Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look at why a think tank says New York City needs another university. We’ll also get details on Donald Trump’s attempts to arrange a bond for more than $550 million in his civil fraud case.
Of all the things New York City needs right now, is another private university one of them?
Jonathan Bowles, the executive director of the Center for an Urban Future, a think tank in Manhattan, said that the answer was yes “because we’re in a different economic environment, postpandemic.”
“If there was anything that could derail the city’s economic progress,” he told me, “it would be a decline in college grads moving to the city. Remote work, along with the city’s affordability crisis, has opened up that possibility. One way to counteract that is to expand the pipeline of people coming here before they even get a degree.”
Attending college in New York would increase the likelihood that graduates would look for and find their first jobs in the city, he said. “If you look at the city’s economic success over the past few decades, nothing has been more important than attracting and retaining highly educated people,” he said. “Companies had to be here because that talent base was here, even if it meant paying the city’s high real estate prices and taxes.”
The connection between college and the economy is so important that a report from the center said that City Hall should find city-owned land and commit to providing $100 million for a new campus.
The college idea was one of five in a report from the center about ways for the city to do well, given the economic realities that the pandemic left behind. The center’s report noted that the city was lagging in several economic sectors: Only 57 percent of the retail jobs lost during the pandemic have returned. The city has regained the same number of jobs lost during the pandemic, but many of the new jobs are in lower-paying industries.
The center’s report comes as the state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, is warning of a “looming enrollment cliff,” in part because the college-age population in the U.S. is expected to drop beginning next year.
Bowles, focused on potential economic benefits, said that opening a major academic institution would create hundreds if not thousands of new jobs before the first students arrived, from administrators and faculty members to building and food-service workers.
“Indeed,” the report from the center said, “colleges and universities may be the city’s most underappreciated jobs engine.” Colleges and universities account for 3.5 percent of the jobs in the city, nearly double the share in the 1990s, the report said.
Bowles said other statistics point to demand that a new college or university could begin to address. More than 120,000 would-be students applied to New York University last year, which he said accepted roughly 15,000 of them. Columbia University admitted just over 2,200 of its 57,000 applicants.
That left nearly 160,000 who considered going to college in New York, even if they gave it only a passing thought as they filled out application after application. Still, the appeal of New York might be enough to draw them to a new institution. “We want more of those top high school students to come to New York and study here and stay afterwards and fuel the industries of the future,” Bowles said.
The number of those private college students pales in comparison with the 226,000 students who attend the City University of New York’s 25 campuses.
Bowles mentioned a couple of possible locations for a new campus, including Sunnyside Yards, a 180-acre railroad yard and potential development site in western Queens. But, he added, “my suggestion is not to start off by saying, ‘Here is where we know it should be.’”
Weather
It will be mostly sunny today with highs near 49. In the evening, temperatures will dip into the low 40s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Sunday (Purim).
The latest New York news
Trump’s ‘insurmountable difficulties’ in arranging a bond
Remember old-fashioned paper checks? Imagine one for $557,491,716. On the line below the one that says “pay to the order of,” the amount would be written out in words: Five hundred fifty-seven million four hundred ninety-one thousand seven hundred sixteen dollars.
That is how much Donald Trump needs for a bond in the civil fraud case in Manhattan. His lawyers said on Monday that 30 companies had turned him down. Apparently, he does not have enough liquidity.
The amount is higher than the $454 million judgment in the case to account for interest Trump will owe. Trump’s lawyers have asked an appeals court to put the judgment on hold or to accept a bond of only $100 million. Otherwise, the New York attorney general’s office, which brought the case against Trump, might move to collect the money, raising the possibility that the state could freeze some of his bank accounts and seize some of his properties.
The attorney general, Letitia James, could have done so as soon as Justice Arthur Engoron issued his ruling last month after finding that Trump had fraudulently inflated his net worth to obtain loans and other benefits. But she offered a 30-day grace period, until March 25. It is unclear whether the appellate court will rule on what amounts to a plea for help before then. It is also unclear whether James will give Trump any more time.
Included in the filing by Trump’s lawyers was a document from Gary Giulietti, an executive at the Lockton Companies, which he said was the world’s largest privately held insurance brokerage firm. Giulietti said that he had been hired by Trump.
“While it is my understanding that the Trump Organization is in a strong liquidity position, it does not have $1 billion in cash or cash equivalents,” Giulietti wrote. “As a result, for a company such as the Trump Organization, which has most of its assets invested in real estate, obtaining a bond for $464 million is a practical impossibility.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Sand sculptures
Dear Diary:
I used to see an older man and his wife every summer by the lighthouse on Fire Island: him, shirtless and wearing Bermuda shorts, her in a floppy pink straw hat.
The man would create two or three sand sculptures of classically styled, voluptuous women, with seaweed for hair and seashells for fingernails. Hundreds of people a day would walk by and admire his work.
The couple had been coming to the beach since the 1960s. We would say a few words, talking more and more as the years went on.
They were both around 80. They would arrive in the morning and leave by 2 p.m. The late-afternoon waves would erase the man’s creations, and he would be back the next week with new ones.
Summer would fade, and it would be eight or nine months before we returned. When we did, there he would be, creating his art.
We had grown up in Brooklyn, decades apart. We talked of our lives, our health, the pain and regret of advancing age. I told them of our son, who had died in a car accident. They were silent and crestfallen.
On my last day there one summer, they collected their belongings, the man’s wife gave a little wave and he shrugged. They walked away, hand in hand.
The next summer, there was no sign of them. What had become of them was a mystery. People passed back and forth where he used to sit, as the ocean washed in and out.
— Joseph P. Griffith
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
