In the wake of this post on how the Wuhan coronavirus, widespread antifa/#BlackLivesMatter looting, and the general rise in crime and disorder under the mayorship of Bill de Blasio have sent citizens feeling, comes a new piece saying that not only is New York City dead, it’s dead forever:
I love NYC. When I first moved to NYC it was a dream come true. Every corner was like a theater production happening right in front of me. So much personality, so many stories.
Every subculture I loved was in NYC. I could play chess all day and night. I could go to comedy clubs. I could start any type of business. I could meet people. I had family, friends, opportunities. No matter what happened to me, NYC was a net I could fall back on and bounce back up.
Now it’s completely dead. “But NYC always always bounces back.” No. Not this time. “But NYC is the center of the financial universe. Opportunities will flourish here again.” Not this time.
“NYC has experienced worse”. No it hasn’t.
A Facebook group formed a few weeks ago that was for people who were planning a move and wanted others to talk to and ask advice from. Within two or three days it had about 10,000 members.
Every day I see more and more posts, “I’ve been in NYC forever but I guess this time I have to say goodbye.”
He says people move to New York City for three reasons: business, culture and food, and all are dead.
Midtown Manhattan, the center of business in NYC, is empty. Even though people can go back to work, famous office buildings like the Time Life skyscraper is still 90% empty. Businesses realized that they don’t need their employees at the office.
In fact, they realize they are even more productive without everyone back to the office. The Time Life building can handle 8,000 workers. Now it maybe has 500 workers back.
Snip.
Another friend of mine works at a major investment bank as a managing director. Before the pandemic he was at the office every day, sometimes working from 6am to 10pm.
Now he lives in Phoenix, Arizona. “As of June,” he told me, “I had never even been to Phoenix.” And then he moved there. He does all his meetings on Zoom.
I was talking to a book editor who has been out of the city since early March. “We’ve been all working fine. I’m not sure why we would need to go back to the office.”
One friend of mine, Derek Halpern, was convinced he’d stay. He put up a Facebook post the other day saying he might be changing his mind. Derek wrote:
“In the last week:
- I watched a homeless person lose his mind and start attacking random pedestrians. Including spitting on, throwing stuff at, and swatting.
- Ive seen several single parents with a child asking for money for food. And then, when someone gave them food, tossed the food right back at them.
- I watched a man yell racist slurs at every single race of people while charging / then stopping before going too far.
And worse.
I’ve been living in New York City for about 10 years. It has definitely gotten worse and there’s no end in sight.
My favorite park is Madison Square Park. About a month ago a 19 year old girl was shot and killed across the street.
I don’t think I have an answer but I do think it’s clear: it’s time to move out of NYC.
I’m not the only one who feels this way, either. In my building alone, the rent has plummeted almost 30 percent – more people are moving away than ever before.
Snip.
People say, “NYC has been through worse” or “NYC has always come back.”
No and no.
First, when has NYC been through worse?
Even in the 1970s, and through the 80s, when NYC was going bankrupt, and even when it was the crime capital of the US or close to it, it was still the capital of the business world (meaning: it was the primary place young people would go to build wealth and find opportunity), it was culturally on top of its game – home to artists, theater, media, advertising, publishing, and it was probably the food capital of the US.
NYC has never been locked down for five months. Not in any pandemic, war, financial crisis, never. In the middle of the polio epidemic, when little kids (including my mother) were going paralyzed or dying (my mother ended up with a bad leg), NYC didn’t go through this.
This is not to say what should have been done or should not have been done. That part is over. Now we have to deal with what IS.
In early March, many people (not me), left NYC when they felt it would provide safety from the virus and they no longer needed to go to work and all the restaurants were closed. People figured, “I’ll get out for a month or two and then come back.”
They are all still gone.
And then in June, during rioting and looting a second wave of NYC-ers (this time me) left. I have kids. Nothing was wrong with the protests but I was a little nervous when I saw videos of rioters after curfew trying to break into my building.
Many people left temporarily but there were also people leaving permanently. Friends of mine moved to Nashville, Miami, Austin, Denver, Salt Lake City, Austin, Dallas, etc.
As for culture, author James Altucher owns a standup comedy club in New York City.
We have no idea when we will open. Nobody has any idea. And the longer we close, the less chance we will ever reopen profitably.
Broadway is closed until at least the Spring. Lincoln Center is closed. All the museums are closed.
Forget about the tens of thousands of jobs lost in these cultural centers. Forget even about the millions of dollars of tourist and tourist-generated revenues lost by the closing of these centers.
There are thousands of performers, producers, artists, and the entire ecosystem of art, theater, production, curation, that surrounds these cultural centers. People who have worked all of their lives for the right to be able to perform even once on Broadway whose lives and careers have been put on hold.
I get it. There was a pandemic.
But the question now is: what happens next? And, given the uncertainty (since there is no known answer), and given the fact that people, cities, economies, loathe uncertainty, we simply don’t know the answer and that’s a bad thing for New York City.
Right now, Broadway is closed “at least until early 2021.”
As for food:
My favorite restaurant is closed for good. Ok, let’s go to my second favorite. Closed for good. Third favorite, closed for good.
I thought the PPP was supposed to help. No? What about emergency relief? No. Stimulus checks? Unemployment? No and no. Ok, my fourth favorite, or what about that place I always ordered delivery from? No and no.
Around Late May I took walks and saw that many places were boarded up. Ok, I thought, because the protesting was leading to looting and the restaurants were protecting themselves. They’ll be ok.
Looking closer I’d see the signs. For Lease. For Rent. For whatever.
Before the pandemic, the average restaurant had only 16 days of cash on hand. Some had more (McDonalds), and some had less (the local mom-and-pop Greek diner).
Yelp estimates that 60% of restaurants around the United States have closed.
My guess is more than 60% will be closed in New York City but who knows.
I think this 60% figure is inaccurate, at least for the nation as a whole, a telephone-game misunderstanding of 60% of Wuhan coronavirus restaurant closures being permanent and only 40% temporary. But it says nothing about restaurants that stayed open during the crisis (if only for takeout). But it wouldn’t shock me if that 60% closure figure is accurate for New York City (and even higher in Manhattan).
He also talks about college students staying away and the collapse of the real estate market.
His conclusion:
OK, OK, BUT NYC ALWAYS COMES BACK.
Yes it does. I lived three blocks from Ground Zero on 9/11. Downtown, where I lived, was destroyed, but it came roaring back within two years. Such sadness and hardship and then quickly that area became the most attractive area in New York.
And in 2008/2009, much suffering during the Great Recession, again much hardship, but things came roaring back.
But…this time it’s different. You’re never supposed to say that but this time it’s true. If you believe this time is no different, that NYC is resilient, etc I hope you’re right.
I don’t benefit from saying any of this. I love NYC. I was born there. I’ve lived there forever. I STILL live there. I love everything about NYC. I want 2019 back.
But this time it’s different.
One reason: bandwidth.
In 2008, average bandwidth speeds were 3 megabits per second. That’s not enough for a Zoom meeting with reliable video quality. Now, it’s over 20 megabits per second. That’s more than enough for high quality video.
There’s a before and after. BEFORE: no remote work. AFTER: everyone can remote work.
Everyone has spent the past five months adapting to a new lifestyle. Nobody wants to fly across the country for a two hour meeting when you can do it just as well on Zoom. I can go see “live comedy” on Zoom. I can take classes from the best teachers in the world for almost free online as opposed to paying $70,000 a year for a limited number of teachers who may or may not be good.
Everyone has choices now. You can live in the music capital of Nashville, you can live in the “next Silicon Valley” of Austin. You can live in your hometown in the middle of wherever. And you can be just as productive, make the same salary, have higher quality of life with a cheaper cost to live.
Snip.
And then people will ask, “wait a second – I was paying over 16% in state and city taxes and these other states and cities have little to no taxes? And I don’t have to deal with all the other headaches of NYC?”
Because there are headaches in NYC. Lots of them. It’s just we sweep them under the table because so much else has been good there.
NYC has a $9 billion deficit. A billion more than the Mayor thought they were going to have. How does a city pay back its debts? The main way is aid from the state. But the state deficit just went bonkers. Then is taxes. But if 900,000 estimated jobs are lost in NYC and tens of thousands of businesses, then that means less taxes unless taxes are raised.
Does the author overstate the case? Slightly. His pieces focuses on upper and upper middle class reasons to live in New York, but the port of New York/New Jersey is the third largest in the country, and neither the port nor its many blue collar jobs are going away anytime soon. And someday Broadway and other in-person cultural events will come back, even if much demolished. But it is indeed very possible that New York City has already peaked, and could lose 1-3 million of its population in the near-term.
And all this to still achieve the highest coronavirus death rate in the country. Thanks, Andrew Cuomo!
Democratic office-holder incompetence, Chinese coronavirus, high taxes and social justice have finally struck New York City a more devastating blow than Osama bin Laden ever could.
