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NYC: “Ghost Town”
I’ve been watching and reading, with much dismay, the implosion that is happening in New York City. It has long been one of my favorite cities on this big, blue marble; a beacon of possibility and entrepreneurship and the grit it takes to carve out your own destiny and future. It pains me to see this play out, even more so because it seems like a foretelling of what could befall the rest of our country.
While there have been varied accounts of the situation unfolding in our great financial capital, a colleague’s LinkedIn post last week really hit me right in the feels. This just might be the gloomiest yet most poignant post I’ve read so far, and while the author may be considered controversial by some standards, he does have a knack for spotting trends, he was a full-time resident of NYC, and his take makes a lot of sense. The taxes are high, the cost of living is outrageous, and businesses and residents are disappearing to never return again. How can the city come back from this devastation? Also, I suspect his predictions for NYC will also ring true in other cities like San Francisco and Chicago.
Other folks have also been discussing this very topic: Buck Sexton, also a resident of New York has covered it on his podcast, and Tucker Carlson explains why all Americans should care about what happens to New York City.
When (and how) do we wake up as a country and realize that this pandemic and how it’s being handled (read: manipulated) is killing us economically? If we knowingly plunge ourselves into a deep financial depression, what’s the point?
Published in Business
Can anyone explain to me this weird fact I read: that NY local voting is so low that De Blasio, ie, Wilhelm, was elected with something ridiculous like 11% in favor? Is that even possible? Why don’t they vote?!
We lived in SF when I was a child. My New Yorker dad hated it. Even today he says he never met someone from SF “who didn’t have their head up their as*”. He and my mom live very happily in the Midwest.
And why did they vote for him twice? I commented above that I would be in favor of helping NYC if they showed themselves capable of saving themselves with a little help. But no one can save a city or an individual that does not want to save themselves. So the next move is on NYC.
Yup. Katrina was a natural disaster. Emphasis on natural. Those who put Hurricane DiBlasio in charge don’t get a dime from me.
This is absolutely heartbreaking. I’m so sorry.
I read the Linkedin article, then the comments. Several disagreed with the writer, one calling him one of the “rich.” Another mentioned that he had considered moving to another country when Trump was elected. Those people have learned nothing.
Then again…
NYC showing an appetite for recovery with new eating venues
https://nypost.com/2020/08/16/starrett-lehigh-building-leases-space-for-food-hall/
Hmmm. Will be interesting to see how things progress (or don’t.) I’m rooting for NYC, for what it’s worth.
Actually … 8.5%. Though that’s of all citizens, not voters.
de Blasio is actually pretty widely reviled in NYC, even though it’s an uber-progressive city. He’s had enough time in office that, even on the Left, it’s approaching universal consensus that he’s lazy and incompetent.
As to why the numbers are so low, NYC does off-year mayoral elections (the year after the presidential race), so it takes a special trip to the polls. And most everyone assumes the Democrat is going to win, so many don’t bother voting. Doubly so when it’s someone like de Blasio that no one really loves.
I don’t think most people realize the small apartments, and nearly-non-existent kitchens in so much of manhattan. that is why people eat out. they can’t afford the space to have a kitchen.
kind of colonial, things used to be that way, yes?
I have an office in Lower Manhattan but live across the river on the New Jersey waterfront (you have no idea how much it pains me, a Californian, to type that). From early March until about mid-June I barely set foot back in the city. Then I started going back in once a week, and now I’m in pretty much every day. I’m in a decided minority.
My morning train used to be packed too tight to breathe. Now there are rarely more than a half-dozen people in it. Not in my car, in the entire train.
The floor where I work used to have probably around 200 people on it on any given day. Since returning I’ve never seen more than five, three of whom are in the employ of the building itself.
Despite having been here for half a decade I still don’t particularly carry a torch for the city. The parade of horribles you hear — increasing crime, ridiculous taxes, broken transit, sky-high housing prices (for no square footage), the omnipresence of the homeless and/or severely mentally ill? It’s all true. Were it not for my professional obligations I’d head back out west or return to the south.
But there’s another trend that’s not getting enough attention — and it’s really starting to get under my skin. White-collar New Yorkers — people who were lucky enough to get through this with their health and jobs intact — are beginning to treat this like an extended summer vacation.
Last weekend, I took a local train to my barber’s here in Jersey, which is near a fashionable shopping and dining district. Those trains that are emptied out during the week? Packed to the gills with people looking to have a good time.
I took COVID seriously and still do. But, especially in New York, it’s time to tell everyone the break’s over.
A couple of years ago, I did a corporate event in Minneapolis. It was nice, overall. In the evenings, there were plenty of things to do, and a lot of restaurants where you could sit and eat and watch the crowds flow by. It was busy.
But there were some off-putting signs. A few too many “lurkers” once you got off the main streets. A hair too much building decay in any structure over ten years old. Uber drivers who universally talked about where they were moving to in the near future, without further comment. That sort of thing.
I can think of several other cities around the country that are well on the way to New Yorkism, not that I think of it. Seattle? Yeah, they’re a long weekend away from being a Troma movie. San Diego? Beautiful place, if you’re immune to Hepatitis-A,B,C…Z. San Francisco? They’ve been a no-go zone for me for almost 20 years.
I live in Orlando. Things here are technically awful. Unemployment is still maxed out, since the theme parks are barely open and the convention center and hotels are basically shut down. My industry (conventions) is basically not coming back this year, if ever. But you can still go outside and see people doing things. Yeah, traffic’s lighter, and a lot of smaller businesses are just empty storefronts now, but there’s still life going on, and people are at least trying to be civil.
The underlying problem is that federal elections are considered more important than state and local elections.
Before the New Deal a citizen paid most of his taxes to state and local governments. The first full year of World War II for the United States was 1942 when the war economy started up, so let’s use that as a marker. For 78 years out of 228 years (when our present constitution took effect) most of our taxes have gone to the feds.
So if local governments aren’t considered that important, why vote in those elections? But New York City’s mayor has an inordinate amount of power. For that matter, so does New York’s governor. Yet New Yorkers don’t care.
And it’s the same way in other cities. Remember Washington D.C.’s Marion Barry? He was a convicted felon who did jail time when he was elected for another term.
One way to bring back cities is to take away at least some local governance whenever they go bankrupt. There has been some success in both Detroit and New York City using those tools.
My favorite De Blasio story is when I met a guy who worked for him in infrastructure for homeless. He told me that De Blasio’s office were especially impressed by Paris’ communist (in all but name) mayor Anne Hidalgo’s architectural solution for migrants in Paris, which has been an absolute unmitigated catastrophe. De Blasio wanted to imitate it as a solution for homelessness. it’s like his office had no access to the Internet. I was speechless in front of the guy.
The numbers for Hidalgo’s clown tent were grossly underestimated or else very probably they lied to the public. But the whole area around La Chapelle was dominated by young African men so that thousands of women and residents signed a petition to protest the fact that women in the area were being harassed. The thing has been taken down.
She is a terrible eco-fascist, ferociously anti-car, which hurts small entrepreneurs and commuters obviously. Taxi drivers loathe her. She herself goes out like De Blasio in a motorcade.
Hidalgo is hated by right AND left. There is a feeling that the city is increasingly dirty and dangerous (I have heard grossed out tourists discussing) and yet she is continues to woo this very small contingent of hipsters.
My husband said “She’ll be re-elected.” And I thought he was displaying Old Country Fatalism. So I rushed off to vote her out, as soon as I got Spousal citizenship. The mayoral election was controversially held on the 1st day of Covid lockdown.
Guess what? Re-elected hands down. What is it with these horrible authoritarian incompetent communists destroying our beautiful cities?