Economic reactions to 9/11 still mixed

Posted on by

Ten years after the September 11 attacks, some local and national economies are thriving, while others continue to struggle. 

In New York, lower Manhattan has been completely revitalized: dozens of new restaurants, shops, and 12 new hotels have cropped up in the neighborhood over the past decade. Tourists stream to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

More New Yorkers are flocking to lower Manhattan, too. In fact, the neighborhood’s population increased by 97% over the past 10 years, largely due to a city effort to attract residents from beyond the financial services industry. Post-9/11 tax breaks also fueled recovery. “Wall Street is back,” said Brian Goldstein, director of operations of New York’s division of the Small Business Administration. On Tuesday, Mayor Bloomberg called Lower Manhattan’s revival one of the “greatest comeback stories in American history.”

However, not all Manhattan neighborhoods have fared so well. Chinatown’s garment district still struggles to stay afloat. Following the 9/11 attacks, land lines in the neighborhood were down for months, essentially isolating local businesses. And, unlike the Financial District, Chinatown was not initially eligible for post-9/11 economic aid. Many local businesses closed their doors, and the ones that survived suffered. Today, not even 50 garment shops remain in Chinatown, compared to 246 shops in 2000.

On the national level, measuring post-9/11 economic recovery depends on who you talk to. For some private firms, the decade after the attacks saw a huge boom in business. The U.S. government began to rely heavily on private defense contractors for intelligence and security operations. “Worldwide, the ratio of contractors to US soldiers in uniform is about one-to-one,” said Pratap Chatterjee, a fellow at the Centre for American Progress. Perhaps unsurprisingly, airport scanner manufacturers have also enjoyed a boost in business since 9/11.

The September 11 attacks also triggered, if indirectly, unexpected increases in some small business around the country. Still, many American business owners have yet to see any long-term economic recovery in the decade since 9/11.
“Maybe in New York, they can see a phoenix rising out of the ashes,” said Tony Brunello, a political science professor at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla. “But to people around here, it’s a world of fear with no evidence of the recovery.” 

This recent video from the BBC provides a useful visual look at how the U.S. economy has changed in the past decade: