N.Y. / REGION

In New York City, Jobs Come Back Without Wall Street

By PATRICK McGEEHANFEB. 15, 2015

The New York Stock Exchange. Jobs in the city are growing at a rapid pace without relying on the financial sector.CreditSpencer Platt/Getty Images

New York City has created more jobs over the past five years than during any five-year period in the last half century. But the city is not pulsing with the same boomtown swagger it radiated in past growth spurts.

What’s missing? Wall Street.

The big investment banks and brokerage firms used to form the powerful engine that pulled New York’s economy out of recessions. During the boom years of the 1990s, the high-paying securities industry accounted for more than 10 percent of all of the jobs added in the city’s private sector. This time around, it has contributed less than 1 percent.

To city officials and economists, this is extraordinarily good news. For the first time in decades, New York is proving that it can grow at a rapid pace without leaning on Wall Street. The city has added about 425,000 jobs since the end of 2009, raising total employment to 4.1 million jobs.

Though New York is in the midst of a strong expansion, the atmosphere is different from 1999, at the height of the tech-stock bubble — or even 2007, before the housing bubble burst. Financiers are not throwing themselves $3 million birthday parties on Park Avenue, as Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chairman of the Blackstone Group, did.

New York’s Booming Job Recovery

The city’s economy is creating jobs at a furious pace.

“It isn’t that kind of boom,” said Ronnie Lowenstein, director of the city’s Independent Budget Office. “It isn’t ‘Bonfire of the Vanities.’ It’s a wide variety of firms in different industries that are contributing to a more diversified job growth.”

Many of the new jobs are in lower-paying businesses, such as hotels and restaurants. But, for a change, fast-growing and well-paying Internet companies like Google,Facebook and BuzzFeed are adding jobs at a fast pace.

Paola M. Maldonado just landed one of those tech jobs, which she said has changed her life.

Ms. Maldonado, 34, said she spent much of last year “either making 10 bucks an hour or on unemployment.”

She enrolled in Access Code, a coding class set up by Coalition for Queens, a nonprofit agency. And last month, her decision to switch careers paid off. As a developer of apps for mobile phones, Ms. Maldonado now makes double what she used to earn when she worked in an administrative job at Hunter College, she said. Jobs in tech companies offer salaries that average $85,619, according to the coalition.

“They’re hiring like crazy,” Ms. Maldonado said of BuzzFeed. “I started in the first week of January and there were about 20 people starting that day.”

Her first splurge was a trip to Ikea for furnishings to spruce up the apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, that she shares with her husband. Next on the list is a new couch, Ms. Maldonado said.

The dynamism of the city’s economy has fueled a rebound that has been much stronger than for the country as a whole. New York has added three times as many jobs as it lost during the recession. The nation’s gain, however, is well short of twice what it lost.

Justo J. Cruz, 30, is a houseman at a Residence Inn in Manhattan. He said he has been receiving annual raises of 4 percent through a contract negotiated by his union.CreditAndrew Renneisen for The New York Times

The city’s unemployment rate has plunged in the last two years by 2.7 percentage points, to 6.3 percent. But it remains above the current national rate of 5.7 percent, in part because the pool of people seeking work in the city has grown substantially in the last several years.

“We’re in a very significant, pretty long-lasting jobs recovery, but for many people it just doesn’t feel that way,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist forMoody’s Analytics. “We’re still not at full employment, even in New York City. That keeps a lid on wages.”

Wages have been growing steadily in the city, but the average wage for all jobs — $87,642 — is still lower than it was in 2007, according to the budget office. The main reason is that pay on Wall Street has not returned to pre-recession levels, though it easily exceeds $350,000 a year on average, the office said.

But the wages of many workers have outpaced inflation. Justo J. Cruz, a hotel houseman, said he had been receiving annual raises of 4 percent through a contract negotiated by his union, the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council A.F.L.-C.I.O. With the ever-growing influx of tourists to the city, hotels are full of visitors “from Easter all the way to New Year’s Eve,” Mr. Cruz said.

Mr. Cruz, 30, said he had spent about $10,000 of his rising income to purchase a used car, an Acura sedan. He and his wife, an accountant, have begun shopping for their first house, preferably in Brooklyn — if they can afford one there, he said.

Mr. Cruz stands at the nexus of New York’s current prosperity. Many of the jobs created in the city have been in hotels, restaurants, stores and other businesses that cater to tourists. And, in comparison with previous booms, much more of the growth has come outside Manhattan.

Almost every industry in the city has been adding jobs at a healthy pace. Data compiled by the New York State Department of Labor indicates that among the fastest-growing sectors are health services and places that serve food and drinks.

Wall Street, on the other hand, has added just a few thousand jobs in five years. Most of that growth has come in the past year or so, after a period of drastic cost-cutting spurred by the financial crisis.

Saul Bolton at one of his three restaurants, Saul Restaurant, in Brooklyn. He employs over 50 people. CreditAndrew Renneisen for The New York Times

Despite Wall Street’s less-than-robust condition, the city is in the midst of what the budget office described in a recent forecast as “a historically strong payroll employment expansion.” It projected that the hiring binge would continue for at least four years, adding 250,000 more positions by the end of 2018.

If that forecast proves accurate, this period of growth would be not just the biggest for the city since at least 1950, but also the longest. In the recovery from the deep recession of the early 1990s, the city added nearly half a million jobs. But that expansion started much slower and lasted more than eight years, culminating in the tech-stock bubble that burst in early 2000.

“The diversified nature of the job growth is a very positive sign, and it augurs well for the job recovery going forward,” Mr. Zandi said. “It’s not going to be derailed by a bursting bubble or financial services going off the rails.”

Saul Bolton, a chef who lives in Brooklyn and opened his first restaurant there in the late 1990s, remembers those days and “the parties that were thrown,” he said.

“People were making money hand over fist,” he said.

Mr. Bolton’s business has ridden the surge of commercial activity in Brooklyn. He now employs more than 50 people at his three restaurants —Saul Restaurant, the Vanderbilt and Red Gravy — and his sausage company,Brooklyn Bangers. Basketball fans have been lining up at his sausage stand in the Barclays Center, home to the Brooklyn Nets. And he said he looked forward to the New York Islanders moving there next season.

Though his home borough is “growing like crazy,” he said, people remain more cautious in their spending than in previous boom times.

“People will still pay for quality,” Mr. Bolton said. But, he added, “they may not buy the most expensive bottle of wine in the way they did.”

He cited the large law firm that employs his wife as an example of how the city’s rebound could ripple to other businesses, spurring more spending and more hiring.

“In the past couple of years, they changed from having big office parties outside the firm to save the money,” Mr. Bolton said. “Now they’re at a point where they can go back out and whoop it up in a more pricey way.”