Last summer, Deepak Shrivastava moved back to New York from Los Angeles to start Sunrise AI, a startup designed to use artificial intelligence to provide fairer and more accurate credit assessments for people who have traditionally been excluded from raising money from banks and investors. If successful, city officials hope, he will be the one of hundreds of AI companies to call New York home.

At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a company called Kelvin used its first major venture capital infusion to staff up to 34 people as it moves to blanket radiators with its energy efficient Cozy devices. Green economy companies like this are crucial to Mayor Eric Adams’ istration’s vision of the next stage for the city’s economy.

But for the next year or two, most of the job growth in the city will come from nonprofits like Self Help, a service provider whose staff of 1,500 aides deliver home care in the city and some nearby suburbs.

“Boomers are aging, and they want to stay in their homes,” said Chief Operating Officer Russell Lusak.

New York City has recovered all or almost all of the 949,000 jobs it lost in the pandemic shutdown, depending whether you are using the seasonally adjusted employment data from the city or the state. But now the question is how fast the city’s economy will add to its 4.7 million job base and whether it will be able to create the kind of high-paying jobs it did in the boom years before the pandemic. 

The Independent Budget Office predicts New York City will add 88,000 jobs next year. The Adams istration forecasts 77,000. Meanwhile, the city comptroller’s forecast is a much more pessimistic 27,000.

“I don’t know that we see large centers of job creation,” said Deputy Comptroller sco Brindisi. “Professional and business services and information all will be affected as the national economy slows.”

In any scenario, a large gap between job growth in the nation and in New York will continue. Although the Adams istration over the last two months has been heralding the recovery of jobs lost in the pandemic in speeches and social media posts, the country recovered all the jobs lost in the pandemic much earlier — in July 2022. 

If the mayor and IBO are right about next year’s growth, the city will exceed pre-pandemic employment by only 2% at the end of 2024 while the country will be at 4%. If the comptroller is correct and the city gains only 27,000 jobs, the difference between the city’s job recovery and the nation’s will be larger.

The gains this year came because Wall Street held its own, tourism rebounded and construction increased.

But the biggest story was the health care sector, which added 80,000 jobs — representing 90% of all the growth in private sector jobs, according to the comptroller’s report. Home health care was the largest component of that, with 38,000 new positions which has been a boon for people needing the care and for many new arrivals looking to the workforce.

“We recruit Spanish and Chinese speakers,” said Lusak. “For many it is their first time being employed.”

But even with a raise in January to $18.55 an hour for aides working in New York City, home care is among the poorest paying jobs in the city.

“There will be jobs but because they pay so little, the poverty numbers or economic hardship in the city is not likely to go down much,” said Debipriya Chatterjee, a senior economist at the Community Service Society.

Health care jobs, and especially in home care, are technically classified in the “private sector” but most are funded by government programs, especially Medicaid. One reason the comptroller’s forecast is much lower than the istration’s or IBO’s is that it sees the end of COVID-era Medicaid expansion and budget pressures curtailing growth in the sector. 

Another reason is that the comptroller thinks tourism-related jobs have expanded as much as they can while the istration and IBO see increases in 2024.

The Adams istration knows it cannot build a post-COVID economy on health care alone.

“We are focused on three long-term sectors with high-paying jobs — tech, life sciences and the green economy,” said Andrew Kimball, president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation.

Tech has been crucial to both the city’s robust growth prior to the pandemic and to its recovery from the shutdown. Using an approach that combines data on tech jobs that are scattered throughout the official sector-by-sector statistics, a city comptroller analysis shows tech jobs reaching about 220,000 by the end of 2023, more than Wall Street. While lagging Wall Street in pay, the average salary of $126,000 is just about double the average wage for all occupations.

There has been a pullback as tech giants like Meta, Facebook and Amazon have trimmed jobs in New York. More local layoffs were announced this month, with 750 cuts looming at the audio company Spotify and another 225 at the online crafts retailer Etsy.

Artificial intelligence will power a new round of growth, Kimball argues, citing a study that the New York area already boasts 40,000 people with AI or related skills to attract companies like Sunrise AI.

“We can and should be the center of AI,” said Shrivastava. “When it comes to talent, New York is the place to be.”

The total space available for life sciences, combining offices and labs, has hit 3 million square feet and the city expects to reach 10 million square feet in the next decade, in part based on plans for a third building in the Alexandria Center near NYU Langone in Manhattan, a half million square foot project and a transformation of Hunter College’s Brookdale Campus into a 1.5-million square foot educational and private lab center, both nearby.

The biggest bet is on the green economy, which EDC estimates s for $25 billion of the city’s gross domestic product, a figure it sees tripling even in inflation-adjusted dollars in the next 15 years to $90 billion.

“The city, state and federal requirements for dealing with climate change are unprecedented,” Kimball said. “We see enormous demand spinning out from our universities.”

Kelvin is one of those companies, launched when founder Marshall Cox tried to devise something to deal with the overly hot steam radiator in his Columbia University dorm room. His solution became a product that blankets the radiator and uses a sensor and fan to keep a room at a specified temperature while cutting the energy use of a building by 25% to 40%.

Formally set up in 2012, the company spent the next several years working to have regulators endorse the product as an energy saving device, which finally happened in 2019. Now, the company has installed more than 16,000 devices across the city and launched a new product to replace window air conditioners with a similar profile heat pump that provides efficient cooling and heating, further reducing energy use.

The company is growing by 300% a year, says Matthew Isaacs, vice-president of business development, and funnels work to hundreds of contractors who install the product.

Kimball says EDC will release a study early next year with a specific estimate of how many green economy jobs can be added in the city. In the meantime, companies like Kelvin are confident it will be a big number.

“We at Kelvin have a path to get older buildings to a fossil free future,” Isaacs says. “Maybe it won’t be like finance, but it will be a large and serious job sector in New York City.”