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Artists Feel the Squeeze in a Midwest SoHo - New York Times

Tuesday, November 29, 2005
The New York Times
November 29, 2005
Artists Feel the Squeeze in a Midwest SoHo
By HOPE GLASSBERG

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - The creative resources in and around Topeka, Kan., in the 1980's didn't inspire a whole lot of confidence in Julie Tyler. So she promptly fled her hometown after high school for cities with more prominent art scenes, attending Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and eventually settling in Washington.

But a few years ago when Ms. Tyler, a printmaker and painter, and her husband, Victor, an amateur photographer, traveled back to nearby Kansas City, Mo., they were startled at the plethora of galleries and the number of artists living in the city's artsy Crossroads district. In many ways, they found the art scene more pulsating with life than its more famous outposts in the East.

"I always thought Kansas City didn't have its arts at the same level as the East Coast," said Ms. Tyler, 38. "But when I came back I saw stuff here that was as good as the art I saw in New York and D.C. There was just a good energy. People were actually like 'Oh great, a new artist,' not closed off and competitive."

In June the Tylers purchased a 2,900-square-foot loft without plumbing or kitchen appliances at 18th and Wyandotte Streets, in the heart of the Crossroads, for $500,000. That made them representative of a new type of person moving downtown: artsy, but also older, upwardly mobile and willing to put down half a million dollars for a bare-bones loft.

It's a process familiar to anyone who has watched the evolution of SoHo in New York or most other downtown revitalizations. However positive the impact on the Kansas City art scene - attracting new galleries and people like the Tylers away from the East Coast - urban renewal has also threatened to squeeze out the artists who pioneered its progress.

"There's a higher price point now, and things are shifting from a renter's market to an ownership market," said Bill Dietrich, chief executive of the Downtown Council, an organization that represents businesses, nonprofit organizations and property owners in Kansas City. A study commissioned by the council found that, demographically, the Crossroads district had changed more in the last few years than any other part of downtown. Median income rose to $79,000 in 2004 from $33,000 in 2002, while the average age of residents jumped to 33 from 24. Real estate prices - and, as a result, property taxes - have also risen substantially.

For young artists like Nancy Bach and Burak Duvenci, both 23, the pricey real estate in the Crossroads was not a realistic option. Instead they chose to rent a warehouse loft in the West Bottoms district, about two miles northwest of the Crossroads district. The space, which they share with two other artists, is 3,500 square feet and costs $275 a month per person. Indeed, the area - once home to light industrial manufacturing plants - positively teems with artists; locals say there are five or so warehouses with 50 to 100 residents each, sometimes squatting five to a loft.

The price is right, but the sustainability of the West Bottoms district as an artist's haven is suspect. Many of the buildings are not zoned for residential purposes, and the artists remain because the city has chosen to turn a blind eye, for now. Perhaps of greater concern to the arts community is that the growing West Bottoms settlements show how quickly downtown revitalization, in the Crossroads in particular, is driving young artists out.

"It's kind of a house of cards," said James Woodfill, a well-established local sculptor and installation artist who has a studio in the east Crossroads. "The Crossroads has based itself on young artists who live on shoestring budgets, but as rents and taxes rise, will that creative synergy move?"

If local artists, with the assistance of the city, have anything to say about it, the synergy will not be disrupted anytime soon. Tax abatements and private initiatives, leaders hope, will help the established arts community stay put and keep younger artists moving in.

Over the last year, the Crossroads Community Association has been working with the office of Mayor Kay Barnes to draw up a plan that would enable property owners using buildings for creative purposes like studios, fine arts schools or art dealerships to get a tax break. If the plan is passed by the City Council, building owners would pay property taxes based on the original value of their property for 10 years and then 50 percent of the tax value based on the most recent assessment of the property for the next 15.

Those same tax benefits were originally given on a project-by-project basis to real estate and commercial developers via Kansas City's Planned Industrial Expansion Authority to jumpstart growth downtown. Now that redevelopment is well under way - since 2000, the city and the private sector have invested more than $3 billion in downtown projects, and there are more than 3,000 residential units built, under construction or planned, according to the Downtown Council - artists want the same tax break to hedge against the rising property values that revitalization necessarily causes.

"It's good to get the neighborhood going, but why do you keep giving tax abatements to new people coming in?" said Stephanie Leedy, who manages several properties in the Crossroads district originally bought by her father, Jim Leedy, a local gallerist and artist. At one of her properties, the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, property taxes more than tripled, to $40,000, two years ago.

Suzie Aron, president of the Crossroads Community Association, is confident that the plan will enable both established property owners to keep their taxes at bay and give newer residential developers an explicit reason to cater to artists. "The great thing about this plan is that if you are a landlord who rents to artists, you could qualify for the tax break and your renters will reap the benefits," she said.

For the tax abatement plan to pass, the entire Crossroads district would need to be deemed a "blighted" area. Forty percent of the district has already received that designation based on previous studies, and the city will survey the rest of the district starting next month, said Donovan Mouton, director of urban affairs in the mayor's office. Then, a majority of the 13-member City Council will also have to approve the plan.

In the meantime, initiatives like the Arts Incubator of Kansas City on 18th Street, a nonprofit that provides extensive business training and affordable studio space to nearly 40 artists, continue to keep young artists plugged in. Another prominent draw is the Urban Culture project, begun in 2003, which provides free studio and exhibition spaces to artists in vacant downtown storefronts. It is part of a larger organization known as the Charlotte Street Foundation, which offers unrestricted grants to Kansas City artists.

Milton Stevenson, a sculptor who graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2004, is originally from New York and had intended to return upon graduation, but changed his mind when he considered the opportunities here. He rents a loft north of the River Market area and keeps studio space, courtesy of the Urban Culture Project, at 11th Street and Baltimore Avenue.

"There are a lot of things that encourage young artists to stay here," said Mr. Stevenson, 24. "I don't know of any other city where I could have had a show one year out of school and have another one planned."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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What I Knew Before the Invasion

Tuesday, November 22, 2005
What I Knew Before the Invasion

By Bob Graham
Sunday, November 20, 2005; B07

In the past week President Bush has twice attacked Democrats for being hypocrites on the Iraq war. "[M]ore than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power," he said.

The president's attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.

The president has undermined trust. No longer will the members of Congress be entitled to accept his veracity. Caveat emptor has become the word. Every member of Congress is on his or her own to determine the truth.

As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq war, I probably had as much access to the intelligence on which the war was predicated as any other member of Congress.

I, too, presumed the president was being truthful -- until a series of events undercut that confidence.

In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq -- a war more than a year away. Even at this early date, the White House was signaling that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was of such urgency that it had priority over the crushing of al Qaeda.

In the early fall of 2002, a joint House-Senate intelligence inquiry committee, which I co-chaired, was in the final stages of its investigation of what happened before Sept. 11. As the unclassified final report of the inquiry documented, several failures of intelligence contributed to the tragedy. But as of October 2002, 13 months later, the administration was resisting initiating any substantial action to understand, much less fix, those problems.

At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.

Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein's capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.

There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein's will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.

Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States' removing Hussein, by force if necessary.

The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs." It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as "If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year," underscored the White House's claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.

From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth -- or even had an interest in knowing the truth.

On Oct. 11, I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.

The writer is a former Democratic senator from Florida. He is currently a fellow at Harvard University's Institute of Politics.

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Voter Profiles for Bloomberg Went Beyond Ethnic Labels - New York Times

Tuesday, November 15, 2005
The New York Times
November 15, 2005
Voter Profiles for Bloomberg Went Beyond Ethnic Labels
By JIM RUTENBERG

Throughout this year's mayoral campaign, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's spending records included something called "voter list development." It looked ominous to Democrats - especially as Mr. Bloomberg poured millions into it.

Lists like this usually include voters' personal data - the magazines they buy, the cars they drive, their political affiliations. But as the cost of compiling Mr. Bloomberg's list inched up toward $10 million, not even aides to President Bush, who perfected this sort of voter identification last year, could figure out where the money was going.

Now, speaking publicly for the first time about the behind-the-scenes details of their campaign - one of the most expensive in New York City history - Mr. Bloomberg's aides have explained the mystery: rather than trying to read the tea leaves of public records to figure out voters' tastes and leanings, they had the money to simply call and ask about them directly. They called hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in what top strategists in both the Republican and Democratic Parties said was one of the most ambitious pollings of an electorate ever undertaken.

They stored the answers in a vast computerized database to develop sophisticated psychological portraits of city voters - identifying eight never-before-identified voting blocs based on people's shared everyday interests and concerns, not on their broader racial, cultural or ideological differences, aides said in interviews in the last few days.

The extensive polling gave Mr. Bloomberg's campaign a deep understanding of the city's voters, and allowed it to tailor mailings, electronic messages and prerecorded telephone calls to voters' specific interests as never before, aides said.

"We sat down in February and said we wanted to do this campaign differently, we wanted to unify the city by looking at people who had common beliefs," said Kevin Sheekey, Mr. Bloomberg's campaign manager. "We were not going to classify them by party or race; it was thought-based."

With these new, multiethnic "thought-based" groups in hand, Mr. Bloomberg's aides said they were able to transcend the traditional political fault lines of race, party and class that have been so crucial to city elections of the past, in the process developing a new model for running elections. This model, they maintain, could just as easily transcend the differences between red and blue states nationally in 2008. (The firm that created the system, Penn, Schoen & Berland, has Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as a client, and created embryonic versions of it for President Bill Clinton in 1996 and for Mr. Bloomberg in 2001.)

Among the groups were these:

¶FANS, or "Fearful and Anxious New Yorkers": described as mostly lower- and lower-middle-income New Yorkers of all races whose lives are "utterly dependent on New York surviving." They rely heavily upon the city's social services, and, perhaps working as janitors or in the airports, they depend for their livelihoods on the city's remaining financially stable and free from attack. "They were motivated by what I call security, broadly speaking," said Douglas E. Schoen, who devised the database with his business partner, Mike Berland. "They do not just fear crime, they do not just fear another terror attack; it's, 'How do I keep my life secure in an uncertain time?' " These voters, many of them members of minorities, received messages that emphasized Mr. Bloomberg's record in fighting crime and combating terrorism, as well as his record on job creation and health care.

¶"Middle Middles": Aides identified these voters as middle-class moderates of all races who said in interviews that they sought independence and honesty in their leaders. They said they admired that Mr. Bloomberg built his fortune on his own. This group, aides said, included people from all walks of life, and messages sent to them highlighted Mr. Bloomberg's "independent leadership" and his personal biography.

¶"Cultural Liberals": These New Yorkers said in interviews that they considered the financing of arts and social programs to be crucial, and that they understood that the survival of such programs depends upon careful fiscal management. Aides said it was with these voters in mind that they produced commercials and mailings promoting the increase in mammography screenings in public hospitals and the mayor's promise to do "more with less."

Campaign aides said they also grouped homeowners together, with their surveys showing that a black homeowner in southeast Queens has many of the same daily concerns as a white homeowner in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

Mr. Sheekey said it was unlikely that Mr. Bloomberg would rely on the data his campaign compiled to govern during the next four years. But he said he believed that the campaign's approach could affect how others are conducted in the future.

"It certainly lays a path for future candidates to communicate with voters on something other than race- or religion-based formulas," Mr. Sheekey said.

Certainly in the aftermath of last Tuesday's results, in which Mr. Bloomberg beat Fernando Ferrer by 20 percentage points, Democrats have engaged in deep soul searching, questioning whether Mr. Ferrer's traditional Democratic appeal based on ethnicity and class can still win elections in the post-Sept. 11 city.

Mr. Bloomberg's aides said this week that they decided from the outset that such an approach would not work for their candidate - a Republican Jewish billionaire from Boston running against a Hispanic Democrat born and raised in a city whose electoral composition is more than 50 percent minority and more than three-quarters Democratic.

Mr. Sheekey said the idea was to take advantage of a new reality: Even as the Sept. 11 attacks fade from memory, the unity the city showed afterward has remained in a way that provides new opportunities for political strategists.

"After 9/11, New Yorkers unified under a paradigm that was not race-based," Mr. Sheekey said.

And with that understanding, Mr. Schoen said, the Bloomberg campaign was able to address voters in a way that Mr. Ferrer's campaign could not. Its frequent critiques of Mr. Bloomberg as a Republican, and its descriptions of the city as "two New Yorks" separated by class, he said, were not addressing the true concerns of New Yorkers.

"If you are a poor person worried about your job, you're not talking in party terms," Mr. Schoen said. "We were talking responsively to their needs and people weren't going to respond to the old language of class and race and party."

Mr. Ferrer's aides were at a distinct disadvantage; they did not even have money to conduct traditional polls gauging who was ahead in the race. And it would be unfair to deduce that Mr. Bloomberg's campaign message was more compelling than Mr. Ferrer's when Mr. Bloomberg was showing up to 10 commercials for every one from Mr. Ferrer, they said.

"I'm sure they were using some of the best techniques money can buy," said Jef Pollock, the pollster for Mr. Ferrer. "It's kind of hard to pinpoint things that did work in the face of millions of dollars of broadcast advertising."

It is unclear whether another city candidate would ever be able to afford to replicate Mr. Bloomberg's effort. And Matthew Dowd, a top strategist for President Bush, said it was far from certain that a presidential candidate would be able to afford the sort of polling Mr. Bloomberg's campaign undertook on a national scale.

Mr. Sheekey, however, said the same aims could be achieved on a cheaper, if smaller, scale, locally and nationally.

"Could this be replicated on a national basis?" he said. "Absolutely."

Asked whether he was perhaps imagining such an attempt on behalf of Mr. Bloomberg, who has denied having any presidential aspirations, Mr. Sheekey said, "I'll let the pundits speculate."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Driving in Manhattan? You Pay, Under One Idea - New York Times

Friday, November 11, 2005
November 11, 2005
Driving in Manhattan? You Pay, Under One Idea

By SEWELL CHAN
It is an idea that has been successful in London, and is now being whispered in the ears of City Hall officials after months of behind-the-scenes work by the Partnership for New York City, the city's major business association: congestion pricing.

The idea is to charge drivers for entering the most heavily trafficked parts of Manhattan at the busiest times of the day. By creating a financial incentive to carpool or use mass transit, congestion pricing could smooth the flow of traffic, reduce delays, improve air quality and raise the speed of crawling buses.

To be sure, it is far from being a reality, or even a complete proposal - when pressed, the mayor's spokesman said it was not on his second-term agenda. Yet the Partnership's work suggests a plan that, if carried out, could profoundly alter the way New Yorkers and those visiting the city use their cars.

Congestion pricing is the focus of a nine-month study by the Partnership, a group with great influence at City Hall, and participants have provided the first rough outlines of how such a plan might work.

The 840,000 cars that enter Manhattan south of 60th Street on an average weekday could be subject to a $7 charge during peak hours. Vehicles starting and ending their trips within that zone might pay a $4 charge. Several roadways would remain free, like the West Side Highway and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive on the East Side, according to people with knowledge of the study.

Drivers could be required to prepay traffic fees, either online or at street-level vending machines. Video cameras would capture license plates of vehicles in the payment zones, and allow the city to match cars to accounts, people familiar with the study said. Failure to pay would result in a fine. No toll barriers would be involved.

Raising money would not be the main goal - although millions of dollars could be collected and funneled into subways, buses, commuter trains and bridges. The video cameras would be at street intersections, and tolls would not be charged on the East River bridges - a prospect that doomed previous proposals, including one Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg advanced in 2002.

City officials acknowledged that Mr. Bloomberg had always been interested in some type of congestion-pricing model, but had said that he considered tolls on the East River bridges politically daunting. And while officials said some sort of business-district traffic charges could conceivably be workable, they would have to seriously consider what sort of political fight that would bring. They stressed that congestion pricing was a battle Mr. Bloomberg would not wage if it distracted from his other priorities, like education and crime reduction.

"Although we're always open to ideas from the business community, this isn't on the mayor's second-term agenda," said Edward Skyler, a spokesman for the mayor.

Even so, several administration officials have discussed the plan with the partnership, and Michael Primeggia, the deputy commissioner for traffic at the city's Transportation Department, has said publicly that congestion pricing should be considered. The Partnership intends to complete its study by the end of the year and to present it to the administration, which the business group hopes will do its own study.

In London, where congestion pricing began in February 2003 after a year of planning, traffic has been reduced by a third and some bus lines are moving twice as fast. Officials are so satisfied that they intend to nearly double the size of the congestion-pricing zone in 2007. One thing seems certain: New York would not charge nearly as much as the $14 it takes to drive into London's financial district during the day.

"Is there an opportunity to create a congestion-relief zone that would help this global city?" asked Ernest Tollerson, a senior vice president at the Partnership. "This is a city that wants to add tens of thousands of jobs, but we can't continue to build streets and roads. For the long-term growth of the city, we need demand-management tools."

Mr. Tollerson oversees a working group that includes five engineering and construction firms, Parsons Brinckerhoff, STV Group, Washington Group International, Siemens and D M J M Harris; a consulting firm, Booz Allen & Hamilton; and two prominent advocacy groups, Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The team has met about once a month since April, and technical analysts have been going through reams of authoritative traffic data from the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, an intergovernmental body that measures traffic for air-quality and planning purposes.

Andrew H. Darrell, the New York regional director at Environmental Defense, said that 80 percent of the cancer-causing substances inhaled by New York City residents comes from tailpipe emissions. "Most people think of traffic congestion in the same way they think about lousy weather - it's too bad but you can't do much about it," he said. "There is no other tool out there as effective as congestion pricing for cutting traffic congestion in a big city like New York."

In London, he said, congestion pricing led to a 20 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions and a 12 percent cut in emissions of harmful particulates and nitrogen oxides, the main components in smog.

Walter B. Hook, executive director of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, which works to reduce automobile dependence worldwide, said congestion pricing was still a fairly new idea. "For a long time people thought it was political suicide to implement congestion charging," he said. Singapore, Oslo and Riga, the capital of Latvia, have all experimented with charging for driving in town.

The most extensive congestion pricing plan, in London, was pushed by an activist (and populist) mayor, Ken Livingstone, and overseen by a transport commissioner, Robert R. Kiley, who happens to be a former president of the Partnership for New York City and a former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Mr. Kiley has urged other cities to consider the London model.

Under the plan, drivers are charged a daylong flat fee of £8 ($14) to enter the so-called congestion zone, an eight-square-mile area around London's financial district.

Officials ruled out using "smart cards," similar to the E-ZPass toll-payment devices used on many bridges and tunnels on the East Coast, as cumbersome. Instead, 700 video cameras capture multiple images of license plates of cars that drive through the zone between 7 a.m. and 6:30 p.m., except on weekends and holidays. Computers process the images, matching the license plates photographed against a database of drivers who have paid their congestion fees.

Drivers pay in advance, online, over the telephone or at machines at stores across London. Failure to pay by 10 p.m. on the day of the trip results in higher fees or fines up to £150 ($261). Disabled drivers and residents of the congestion zone are exempt, as are cars that have 9 or more seats or run on electricity or natural gas.

The Federal Highway Administration is spending $59 million through 2009 to study congestion pricing. San Francisco is exploring how a plan like London's could be adopted. "The focus would be on where we have the most serious and chronic congestion," said Tilly Chang, deputy director for planning at the San Francisco Country Transportation Authority.

She, too, said the program might rely on easy-to-install cameras rather than transponders, the term for toll-payment devices like E-ZPass or FasTrak, which is used on the Bay Bridge. "The benefit of using cameras is that they can roll out quickly," she said. "You don't need transponders."

There is some precedent locally for congestion pricing. In January 2001, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey authorized higher tolls during peak hours on its Hudson River crossings, including the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels.

Congestion pricing in New York City would probably require approval of the City Council and the State Legislature, and skeptics are already grumbling.

"What's good for London is not necessarily good for New York City," said Councilman David I. Weprin, a Queens Democrat who led opposition to tolls on East River bridges. But he said he would keep an open mind to a Manhattan-centered plan that did not unfairly burden residents of the other boroughs. "I'd have to look at it, but my gut reaction is it would be a nuisance tax," he said.

Carolyn Marshall and Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting for this article.


Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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More Commuters Are Going Against the Flow, and Out of the City - New York Times

Monday, November 07, 2005
The New York Times
November 7, 2005
More Commuters Are Going Against the Flow, and Out of the City
By SAM ROBERTS

Manhattan grows on you, like no place else.

Every weekday, more than 1.3 million people commute to work in Manhattan - nearly doubling the borough's population. And while no other city in the country gains more out-of-town commuters than New York - including those who also come to visit, shop, study and play - a small but expanding proportion of the city's residents are reverse commuting to work in the suburbs.

For the first time, the census, analyzing figures from 2000, has calculated the daytime population of the nation's cities. Combined with estimates from city planners and regional transportation agencies, the numbers compose a moving picture that evokes the novelist E. L. Doctorow's depiction of Sherman's conquering army as "a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations...tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels," except that the commuters collectively advance only so far and reverse direction at the end of every day.

Because New York has so many residents to begin with, though, the daily influx of commuters to all five boroughs from out of town is smaller proportionately than that of many other big cities - a net gain of about 563,000, or 7 percent. Nearly 92 percent of New York's nearly three million workers live here, more than in any other city. In Detroit and San Jose, fewer than half do.

In contrast, commuters swell the daytime population by about 72 percent in Washington, 56 percent in White Plains, 54 percent in Hartford, 41 percent in Boston, 28 percent in Seattle and Denver, and 20 percent in Houston and Dallas. In the resort community of Lake Buena Vista, Fla., home to Walt Disney World, the population swells from 16 permanent residents to more than 30,000 during the day, according to the census. In Atlantic City, it increases by 92 percent.

Most suburban bedroom communities shrink after sunrise. On Long Island, Levittown loses about one-third of its population. Putnam County's falls by one-fourth.

The census suggests that while about 200,000 to 300,000 people leave New York City every day, 800,000 or so others arrive, though urban planners say the influx is understated because only commuters are counted.

"Business visitors, tourists, students - in the context of New York all those are sizable streams of people," said Eric Kober, director of housing, economic and infrastructure planning for the city's Department of City Planning. "The city has 60,000 hotel rooms, and with an average occupancy of 80 percent, that's 40 to 50,000 people right there."

He said the city's daytime population could well be several hundred thousand higher than the census estimates.

The number of people who live in New York and work outside the city is relatively small, but appears to be growing.

In the 1990's, the number of reverse commuters increased by more than 8 percent, or about 20,000 workers, to about 270,000 (or nearly as many as commute to jobs in the city from New Jersey, or Long Island, and more than those who commute from the northern suburbs, including Connecticut). Reverse commuters accounted for 7.8 percent of the city's work force in 1990 and 8.5 percent in 2000, according to the census.

In the Bronx and Queens, about 12 percent of workers have jobs outside the city. About 16 percent of the people who work in Nassau County live in the city, mostly in Queens.

The ranks of reverse commuters range from those who work for companies that were displaced or left Lower Manhattan after 9/11 to immigrants who find jobs in the suburbs because the demand for retail, service and health care workers exceeds the supply.

"Lower-paid jobs in the suburbs increasingly are being taken by people in the city who can't afford to live in the suburbs," said Mr. Kober of the Planning Department.

Rae D. Rosen, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said that while the trend is difficult to quantify, "there are vans that take Korean manicurists to Greenwich, and Chinese cooks and wait staffs to Chinese restaurants in Westchester and Long Island. There are housekeepers and nannies who reverse commute on Metro-North to the northern suburbs."

Also, Ms. Rosen said, many bankers and, in particular, foreigners prefer to live in the city and commute. "The traders don't want to live in the suburbs," she said. "They prefer the 24/7 lifestyle of the city."

The number of outbound commuters has risen so steadily for so long that two of the region's biggest transit systems, Metro-North Railroad and New Jersey Transit, started charging them more this year.

When Metro-North raised its fares in March, it eliminated a discount it had long offered to passengers going against the flow during the morning and evening rush. A ticket from Manhattan to White Plains at 8 a.m. now costs as much as one from White Plains to Manhattan.

The number of people boarding outbound trains at Grand Central Terminal and in the Bronx has more than doubled, to about 12,000 each weekday morning, said Robert C. MacLagger, director of operations planning for Metro-North.

"One of the things we were trying to do was provide mobility for people who live in the Bronx to take good-paying jobs in places like White Plains and up to Greenwich and Stamford," Mr. MacLagger said.

In July, New Jersey Transit reduced the discount on its train and bus tickets for travel during off-peak hours, in part because of the growth of reverse commuting, said Jim Redeker, assistant executive director of the agency.

"What we're finding is a significant reverse flow to New Jersey," Mr. Redeker said. "All of the trains coming out of New York heading down to Trenton are full."

Aside from the disruptions after 9/11, long-term transportation figures appear to confirm the trend.

"There is definitely an increase in reverse commuting," said William Wheeler, director of special project development and planning for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. "It's still a small percentage of total customers but it grows each year."

He said reverse commuting during the morning rush accounts for only about 10 percent of commuters, but has about doubled on the Long Island Rail Road, to 10,000, since the mid-90's. As a result, the authority has increased track capacity for more outbound service between Bronxville and Crestwood in Westchester and will do so between Bellerose and Hicksville on Long Island.

The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority estimates that since 2000, the number of vehicles leaving Manhattan has increased slightly, by one or two percentage points, as a proportion of all vehicles during the morning rush.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey says that while the number of morning rush commuters on PATH trains has declined since 2001, the number of reverse commuters has remained about the same.

Alexis Perrotta, senior policy analyst at the Regional Plan Association, a nonpartisan research group, attributed the trend, in part, to official policy. Some suburban governments engage in "fiscal zoning," she said, encouraging commercial development to generate property tax revenue while discouraging new housing that would require more schools and other costly public services.

Patrick McGeehan contributed reporting for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company


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