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By Steven Rattner
Mr. Rattner, a contributing Opinion writer, served as counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration.
For more than 60 years, my family owned a small paint factory in Long Island City, Queens, in the shadow of the neon Pepsi-Cola sign just across the East River from Manhattan. That factory and the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant are long gone — two of the hundreds of industrial facilities that once existed throughout the city.
What has replaced some of them are gleaming towers of condominiums, many with seven-figure price tags. Trendy restaurants have supplanted blue-collar diners. In a few decades, New York’s industrial base was extinguished, yet today, the city has never been more populous or more prosperous, a winner in the process that the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.”
