Mitchell L. Moss

New York City’s Open Restaurants outdoor dining program began in June 2020. This municipal program has transformed the streets and sidewalks of the city. Today, more than 12,000 cafes, bars, and restaurants use sidewalk and/or parking lane space to serve customers. But, of even greater importance, Open Restaurants has made outdoor dining more accessible to residents, visitors, and small businesses in neighborhoods across New York City's five boroughs.

Open Restaurants has especially fostered the growth of outdoor dining beyond the established restaurant corridors of Manhattan. This report compares New York City’s old Sidewalk Café outdoor dining program with its replacement: Open Restaurants. It highlights how Open Restaurants has led to new outdoor dining opportunities outside Manhattan, in communities that had no prior outside dining, and in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods as well. The findings of this report are striking:

• The four outer boroughs collectively had 30% of the city’s pre-pandemic Sidewalk Cafés.

  They now have 51% of Open Restaurants.

• Communities of color have doubled their share of New York City’s outdoor dining

  establishments under Open Restaurants (41% of Open Restaurants located in Community

  Districts with majority-nonwhite populations, up from 20% of pre-pandemic Sidewalk Cafés).

• Low-income communities have nearly doubled their share of New York City’s outdoor dining establishments under Open Restaurants (31% of Open Restaurants located in Community Districts with a median household income of $60,000 or less, up from 17% of pre-pandemic Sidewalk Cafés).

• The 17 Community Districts that had no outdoor dining under the Sidewalk Café program in June 2020 now have outdoor dining under the Open Restaurants program.

  This remarkable growth in communities across the city would not have been possible

  under New York City’s pre-pandemic Sidewalk Café program. Under that program, cafes, bars, and restaurants seeking outdoor seating had to undergo a lengthy review process and pay steep revocable consent fees, assuming their zoning allowed it. The disproportionate regulatory burden concentrated outdoor dining in a limited number of Manhattan neighborhoods, where more businesses had the organizational and financial resources to obtain a Sidewalk Café license.

  Open Restaurants has also generated considerable opposition, stemming from serious concerns about noise, safety, and sanitation. The debate that has arisen over who and what occupies the sidewalk curb demonstrates the central role public space plays in the lives of New Yorkers. It also emphasizes how critical it is that New York City's municipal government recognize the competing 

  values raised by outdoor dining.
  
  This report recommends that New York City’s municipal government build upon Open

  Restaurants and recognize that greater citywide access to outdoor dining is one of the unanticipated benefits that has emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic. Outdoor dining has helped save jobs in the restaurant industry. It has fostered a new pattern of activity on our streets and sidewalks that has strengthened local communities and their economic vitality. New York City should learn from the experience of the past two years with Open Restaurants as it considers outdoor dining in all neighborhoods as a permanent part of the city’s streetscape. To achieve that goal, this report offers four policy recommendations for permanent outdoor dining:

• Create a streamlined permit application process

• Limit permit fees so small establishments can participate in outdoor dining

• Allow year-round outdoor dining

• Produce more free-to-all public outdoor space by streamlining the Street Seats program

During the past hundred years, the Port Authority region has undergone a dramatic transformation, from an economy based on manufacturing to one tied to advanced business services. This report highlights the way in which services have emerged as the leading exports of the Port Authority region. Today, the movement of goods through the maritime and aviation facilities of the Port Authority plays a vital role in the region’s and nation’s economy. However, the NY-NJ region’s exports are increasingly tied to information-based services.

Moreover, the island of Manhattan, with its concentration of banks, financial service firms, global media and entertainment firms, information technology firms, management consultants, advertising agencies, law firms—as well as medical and educational institutions—is the hub for the services that account for the region’s leading foreign exports.

The face-to-face communication that occurs in office towers, restaurants, and cultural settings is the raw material that is converted into products and services that are then distributed over fiber optic and satellite systems around the world. Of course, the flow of ideas and information depends on the people who move in, through, and out of the city—by foot, bike, scooter, automobile, subway, commuter rail, ferry, bus, helicopter, and airplane. Indeed, the New YorkNew Jersey region has a robust mix of transportation systems, built and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the State of New Jersey, and the City of New York.

More than 400 years ago, the Dutch established a trading post at the tip of Manhattan to obtain the highly valued beaver pelts that were the raw material for the felt hats worn throughout Europe. Today, New York is still exporting high value goods, but they are based on information and ideas, not animal skins. They are produced by thousands of people working in office buildings in the bistate region. In this report, we examine important indicators of the Port Authority’s evolving role in foreign trade:

• a comparison of foreign business exports for the United States as a whole to those exported by the Port Authority’s 18-county region1
• the top 10 export industries in the Port Authority region in 2017
• how the mix of top export industries has changed for the Port Authority region between 2003–2017
• the Port Authority region’s share of US exports by industry in 2017
• the Port Authority region’s share of US export growth by industry over the years 2003– 2017
• a comparison of the Port Authority region to major US cities by number of departing international flights

The analysis of export industries in this report is based upon the 2018 edition of the Brookings Institution’s Export Monitor, a collection of export industry statistics for the years 2003 to 2017. 2 By contrast, the US Census Bureau publishes trade data, reported at the state and metropolitan area levels, on imports and exports of commodities, but not services. 3 The Brookings database is unique in two ways. First, it includes export data for both goods and service industries. 4 This highlights the ongoing shift from a commodities-reliant export economy to one increasingly tied to information and services. Second, the Brookings data is aggregated at the state, metropolitan area, and county levels. This allows the aggregation of data for the 18 counties comprising the Port Authority region.

The proposed legalization of recreational cannabis in the State of New York provides an opportunity to maintain current subway, bus and commuter rail fares—on a temporary basis—for a one year time period. This report analyzes how potential cannabis revenues can be used to maintain current fares, thus relieving the burden on families and workers who depend on public transit for access to work, school, and health care.

Projected annual state tax revenues from the legalization of cannabis exceed the revenue target of $100 million from a proposed fare increase in 2021. Issuing revenue anticipation bonds and allocating cannabis revenues in 2021 to stabilize subway and bus fares would maintain and expand ridership during the COVID 19 pandemic, providing a temporary source of funds to support bus and subway fares. This proposed policy would not address the longterm financial challenges facing the MTA but assure the continued growth in MTA ridership during the coming year.

One important concern around the spread of respiratory infectious diseases has been the contribution of public transportation, a space where people are in close contact with one another and with high-use surfaces. While disease clearly spreads along transportation routes, there is limited evidence about whether public transportation use itself is associated with the overall prevalence of contagious respiratory illnesses at the local level. We examine the extent of the association between public transportation and influenza mortality, a proxy for disease prevalence, using city-level data on influenza and pneumonia mortality and public transit use from 121 large cities in the United States (US) between 2006 and 2015. We find no evidence of a positive relationship between city-level transit ridership and influenza/pneumonia mortality rates, suggesting that population level rates of transit use are not a singularly important factor in the transmission of influenza.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the shutdown of non-essential business transformed mobility in, through and around New York City. This report provides a detailed analysis of the way in which the transportation systems in New York City and the surrounding region were affected by the pandemic and curtailed economic activity through May 31, 2020.

New York is a subway city. Despite the growth of bikes, scooters, for hire cars, and ferries, the city’s subway system is the principal way in which New Yorkers move. More than 5.5 million people ride the subway each weekday.[1] This number is larger than the total population of the nation’s second largest city, Los Angeles, and more than six times the size of San Francisco’s population.

Unlike other mass transit systems in the United States, the city’s subway system operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And in contrast with most mass transit systems in the nation, the cost of a subway ride is the same at any time of day, regardless of distance. The economic health of New York City depends on the capacity of the subway system to safely and reliably carry millions of people. This includes office workers, a quarter million public school students, tourists, and the musicians, writers, actors, dancers, and artists who sustain the cultural vitality of the city.

The centrality of the subways to the life of New York is the very reason why the public is alarmed about the condition of mass transit. The Citizens Budget Commission has systematically analyzed the failure of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to maintain a state of good repair and the need for fundamental reform of the MTA’s capital spending processes.[2, 3] A new plan, “Fast Forward,” has been proposed to improve accessibility, deploy new technologies, update signals, and acquire 21st century subway cars.[4]

Clearly, increased fares and congestion pricing are insufficient to deal with the long-term financial needs of the subway system. This report argues that the subways need a dedicated revenue source with the potential for growth in future decades—one that does not divert funds from other public services, and that has yet to be tapped by the state and local government. The legalization of recreational cannabis offers New York State a unique opportunity to generate a new revenue stream dedicated to mass transit.

1 Introduction to subway ridership. (2018). Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Retrieved from http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/

2 Dague, J. (2015). Sisyphus and subway stations. New York, NY: Citizens Budget Commission. Retrieved from https://cbcny.org/research/sisyphus-and-subway-stations

3 Dague, J. (2018). Getting back on track: Replacing and repairing subway cars will be expensive and take more than a decade. New York, NY: Citizens Budget Commission. Retrieved from https://cbcny.org/research/getting-back-track

4 New York City Transit. (2018). Fast forward: The plan to modernize New York City Transit. New York, NY: Author. Retrieved from https://www.mta.info/sites/default/files/mtaimgs/fast_forward_the_plan_…

New York City has experienced four decades of population and housing growth since the 1970’s fiscal crisis, and needs continued growth to maintain its position as the nation’s leading center of commerce and culture, while generating tax revenue to support public services. Properly planned growth enables the city to provide housing and economic opportunities to a diverse population.

New York City must plan for its future growth while burdened with a legacy of zoning not designed to support the population and housing stock it will need in the next three decades. But at the same time, it benefits from far-sighted rail transit investments mostly undertaken before 1940. This transit legacy is both a vital support for future needed zoning density increases and a challenge in those areas where historic transit investment was inadequate.

Transportation Challenges of Unbalanced Regional Growth addresses how trends in

job creation and housing influence regional transportation needs.

With the New York State Fiscal Year 2019 Executive Budget proposal to include a “value capture” mechanism for financing transit, an obscure and highly technical subject suddenly has generated considerable attention. This report explores the purpose of, and issues created by value capture generally, and by the current proposal. What is “value capture?” What are its uses? Has it ever been used successfully before in New York City?

Much of the favorable attention transit experts give to value capture stems from the Hong Kong model. In Hong Kong, the rail operator, MTR, builds rail lines financed through the profits from development above stations and depots along the route.1 Hong Kong has unique characteristics that facilitate this model, particularly its high density and scarcity of developable land, which make the rail right-of-way development particularly profitable. New York City used a similar strategy to finance the extension of the #7 subway to Hudson Yards in Manhattan.

While value capture has in the past successfully provided new revenue for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s capital projects, the current proposal does not build successfully on past achievements. Rather, it diverts New York City’s largest and most stable tax source in a manner that could affect the City’s fiscal stability and limit the productive ways that the City has used value capture to funnel funding generated by private real estate development to the MTA.

Ridership on the New York City Subway has grown drastically in the last four decades, from 966 million in 1975 to 1.7 billion in 2015; at the Times Square subway station alone, rides increased by 29 million. This explosive growth in usage demonstrates the system’s importance to both the city and region. New York City’s 24-hour subway promotes a dynamic economy, livability, and connectivity giving residents access to economic opportunities and a quality of life that is unparalleled in most world cities.

Growth in subway ridership reflects the changes in New York City. This report addresses key moments in the City's history affecting subway ridership, including the high homicide rate in the 1980s, introduction of the MetroCard, attacks of September 11, 2001, Financial Crisis of 2008, and peak tourism numbers in 2010-2015.

The health and continued growth of the subway system is critical to New York City’s future, and must be maintained and upgraded to reflect New Yorkers’ increasing reliance. Recommended system upgrades are included in this report.

The L train tunnel between Manhattan and Brooklyn will close fully to trains for 18 months in 2019 to repair extensive damage from Superstorm Sandy.  The L has become synonymous with the Brooklyn brand; ridership at Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue station has increased more than thirty percent since 2010.

The NYU Rudin Center addresses the effects of this closure in our newest report, "L Train Closure and Mitigation," written by Mitchell L. Moss, Sarah M. Kaufman, Jorge Hernandez and Sam Levy.

This report analyzes how the L train’s surrounding Brooklyn communities will absorb the economic impact of this tunnel closure: jobs, commutes dining and nightlife will be affected, and recommends mitigation measures.

Download the report [pdf]

Read the Wall Street Journal coverage.

Of the many changes that have reshaped New York City during the past fifteen years, few have been as dramatic and as consequential as the emergence of Downtown Brooklyn as a major center of innovation, economic growth, and cultural development. This report examines the ongoing transformation of Downtown Brooklyn, why and how it has happened, and its implications for the borough and the city.

Although public transit provides access to jobs throughout the New York City region, there are actually substantial inequalities in mobility. By focusing on the neighborhood level, the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation has identified communities that are substantially underserved by the public transportation system. The Rudin Center ranked New York City’s 177 neighborhoods according to the number of jobs accessible from the neighborhoods by transit, within 60 minutes and completed by 9:00 a.m. on a Monday morning. This analysis reveals high variation in levels of transit access across New York affect residents’ employment levels, travel modes and incomes. This report seeks to affect the implementation of new policies and transit services to increase economic opportunity for New Yorkers, and ensure that the transportation system is fully leveraged to connect workers with jobs. These improvements will benefit all New Yorkers’ access to job opportunities and economic mobility.

The general view of New Yorkers, the media, and the civic community has been that the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, while necessary, has come at a major cost to the Port Authority’s bottom line. Findings in a new report by the NYU Rudin Center, with the assistance of Appleseed, tell a different story: The World Trade Center project will ultimately generate enormous economic return for New York and the region, while preserving the Port Authority’s ability to invest in its core transportation assets.

This analysis shows that the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey is poised to recover nearly all – between 97.4 and 98.6 percent – of its anticipated $16.76 billion investment in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, and confirms that the redevelopment of the site has already generated substantial benefits for the New York-New Jersey region.

Pope Francis’ visit to the United States is an historic event that will disrupt life in Philadelphia, Washington D.C., but not in New York City. In Washington D.C., federal government workers are being advised to telecommute. Philadelphia is towing cars and shutting down roads and transit in the event area. For New Yorkers, the Papal visit will limit mobility in some parts of Manhattan, but only for limited time periods. With the nation’s largest subway system and municipal police department, New York is accustomed to large-scale events and high-profile visitors like the Dalai Lama, the President of the United States and foreign leaders coming to the United Nations.

New York City launched Citi Bike, the largest bike share program in the United States, in May 2013. This study examines the first two years of Citi Bike and its role in New York City mobility. Citi Bike’s station connection to public transportation hubs and station density are major factors in the system’s high ridership and use. Seventy-four percent of Citi Bike stations are within a five-minute walk of a subway station entrance, providing a “last mile” solution for transit commuters. The system’s greatest challenges are expanding and diversifying its customer base while also rebalancing the number of bicycles available at high-demand stations. Citi Bike has become an integral part of New York’s transportation culture, even though it serves a limited geographic area. This report addresses those challenges and recommends strategies for the future.

In 2011, the New York State Legislature approved and Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law the New York State Infrastructure Investment Act. The new law authorized five state agencies – the Department of Transportation, the Department of Environmental Conservation, the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, the New York State Thruway Authority, and the New York State Bridge Authority – to manage the delivery of construction projects using a method known in the industry as “Design-Build.”

Design-Build is a form of project delivery in which a public agency or private sector owner enters into a single contract with a single entity (usually a construction firm) that takes full responsibility for both design and construction of the project. The 2011 law also authorized the five agencies to hire firms based on qualifications and innovation, not just the lowest bid.

When used appropriately, Design-Build can effectively reduce the time required to complete a project, reduce the cost of a project, provide clearer accountability for a project, and encourage more innovation in design and construction.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has been a vital force in the physical and economic growth of the New York-New Jersey region. During the past few years, however, public attention has focused on the Port Authority’s spending, management, and political interference in the agency’s operations. In recent weeks, several sources have called for reform, restructuring, or even abolition of the Port Authority.

However, the critical problem facing the Port Authority today is not mismanagement, political abuse, or rivalry between New York and New Jersey. The fundamental challenge is that the business model under which the Authority has operated for the past thirty years is no longer sustainable. For the New York-New Jersey region to grow over the next fifty years, the Port Authority must rethink not only how it manages its business, but also how it defines what that business is.

This update to the “Emergence of the Super-Commuter” report released in February 2012 uses recently released 2010 home-to-work flows data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics OnTheMap tool to examine whether the super-commuting trend has continued to grow between 2009 and 2010, by analyzing 1-year and 8-year growth rates in where workers live. The report finds that while super-commuting growth rates have slowed between 2009 and 2010, the slowdown was primarily due to job market conditions, and super-commuting trends continue to outpace job growth trends in 9 out of the 10 counties profiled in this study. The report also distinguishes between two types of super-commuters: those who live along the combined metropolitan area’s periphery and those who travel less frequently and longer distances to each urban core county. It finds that for most cities, both types of super-commuters have been growing rapidly over the last decade, but these trends vary across cities.

We cannot understand Manhattan in the 21st century by relying on conventional measures of urban activity. Simply put, Manhattan consists of much more than its residential population and daily workforce. This island, measuring just 22.96 square miles, serves approximately 4 million people on a typical weekday, 2.9 million on a weekend day, and a weekday night population of 2.05 million. Manhattan, with a residential population of 1.6 million more than doubles its daytime population as a result of the complex network of tunnels, bridges, railroad lines, subways, commuter rail, ferry systems, bicycle lanes, and pedestrian walkways that link Manhattan to the surrounding counties, cities and towns.

This transportation infrastructure, largely built during the twentieth century, is operated by the City of New York, Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. The infrastructure network generates a constant flow of people who are responsible for Manhattan's emergence as a world capital for finance, media, fashion, and the arts.

The residential population count does not include the 1.6 million commuters who enter Manhattan every weekday, or the hundreds of thousands of visitors who use Manhattan's tourist attractions, hospitals, universities, and nightclubs. This report analyzes the volume of people flowing in and out of Manhattan during a 24-hour period; we provide an upper estimate of the actual number of people in Manhattan during a typical work day.

Manhattan, a global center of  finance, culture, fashion and media, harnesses a workforce of 2 million people. Regionally, Manhattan is the business hub for the New York metropolitan area, with commuters entering the city every morning from the other four boroughs,  suburban counties in New Jersey, the Hudson Valley, western Connecticut, and Long Island, and distant locations, such as eastern Pennsylvania. The workforce of Manhattan is both growing and changing. There is a growing set of high-income, service-related occupations, and an increasing number of workers are residing in the outer boroughs or to the west, across the Hudson River in New Jersey. In fact, Manhattan now has 59,000 “super-commuters” who do not live within the metropolitan region. This report examines key trends in the residential location of Manhattan workers and will also discuss the travel, occupation, and income characteristics of Manhattan workers living in the surrounding metropolitan region. Finally, we explore the strength, resilience and vitality of Manhattan as a global economic and cultural hub in the 21^st century.

This study examines the role of mobile communications in urban transportation systems and analyzes American metropolitan regions best positioned to capitalize on the growth of mobile technologies. This paper identifies three critical factors—data accessibility, mobile network strength, and mobile tech user/developer demographics—and uses data from several public resources in an analysis of major Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs). The authors explore trends and public policy implications for furthering the use of mobile communications in the transportation systems of metropolitan regions.

The rankings revealed that metropolitan regions each have areas of strength and weakness. In fact, no MSA ranked in the top five for each category, suggesting that though several cities were very strong (top five) in two categories (San Jose, San Francisco, Washington DC, San Diego), every MSA has substantial room for improvement.

During the past fifty years, federal disaster policy in the United States has been shaped by an ongoing conflict between proponents who favor federal intervention following a disaster and those who believe disaster response should be the responsibility of state and local governments and charity. This article explores the existing federal disaster policy landscape within the United States with a focus on the Stafford Act, the cultural and political forces that produced it, and how the current system is ill equipped to aid in the response and recovery from major catastrophes. The Stafford Act defines how federal disasters are declared, determines the types of assistance to be provided by the federal government, and establishes cost sharing arrangements among federal, state, and local governments. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) carries out the provisions of the Stafford Act and distributes much of the assistance provided by the Act. With the establishment of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the threat of domestic terrorism, and large-scale natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the limits of the Stafford Act and FEMA have been shown. We look at several areas where the shortcomings of the Stafford Act have emerged and propose directions for reform.

Forget immigration, global warning, Donald Rumsfeld and abortion rights.

The hot issues of today will quickly fade away if the current surge in gasoline prices and home-mortgage rates continues unabated. And all indications are that both the price of gas and the cost of borrowing are moving in one direction only: north.

The attack on the World Trade Center reinforced a process of change in lower Manhattan that had been under way for at least the past fifty years. The public and private responses to the destruction wrought on September 11 have provided the funds, organizational capacity, and public commitment to do what a previous generation of municipal planners tried to accomplish, with only partial success: creating a mixed residential and office community in what was once New York City's dominant financial and business district. Federal aid to rebuild lower Manhattan has been the catalyst for modernizing and expanding its mass transit systems and facilities, providing low-cost financing for converting obsolete office buildings into housing, improving pedestrian movement, investing public funds in parks and cultural institutions, and subsidizing the creation of new public schools. This chapter examines the key public and private organizations that have shaped this redevelopment and the implications for the future of lower Manhattan and for office development in the rest of New York City.

An invisible network of digital technology systems underlies the highly visible networks of roads, waterways, satellites, and power-lines. Increasingly, these systems are becoming the "infrastructure's infrastructure," providing a crucial array of data on network demand, performance, reliability, and security. "Digital Infrastructures" presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the technological systems that envelop these networks. The book balances analyses of specific civil and environmental infrastructures with broader policy and management issues, including the challenges of using IT to manage these critical systems under crises conditions. "Digital Infrastructures" addresses not only the technological dimension but, importantly, how social, organizational and environmental forces affect how IT can be used to manage water, power, transport and telecommunication systems. The book is organized four sections. First, fundamental themes of policy, management, and technology are presented to frame the domain of digital infrastructures. Second, the way in which information technologies are applied in specific infrastructure sectors provides an in-depth assessment of what the advantages and disadvantages have been over time. Third, cross-cutting themes of economics, earth systems engineering, and international sustainability show how various systems perspectives approach some of the barriers to integrating information technology and infrastructure. Finally, the concluding section looks at some of the new directions and challenges being posed by issues such as security. "Digital Infrastructures" is the first integrated treatment of how IT technology is fundamentally affecting how critical infrastructures are managed. It is geared to provide the new infrastructure professional with state of the art concepts, methods, and examples for use in creating public policies, strategic plans, and new systems. It will be an essential book for upper level undergraduate and graduate courses in infrastructure management, critical infrastructure, environmental systems management, and management of IT systems.

This chapter examines the role of digital communications networks during and after the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. Digital networks in New York City played a vital role in all three phases of this catastrophe: initial response, interim restoration, and long-term recovery. Mitchell L Moss and Anthony Townsend conclude that during each of these phases, the digital network infrastructure, while the most fragile of all urban networks, demonstrated remarkable resiliency in serving the citizens of the city and the nation.

Last week, Howard Dean came to Harlem to receive the endorsement of Mr. Gore. Contrary to popular wisdom, Mr. Gore's endorsement is the kiss of death for Dr. Dean.

We should not let the prospect of filling hotel rooms and restaurants overshadow the real benefit of hosting the Republican National Convention one year from now. The true value of the convention is that it will allow the city's leaders to forge a direct relationship with the leaders of the federal government. The benefits of building such a bond over the next year could help this city for years to come, not just during the four days in August and September when the Republican Party comes to town.

Since 1993, when the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, was released into the public domain, the Internet has evolved from an obscure academic and military research network into an international agglomeration of public and private, local and global telecommunications systems. Much of the academic and popular literature has emphasized the distance-shrinking implications and placelessness inherent in these rapidly developing networks. However, the relationship between the physical and political geography of cities and regions and the virtual (or logical) geography of the Internet lacks a strong body of empirical evidence upon which to base such speculation.

This chapter presents the results of a series of studies conducted from June 1996 to August 1998. Our research suggests there is a metropolitan dominance of Internet development by a handful of cities and regions. We identity and describe an emerging structure of "virtual" hubs and pathways which are linking a set of major cities in the United States, suggesting that there is a complex emerging inter-urban communications network that goes far beyond Castells' (1989) informational mode of development.

Public policies for urban development have traditionally emphasized investment in physical infrastructure, the development of large-scale commercial facilities, the construction of new housing, and the renewal of existing neighborhoods. Most efforts to revitalize central cities by building new facilities for visitors have focused on suburban commuters and tourists. At the same time, many housing initiatives in central cities have concentrated on low-income communities because outlying suburban areas have attracted traditional middle-income households.

This article argues that emerging demographic and cultural trends - combined with changes in the structure of business organizations and technological advances - provide new opportunities for cities to retain and attract middle-class households. Using gay and lesbian populations as an example, it focuses on the role that nontraditional households can play in urban redevelopment. In light of the rise of nontraditional households and the growth of self-employment and small businesses, cities should adopt policies that make them attractive places in which to live and work.