Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show, today is my colleague, Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show,

today is my colleague, Stephen Malanga. He's City Journal's senior editor and a senior fellow at the

Manhattan Institute. He writes about urban economies, business communities, public policy, and much

more. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Cranes, New York Times, New York Post,

in addition, of course, to CJ. Today, we're going to be discussing his recent City Journal

work on urban retail fight and other matters, which, you know, has been generating a lot of

attention. So, Steve, as always, thanks for coming on 10 blocks.

Oh, yeah. Thanks for having me.

New York City has long been considered one of the world's greatest places for shopping.

Indeed, tourists come here to shop. Yet many of its local communities and neighborhoods have

lacked basic amenities like supermarkets or drugstores. During

the 70s and 80s, crime and disorder drove thousands of businesses from the city. That left

residents of many of these places with no immediate access to basic retailing. Arlem, for instance,

didn't have a single large chain supermarket for more than two decades.

This created what some people have called retail deserts for local residents.

But then that changed a lot, right, in the 90s and 2000s.

A lot of these retail deserts were kind of eliminated.

Yeah, essentially what happened was that, first of all, the decline in crime and a reestablishment

of social order in many neighborhood communities. And again, when people talk about New York

as a retailing mecca, they're typically talking about Madison Avenue or Fifth Avenue.

Now, what we're talking about, for instance, is the other boroughs.

...