Good Essay! As a perhaps too ardent fan of industrial retention and expansion, I think LL 37 can be a help in retaining industrial space; but it's only one element. Another, as you point out is a serious pro-industry policy. Under Mayor Bloomberg, whose land use policy has been anti-industry, we're a long way from a thought-out industrial policy.

However, most important, in my view, is the utter lack in NYC of a serious affordable housing plan, Affordable residential and studio space is essential and -- as I type -- missing from the package. So long as real economic pressures push people to convert vacant space to residential use, all the enforcement on earth will be not result in serious industrial preservation and expansion.

I wonder, do any of you hold degrees in Economics? If so, perhaps you would recall some concepts known as private property and the market.

If someone owns property, the future of said property should be solely in the hands of said person to do with as they please, so long as they do not pollute the air, etc, or otherwise physically harm anyone else.

So please, spare the world your haughty "we know best" attitude. Laws such as Local Law 37 are bad policy because they subvert the market while protecting (and therefore placing the interests of) a certain segment of the population above another. This is called discrimination.

Businesses flee our nation because folks like you all enjoy taxing them to hell and back. And then you cry and whine when companies like Haliburton move to Abu Dubai. Why wouldn't they? Corporations are formed to generate profit for their shareholders. But I guess, in your eyes, that makes them "evil," right? Ah yes, that's right, they're unpatriotic, just like anyone who criticizes our foreign policy of imperialism. *rolls_eyes* You know, really, for all you guys dislike about Bush & Co., you're frighteningly similar in your arrogance.

Protectionism is a failed ideology. And you all wonder why you are consistently ignored by mainstream political figures? I hate to be cliche, but this isn't France: we like our economy to be strong and vibrant, not weak and stagnant.

I'm not sure why one might differentiate pollution and physical harm from other types of dangerous externalities, including a landscape of monolithic land uses (e.g. high-priced office space and market-rate & luxury housing) that is vulnerable to downturns in one business cycle or another. In both cases, an individual land owner may be profiting at the expense of someone else's well being. In the latter case, it's an entire city's ability to have a robust economy that is not overly reliant on any one, volatile sector.

Providing a framework--through zoning, for instance--for a range of job opportunities ensures an economy has a natural hedge against troughs in any one sector.

I may not have an economics degree, but as a personal investor saving for my retirement I can tell you that my portfolio has a range securities: some aggressive stocks that have the potential to pay off with significant gains (but which are also volatile and may lose value) as well as bonds or fixed-income securities which pay a more modest, but predictable return over the long run. Fundamentally, cities should be no different in how they pursue their long-term economic viability. An appropriate level of industrial jobs, in my mind, are the fixed-income or bonds of a city's economic portfolio.

New York City's industrial retention efforts have been newly rejuvenated in the past few years and deserve credit for trying to strike the right balance--as all regulation on externalities does--between supporting a growing, expanding economy and minimizing negative impacts on others. But it is wrong to assume that these efforts are Pollyanna nostalgia. The types of industrial jobs NYC has been working to retain are those which are still profitable and make sense to have in cities: fabricated goods with high added value or highly customized products that benefit from being at or near their end market.

Ironically, it is these industrial businesses that are increasingly being forced to flee the City. And they are doing so not because of taxes, but because of speculative land bidding that comes from, in part, illegal conversions of space designated, for the benefit of the City as a whole, for industrial uses.

Local Law 37 is about enforcing the law, not about protecting manufacturing or taxing businesses. There is no such thing as completely uncontrolled private property rights: every inch of this city is covered by zoning that dictates height, bulk, or use because some restriction of private property rights serves the needs of the city as a whole. And let's remember that government "subversion" of the market forces includes multi-million dollar tax breaks to big companies to incentivize them to locate in a specific place and the use of eminent domain to make way for development projects.

"There is no such thing as completely uncontrolled private property rights: every inch of this city is covered by zoning that dictates height, bulk, or use because some restriction of private property rights serves the needs of the city as a whole."

Sadly, you are correct, but I oppose every sentence and period that has been composed in support of such legislation. Only an arrogant fool would pretend to know the "needs of the city as a whole." And like I said above, for all the bashing of Bush you folks do, you are so very similar in your authoritarian tendances.

"And let's remember that government "subversion" of the market forces includes multi-million dollar tax breaks to big companies to incentivize them to locate in a specific place and the use of eminent domain to make way for development projects."

If your assumption is that I support such collusion between the government and private corporations, you would be wrong. That too, as you point out, is a subversion of the market, and I believe such moves to be exercises in corporatism, which I always have and will continue to rail against.