Who says banksters don't create jobs? Look at all those branches they're opening

No, it's not exactly fine dining, but the 3 Star Coffee Shop adds more to the neighborhood than the Citibank branch planned to take its place later this year here at the corner of Columbus Avenue and 86th Street, one of four new banks scheduled to open in just the chunk of Manhattan's Upper West Side between Broadway and Columbus Avenue from 67th to 88th Street. Critics say bank branches "deaden" neighborhoods.

"City Councilwoman Gale Brewer said the upcoming bank openings will bring the total number of banks in her district, which runs from West 54th to West 96th Street, to almost 70.

"'Who needs 70 banks?' Brewer said."

-- from Leslie Albrecht's DNAinfo.com report on the UWS bank glut

by Ken

Was it all that long ago (answer: I guess it was) that NYC banks were cutting back drastically on their retail presence, closing branches like mad and even trying, in one especially famous instance, to limit access to live tellers to the "swells" among its customers? I just find it curious now that the banks are opening branches like mad, branches that are almost always less useful to their neighborhood than the businesses they displace -- and this at a time when banks have mastered the art of driving customers crazy with new, previously unimagined fees, and when more and more of us are doing more and more of our banking online.

It's gotten so bad that on Manhattan's Upper West Side the locals have set the wheels in motion for legal relief from the proliferation of banks. Proposed zoning revisions have passed the local community board and the city Planning Commission, and now go to the City Council. As Leslie Albrecht reported earlier this week for DNAinfo.com:

Four new banks are slated to open soon on the Upper West Side, bringing the number in the neighborhood to a whopping 70 branches, which has renewed calls for proposed zoning laws meant to keep the financial outposts from "deadening" the area. . . .

The bank openings come as the City Council prepares to vote this summer on proposed zoning laws that would prohibit banks from having storefronts wider than 25 feet on parts of Broadway, Amsterdam and Columbus avenues.

"It's crazy," said Anthony Kim, owner of The Wine Place at 2406 Broadway, which will close in early June to make way for a new 4,000 square-foot TD Bank slated to open in early 2013. "They're making a second Wall Street. Maybe they think there's a lot of money around here."

Of course the grim reality is that there is a lot of money around there. Presumably the banks that are bankrolling all these branches think that more storefronts in the area can snag enough of that money to justify what must be fairly monstrous expenditures. UWS rents ain't cheap, to put it mildly.

I can't help feeling, though, that for many of those banks this glut of branches is more of a loss leader. Yes, they want new customers, and presumably hoity-toity ones, at least hoity-toitier than some of the deadbeats they're saddled with, but I can't help thinking they're not rigorously running computer forecasts to justify the investment in those new branches, that they've figured out how to use money from other sources -- from us deadbeat customers paying those mounting zillions of dollars in fees, from government bankster bailouts -- to enable them to troll for these hoped-for hoity-toits.

It's not as if West Siders have been going around telling one another, "You know, what we really need in the hood is more banks." Here's Leslie Albrecht again:

The city's Planning Department created the new zoning area at the request of Upper West Side leaders who said oversized banks were gobbling up too much of their once lively streetscape.

City planners researched the neighborhood and found a flood of large banks, especially on Broadway. "Many close their offices on the weekends and on weekday late afternoons, deadening street vitality and reducing foot traffic, and potentially jeopardizing these successful retail corridors," city planners wrote in the zoning proposal.

The New York Bankers Association has battled the zoning proposal, arguing that it would "have a negative impact on the neighborhood’s vitality, and deprive the city of much needed jobs and tax revenue," in a letter that the NYBA submitted to Planning Commission chair Amanda Burden.

Of course both the banksters and the real-estate interests -- fronted by groups like the Real Estate Board of New York and the Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District -- have been fighting the zoning changes. They claim on the one hand that the restrictions on new banks aren't needed because banks aren't looking to gobble up larger and larger chunks of real estate, and on the other hand that legal restrictions -- on development they claim isn't going to happen anyway -- is a recipe for urban disaster.

The chair of Community Board 7, Mark Diller, has noticed. "The suggestion was that banks seeking to occupy more and more space in our district was a thing of the past, [but] the plans of these [four] banks has proved that to be untrue, and it's proved once again the prescience and the appropriateness of the zoning proposal." Board member Mel Wymore, noting the news of the four new banks, said, "It's a shame we didn't manage to pass it sooner."

He pointed to the corner of West 64th Street and Broadway as a prime example of how too-big banks have an outsized affect the neighborhood's vitality, he said. The corner once housed a large Chase Bank, but then the branch closed and was replaced by Bar Boulud.

"It really transformed that entire corner from something that you walked by and didn't notice to something that you're drawn to," Wymore said. "It's never empty. It went from essentially a ghost corner to one of the most thriving locations in the Lincoln Center area."

(For the record, only three of the four planned new banks fall within the proposed new zoning area.)

On a positive note, especially in view of this week's disappointing job-growth numbers, the new banks -- like all the others of those nearly 70 UWS banks -- will presumably be employing people.

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