studio owned by the video game maker Activision Blizzard in upstate New York.As of June, Trader Joe’s had more than 500 locations and 50,000 employees across the country and was not unionized. Early in the pandemic, the company’s chief executive sent a letter to employees complaining of a “current barrage of union activity that has been directed at Trader Joe’s” and arguing that union supporters “clearly believe that now is a moment when they can create some sort of wedge in our company.”The company has said it is prepared to negotiate contracts at its unionized stores. An employee involved in the union, Maeg Yosef, said the two sides were settling on bargaining dates.Union supporters at the Brooklyn store had said they were seeking an increase in wages, improved health care benefits and paid sick leave as well as changes that would make the company’s disciplinary process more fair.Before union supporters had a chance to talk with all their colleagues, management became aware of the campaign and announced it in a note posted in the store’s break room in late September. The company also fired a prominent union supporter a day or two later.Amy Wilson, a leader of the union campaign in the store, said organizing had become more difficult after the firing and the note from management.“The last core of people hadn’t been spoken to directly by their co-workers, and we lost them instantly,” she said, referring to the note. “It undermined the trust, the relationship. They felt excluded and offended.”Ms. Rohde, the Trader Joe’s spokeswoman, did not respond to a question about why management posted the break room note. She said that while she couldn’t comment on the firing of the union supporter, “we have never and would never fire a crew member for organizing.”Trader Joe’s is known for providing relatively good wages and benefits for the industry, though workers have complained that the company has made its health care and retirement benefits less generous over the past decade. More