East Coast ports are heading into a traffic jam.
+ a new Williamsburg aesthetician, and New York's failed housing plans.
If you’ve been reading Feed Me for a while, then you know about my Anonymous Transit Expert. Back in June, after he wrote about Gov. Kathy Hochul’s congestion pricing plan, you demanded more coverage from him. He’s contributed to dozens of Feed Me letters as an expert on: transit, F1, the crises of Gen-Z masculinity, menswear, returning to the office, and tipping.
There are important topics that I think should be covered in Feed Me’s voice, but by experts — and the scope of those topics might be expanding.
The Anonymous Transit Expert has to stay anonymous because he has a Real Job in a Real Office, but you’ll be seeing more of him around here.
East Coast ports are heading into a traffic jam.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, there’s a strike shutting down East and Gulf Coast ports that is entering day three. As reported by The New York Times this morning, the economic stakes are huge: “The ports account for about 60 percent of container-based U.S. trade, handling nearly $600 billion worth of imports.”
Harold Daggett, the leader of the International Longshoremen's Association, is facing criticism for his relationship with Trump and his $700k salary as the port strike continues. On top of that, Daggett is calling the strike right after a storm in the Southeast when supplies are badly needed, so people are suffering as a result.
Balancing this against record profits for shippers and port operators and very real nerves from the prospect of automation creates a big, tangled mess.
Anyway, handing it over to our Anonymous Transit Reporter:
“I suspect we’re old enough to remember the WGA Strike that snarled Hollywood productions and filled my office with catchy pro-labor chants (by way of being neighbors with a Media Megacorp) last summer. While the collective bargaining was wall-to-wall covered thanks to Hollywood being, inherently, a visible industry, its effects on Americans whose paychecks weren’t tied to media businesses were relatively narrow. Maybe you couldn’t watch the latest Emily in Paris right on time, or your late night television was humorless without two dozen writers, but for most, commerce and life went on uninterrupted. Movies, like any widget, are delivered to you via a complicated supply chain. And while not strictly a factory, Disney’s Marvel franchising is pretty damn close - generate your idea with safe IP, get your storyboard/topical jokes primed, film it, slap $150mm of effects on there and fire it at theaters strapped to a missile. When a piece of the supply chain breaks, you feel no barely any releases in summer 2023 in real time, and you feel the release delays still being caught up this year long after.
Tuesday morning, the contract between the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), the union representing workers at major seaports, and the U.S. Maritime Alliance (USMX), the trade association representing shippers and port operators, ran out. Longshoremen, who today start at a wage of $20/hr and top out at $44/hr, are striking for a 77% wage increase over 6 years and protections from automation. Port operators, like Hollywood studios last year, now face a logistical pileup if the situation isn’t resolved with haste.
Maybe it’s because we’re 33 days from choosing a President, or maybe it’s because hitting someone’s lizard brain with an icepick makes them click on content sludge, but there’s been a lot of alarmism about East Coast ports and what chaos might befall us if the Taft-Hartley Act (a phrase not typed since AP US) isn’t dusted off to get longshoremen moving containers again. Completely unrelated fact: did you know America makes 90% of its toilet paper domestically, and it never touches a boat? The rest is imported from Canada, famously home to a lot of trees and connected to America by land. Please do not do the toilet paper thing again.
If you’ve ever seen a traffic jam, you know it takes longer to unravel than it did to form. What East Coast ports are heading into is a traffic jam. The potential effects of the stoppage shouldn’t be understated, but you deserve to know up front that New York is not going to collapse in on itself and median rents will continue to rise. The first thing that’s going to happen is a bunch of hanging out, like what was on display during the height of COVID at Long Beach and Los Angeles, except this time instead of clothes and PS5’s, the containers are full of perishable exotic fruits and Mercedes Benzes and precision industrial equipment. That group of container ships you fly over on approach at JFK? Bigger. We’re not going to run out of imported oil or its derivatives. Garbage barges will float off as usual. Prescriptions will be filled as usual. New York has a 60 day supply of medical equipment, should its unloading be interrupted. But if you’re buying an imported car, or manufacturing equipment or components, or European semiconductors, or anything perishable from Europe or South/Central America, if the strike is measured in weeks it’ll be felt. And the longer it goes on, the exponentially longer it takes to unravel. I’d hate to be the guy insuring banana shipments right now.
Whether we want to or not, we may well find out how essential these 50-some-thousand longshoremen are to the smooth function of our economic way of life. And whenever a supply chain wrinkle like this bubbles up, I wonder what commodities we’ll deem important enough in my lifetime to make resilient against an externality like this. I remember that we used to be fine making all our IV bags in Puerto Rico (Rube Goldberg Tax Code, anyone?) until a single hurricane gummed up supplies for the better part of year. I remember that until the pandemic, only the most China-spooked had a real problem with cutting-edge computer architectures being fabricated in Asia. Just two days ago, the last furnace in the UK capable of making steel from iron ore shut off forever. “Inventory” was a dirty word, capital demanded manufacturing take place at the lowest cost, and everything got delivered just in time. What can the unflappable US consumer stand to lose? What can they stand to pay more for in the name of supply resilience? Buckle up, and we’ll find out together.”
Shut up and build.
On Tuesday, I wrote about Bridgewater’s new Manhattan and absurd hotel prices in New England this fall. Someone in the comment section wrote, “Just gonna leave this here” linking to a piece about Kamala Harris’s promise about affordable housing, and how that did not work in New York City.
Agin, passing the mic to Anonymous Transit Reporter who had some words for the WSJ editorial board:
“Shut up and build. Shut up. And build. Physical, livable housing units, not an app that turns every passive income bro with a 3.2% line of credit from 2019 into a neurotic “landlord”. No matter how many podcasts Brian Chesky goes on, believing the assertion that Airbnb has been at any point in the 2020’s about renting spare bedrooms from real people means I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Ask New York’s own tourism marketing arm about hotel inventory. They’ll tell you that from 2019 to 2023 my fair city was on course to add 12,100 rooms, or 10% expansion, and - politics aside - a mere 2% factoring rooms taken off-market by participation in the City’s asylum-seeker housing programs. The City’s Housing Supply Report reads like a tombstone. Permits down year on year. 210k units added from 2019 to 2023, which sounds impressive if you pretend it isn't a 6.5% expansion in a town with a rental vacancy rate of 1.4%. Assume every single one of the 20k Airbnb rentals immediately snapped into housing supply the second New York passed its law (they didn’t, filter StreetEasy for furnished rentals and behold, but pretend they did). These units would represent an instant 15% reduction in hotel inventory, and an increase of….. 0.6% in housing inventory. It’s taking a stone out of a shot glass and throwing it into a bathtub, then being smug when the water level doesn’t visibly rise.
Should we be surprised that we can’t build our way out of housing and hotel hell when we can’t even get bus shelters put up without a Community Board grousing about the Neighborhood Charm™ that would be irreparably damaged? Maybe the Mayor is in the hotel industry’s pocket, and yes, removing short term rentals from the smaller “hotel” pool and putting them in the oceanic “housing supply” pool impacted the price of hotels more than the price of housing. Answer the question “Why is the Wall Street Journal editorial board acting incredulous about 100 level economics?” on your own. I hope to see some of its members, housing champions that they are and with some of whom I suspect I might share a Community Board, shouting “YES” at every new development and transit project that comes near them. New York will be short a half million homes by the end of the decade. Supply has to come from somewhere, and right now should be all hands on deck. If that means sinking some short term rental firms along the way, then damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” - Anonymous Transit Reporter
If we had a water cooler, I’d talk to you about:
“Whole Foods is discontinuing the Berry Chantilly cake that we all know and love.”
Wedding planners told The Cut that you should skip a wedding party, a band, and the day-after brunch.
New York’s it-girl Sofie Pavitt has a new Williamsburg studio and some fresh cash. True Beauty Ventures (whose portfolio includes Crown Affair, Ami Colé and Vacation) has committed an undisclosed amount of seed funding to Pavitt’s skincare brand Sofie Pavitt Face. “There are currently seven aestheticians at Pavitt’s skincare studio, and it sees 350 people a month. About 85% of the them are dealing with problematic skin, according to Pavitt, who counts Zendaya and Lorde among her famous clients.” In addition to her Chinatown studio, there is now a new location across the bridge in Williamsburg. And look at her cute merch:
Why can’t everyone just go to a bar, put their phone away, and hit on people? I am so confused.
Ozempic influencers are giving “MLM vibes.”
Now I’m about to go on a walk and listen to this.
See you tomorrow!
Kyla Scanlon has an interesting take on the port strikes and their greater influence on AI and automation. I would recommend a read if you want to dig deeper: https://substack.com/inbox/post/149702652.
Also, toilet paper is produced domestically, so stop fucking panic buying and buy a bidet.
I love Anonymous Transit Reporter’s takes. My day job is for a manufacturer and we import some components from Europe…our lumber suppliers import some of the wood we use from equatorial west Africa as well. next few weeks should be fun. But solidarity with the longshoremen.