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By Doug64
#15114030
I remember a commercial I saw years ago, with a man getting excited about an empty field in the middle of nowhere (and therefore cheap) because it was up the road from an airfield and had telephone lines along the road, and therefore had everything he needed to build and run a business. It was premature at the time ... but maybe not now. Altucher is right about Before Bandwidth and After Bandwidth, but we’ve been coasting—infrastructure is already set up for the old way of doing things, changing costs money and no one is quite sure if it’ll work, we’re comfortable with the way things are ... until suddenly, we aren’t.

I came across a column self-posted by a former and maybe future resident of New York City, who is afraid the world he has lived in for most of his life may never be coming back:

NYC IS DEAD FOREVER. HERE'S WHY

    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." Every single day I see those posts. I've been screenshotting them for my scrapbook.

    Three of the most important reasons to move to NYC:

    - business opportunities

    - culture

    - food


    and, of course, friends. But if everything I say below is even 1/10 of what I think then there won't be as many opportunities to make friends. =

    A) BUSINESS

    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.

    "What do you mean?" a friend of mine said to me when I told him 'Midtown should be called 'Ghost Town', "I'm in my office right now!"

    "What are you doing there?"

    "Packing up," he said and laughed, "I'm shutting it down." He works in the entertainment business.

    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.

      So...

      It’s not goodbye yet. But a life long New Yorker is thinkng about it."

    I pick his post out but I could've picked one of dozens of others.

    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.

    Now a third wave of people are leaving. But they might be too late. Prices are down 30-50% on both rentals and sales no matter what real estate people tell you. And rentals soaring in the second and third-tier cities.

    I'm temporarily, although maybe permanently, in South Florida now. I also got my place sight unseen.

    Robyn was looking at listings around Miami and then she saw an area we had never been to before. We found three houses we liked.

    She called the real estate agent. Place #1. Just rented that morning 50% higher than the asking price. Place #2. Also rented (New Yorkers - "they came from New York for three hours, saw the place, got it, went back to pack."). Place #3. "Available."

    "We'll take it!" The first time we physically saw it was when we flew down and moved in.

    "This is temporary, right?" I confirmed with Robyn. But...I don't know. I'm starting to like the sun a little bit. I mean, when it's behind the shades. And when I am in air conditioning.

    But let's move on for a second:

    Summary: Businesses are remote and they aren't returning to the office. And it's a death spiral: the longer offices remain empty, the longer they will remain empty.

    In 2005, a hedge fund manager was visiting my office and said, "In Manhattan you practically trip over opportunities in the street."

    Now the streets are empty.

    B) CULTURE:

    I co-own a comedy club, Standup NY, on 78th and Broadway. I'm very very proud of the club and grateful to my fellow owners Dani Zoldan and Gabe Waldman and our manager Jon Boreamayo. It's a great club. It's been around since 1986 and before that it was a theater.

    One time, Henry Winkler stopped by to come on my podcast. He was the one who told me it had been a theater.

    He said, "I grew up two doors down from here and used to perform in here as a kid. Then I went out to LA to be the Fonz and now I'm back here, full circle, to be on your podcast. This place has history." Things like that happen in NYC.

    In the past year, Jim Gaffigan, Jerry Seinfeld, Tracy Morgan, and many others have been on the stage.

    It's only one step to get on the stage. Jim Gaffigan fell flat on his face while he was walking up the steps. The next day, on Seth Myers late night show, Jim said, "I failed at the one thing you're supposed to do - I couldn't stand up!"

    I love the club. Before the pandemic I would perform there throughout the week in addition to many other clubs around the city and in the past few months, clubs in: Chicago, Denver, San Jose, LA, Cincinnati, all over the Netherlands, and other places.

    I miss it.

    We had a show in May. An outdoor show. Everyone social distanced. But we were shut down by the police. I guess we were superspreading humor during a very serious time.

    The club is doing something fun: they are doing shows outside in the Park. This is a great idea.

    In a time like this, businesses need to give to the community, not complain and not take.

    That said, 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" and then there are supposed to be a series of "rolling dates" by which it will reopen.

    But is that true? We simply don't know. And what does that mean? And will it have to be only 25% capacity? Broadway shows can't survive with that! And will performers, writers, producers, investors, lenders, stagehands, landlords, etc wait a year?

    Same for the museums, Lincoln Center, and the thousand other cultural reasons millions come to New York City every year.

    The hot dog stands outside of Lincoln Center? Finished.

    C) 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.

    Someone said to me, "Well, people will want to come in now and start their own restaurants! There is less competition."

    I don't think you understand how restaurants work.

    Restaurants want other restaurants nearby. That's why there's one street in Manhattan (46th St between 8th and 9th) called Restaurant Row. It's all restaurants. That's why there's another street called "Little India" and another one called "Koreatown".

    Restaurants happen in clusters and then people say, "Let's go out to eat" and even if they don't know where they want to eat they go to the area where all the restaurants are.

    If the restaurants are no longer clustered, fewer people go out to eat (they are on the fence about where so they elect to stay home). Restaurants breed more restaurants.

    And again, what happens to all the employees who work at these restaurants? They are gone. They left New York City. Where did they go? I know a lot of people who went to Maine, Vermont, Tennessee, upstate, Indiana, etc - back to live with their parents or live with friends or live cheaper. They are gone and gone for good.

    And what person wakes up today and says, "I can't wait to set up a pizza place in the location where 100,000 other pizza places just closed down." People are going to wait awhile and see. They want to make sure the virus is gone, or there's a vaccine, or there's a profitable business model.

    Or...even worse.

    D) COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE

    If building owners and landlords lose their prime tenants (the store fronts on the bottom floor, the offices on the middle floors, the well-to-do on the top floors, etc) then they go out of business.

    And what happens when they go out of business?

    Nothing actually. And that's the bad news.

    People who would have rented or bought say, "Hmmm, everyone is saying NYC is heading back to the 1970s, so even though prices might be 50% lower than they were a year ago, I think I will wait a bit more. Better safe than sorry!"

    And then with everyone waiting... prices go down. So people see prices go down and they say, "Good thing I waited. But what happens if I wait even more!" And they wait and then prices go down more.

    This is called a deflationary spiral. People wait. Prices go down. Nobody really wins. Because the landlords or owners go broke. Less money gets spent on the city. Nobody moves in so there is no motion in the markets. And people already owning in the area and can afford to hang on, have to wait longer for a return of restaurants, services, etc that they were used to.

    Well, will prices go down low enough everyone buys?

    Answer: Maybe. Maybe not. Some people can afford to hang on but not afford to sell. So they wait. Other people will go bankrupt and there will be litigation, which creates other problems for real estate in the area. And the big borrowers and lenders may need a bailout of some sort or face mass bankruptcy. Who knows what will happen?

    E) COLLEGES

    There are almost 600,000 college students spread out through NYC. From Columbia to NYC to Baruch, Fordham, St. Johns, etc.

    Will they require remote learning? Will kids be on campus? It turns out: a little bit of both. Some colleges are waiting a semester to decide, some are half and half, some are optional.

    But we know this - there is uncertainty and there is hybrid. I don't know of any college fully coming back right away.

    That's ok, you might say, so in a semester or two it might be fine.

    Not so fast. Let's say just 100,000 of those 600,000 don't return to school and decide not to rent an apartment in New York City. That's a lot of apartments that will go empty.

    That's a lot of landlords who will not be able to pay their own bills. Many bought those student apartments as a way to make a living. So now it ripples back to the landlords, to the support staff, to the banks, to the professors, etc.

    In other words, we don't know. But it's going to be a lot worse before it's better.

    F) 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.

    No alt text provided for this image


    The difference: bandwidth got faster. And that's basically it. People have left New York City and have moved completely into virtual worlds. The Time Life building doesn't need to fill up again. Wall Street can now stretch across every street instead of just being one building in Manhattan.

    We are officially AB: "After Bandwidth". And for the entire history of NYC (the world) until now we were BB: Before Bandwidth.

    Remote learning, remote meetings, remote offices, remote performance, remote everything.

    That's what is different.

    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.

    G) And what would make you come back?

    There won't be business opportunities for years. Businesses move on. People move on. It will be cheaper for businesses to function more remotely and bandwidth is only getting faster.

    Wait for events and conferences and even meetings and maybe even office spaces to start happening in virtual realities once everyone is spread out from midtown Manhattan to all over the country.

    The quality of restaurants will start to go up in all the second and then third tier cities as talent and skill flow to the places that can quickly make use of them.

    Ditto for cultural events.

    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.

    Next is tolls from the tunnels and bridges. But fewer people commuting to work. Well how about the city-owned colleges? Fewer people are returning to college. Well how about property taxes? More people defaulting on their properties.

    What reason will people have to go back to NYC?

    I love my life in NYC. I have friends all over NY. People I've known for decades. I could go out of my apartment and cross the street and there was my comedy club and I can go up on stage and perform. I could go a few minutes by Uber and meet with anyone or go play ping pong or go to a movie or go on a podcast and people traveling through could come on my podcast.

    I can go out at night to my favorite restaurants and then see my favorite performers perform. I can go to the park and play chess, see friends. I could take advantage of all this wonderful city has to offer.

    No more.
By Doug64
#15114324
And it looks like Altucher isn’t the only prophet of doom.

When Half Of NYC’s Tax Base Leaves And Never Comes Back

    The separateness in New York, and by extension much of the nation curled around it from America’s eastern edge, stands out. There are the hyper-wealthy and there are the multi-generational poor. They depend on each other, but with COVID who needs who more has changed.

    It’s easy to stress how far apart the rich and the poor live, even though the mansions of the Upper West Side are less than a mile from the crack dealers uptown. The rich don’t ride public transportation, they don’t send their kids to public schools, they shop and dine in very different places with private security to ensure everything stays far enough apart to keep it all together.

    But that misses the dependencies which until now have simply been a given in the ecosystem. The traditional view has been the rich need the poor to exploit as cheap labor—textbook economic inequality. But with COVID as the spark, the ticking bomb of economic inequality may soon go off in America’s greatest city. Things are changing and New York, and by extension America, needs to ask itself what it wants to be when it grows up.

    It’s snapshot simple. The wealthy and the companies they work for pay most of the taxes. The poor consume most of the taxes through social programs. COVID is driving the wealthy and their offices out of the city. No one will be left to pay for the poor, who are stuck here, and the city will collapse in the transition. A classic failed state scenario.

    New York City is home to 118 billionaires, more than any other American city. New York City is also home to nearly one million millionaires, more than any other city in the world. Among those millionaires some 8,865 are classified as “high net worth,” with more than $30 million each.

    They pay the taxes. The top one percent of NYC taxpayers pay nearly 50 percent of all personal income taxes collected in New York. Personal income tax in the New York area accounts for 59 percent of all revenues. Property taxes add in more than a billion dollars a year in revenue, about half of that generated by office space.

    Now for how the other half lives. Below those wealthy people in every sense of the word the city has the largest homeless population of any American metropolis, which includes 114,000 children. The number of New Yorkers living below the poverty line is larger than the population of Philadelphia, and would be the country’s 7th largest city. More than 400,000 New Yorkers reside in public housing. Another 235,000 receive rent assistance.

    That all costs a lot of money. The New York City Housing Authority needs $24 billion over the next decade just for vital repairs. That’s on top of a yearly standard operating cost approaching four billion dollars. A lot of the money used to come from Washington before a multibillion-dollar decline in federal Section 9 funds. So today there is a shortfall and repairs, including lead removal, are being put off. NYC also has a $34 billion budget for public schools, many of which function as distribution points for child food aid, medical care, day care, and a range of social services.

    The budget for a city as complex as New York is a mess of federal, state, and local funding sources. It can be sliced and diced many ways, but the one that matters is the starkest: the people and companies who pay for New York’s poor are leaving even as the city is already facing a $7.4 billion tax revenue hit from the initial effects of the coronavirus. The money is there; New York’s wealthiest individuals have increased their net worth by $44.9 billion during the pandemic. It’s just not here.

    New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo has seen a bit of the iceberg in the distance. He recently took to MSNBC to beg the city’s wealthy, who fled the coronavirus outbreak, to return. Cuomo said he was extremely worried about New York City if too many of the well-heeled taxpayers who fled COVID decide there is no need to move back. “They are in their Hamptons homes, or Hudson Valley or Connecticut. I talk to them literally every day. I say. ‘When are you coming back? I’ll buy you a drink. I’ll cook. But they’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking, if I stay there, they pay a lower income tax because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge. So, that would be a bad place if we had to go there.”

    Included in the surcharge are not only NYC’s notoriously high taxes. The recent repeal of the federal allowance for state and local tax deductions (SALT) costs New York’s high earners some $15 billion in additional federal taxes annually.

    “They don’t want to come back to the city,” Partnership for NYC President Kathryn Wylde warned. “It’s hard to move a company… but it’s much easier for individuals to move,” she said, noting that most offices plan to allow remote work indefinitely. “It’s a big concern that we’re going to lose more of our tax base then we’ve already lost.”

    While overall only five percent of residents left as of May, in the city’s very wealthiest blocks residential population decreased by 40 percent or more. The higher-earning a neighborhood is, the more likely it is to have emptied out. Even the amount of trash collected in wealthy neighborhoods has dropped, a tell-tale sign no one is home. A real estate agent told me she estimates about a third of the apartments even in my mid-range 300 unit building are empty. The ones for sale or rent attract few customers. She says it’s worse than post-9/11 because at least then the mood was “How do we get NYC back on its feet?” instead of now, when we just stand over the body and tsk tsk through our masks.

    Enough New Yorkers are running toward the exits that it has shaken up the greater area’s housing market. Another real estate agent describes the frantic bidding in the nearby New Jersey suburbs as a “blood sport.” “We are seeing 20 offers on houses. We are seeing things going 30 percent over the asking price. It’s kind of insane.”

    Fewer than one-tenth of Manhattan office workers came back to the workplace a month after New York gave businesses the green light to return to the buildings they ran from in March. Having had several months to notice what not paying Manhattan office rents might do for their bottom line, large companies are leaving. Conde Nast, the publishing company and majority client in the signature new World Trade Center, is moving out. Even the iconic paper The Daily News (which published the famous headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead” when New York collapsed in 1975 without a federal bailout) closed its physical newsroom to go virtual. Despite the folksy image of New York as a paradise of Mom and Pop restaurants and quaint shops, about 50 percent of those who pay most of the taxes work for large firms.

    Progressive pin-up Mayor De Blasio has lost touch with his city. After years of failing to address economic inequality by simply throwing free money to the poor and limiting the ability of the police to protect them, and us, from rising crime, his COVID focus has been on shutting down schools and converting 139 luxury hotels to filthy homeless shelters. Alongside AOC, he has called for higher taxes on fewer people and demanded more federal funds. As for the wealthy who have paid for his failed social justice experiments to date, he says “We don’t make decisions based on a wealthy few. Some may be fair-weathered friends, but they will be replaced by others.”

    What others? The concentration of major corporations once pulled talent to the city from across the globe; if you wanted to work for JP Morgan on Wall Street, you had to live here. That’s why NYC has skyscrapers; a lot of people once needed to live and especially work in the same place. Not any more. Technology and work-at-home changes have eliminated geography.

    For the super wealthy, New York once topped the global list of desirable places to live based on four factors: wealth, investment, lifestyle and future. The first meant a desire to live among other wealthy people (we know where that’s headed), investment returns on real estate (not looking great, if you can even find a buyer), lifestyle (now destroyed with bars, restaurants, shopping, museums, and theaters closed indefinitely, coupled with rising crime) and…

    The future. New York pre-COVID had the highest projected GDP growth of any city. Now we’re left with the question if COVID continues to hollow out the city, who will be left to pay for New York? As one commentator said, NYC risks leading America into becoming “Brazil with Nukes,” a future of constant political and social chaos, with a ruling class content to wall itself off from the greater society’s problems.
#15114331
I love everything about NYC. I want 2019 back.


That is the real problem of NY, these idiots think its Covid that is killing the city....
Nope it is the failed Leadership of a leftist Mayor, who was bent on reversing all the things that really turned NY around.
Things started by Rudy, continued by Bloomberg. Under those mayors, NY grew safer, businesses thrived, Schools improved, streets clean.
When I moved from Ukraine to NY in 1988, it was a true shit show. Trains were covered in garbage and graffiti, Drug addicts, prostitutes were on many street corners. Crime was high, streets were dirty. It was a true renaissance, but then the liberal leftists took power....
By Doug64
#15114337
@Oxymoron There’s this, too:

    Included in the surcharge are not only NYC’s notoriously high taxes. The recent repeal of the federal allowance for state and local tax deductions (SALT) costs New York’s high earners some $15 billion in additional federal taxes annually.

Now that the rich and upper-middle classes in NYC are paying their full share of of those “notoriously high taxes” instead of passing a large chunk of the bill to the rest of us, it’s not looking like such a good deal.
By Rich
#15114357
Has SALT gone completely or is it just capped?
By Doug64
#15114363
Rich wrote:Has SALT gone completely or is it just capped?

It’s capped at $10,000.
By Doug64
#15114372
@Unthinking Majority

The figures in the two columns I posted aren’t hyperbole. And I imagine that the cities where all the rich and middle-class people leaving NYC moved to are happy to have them. When remote working is a real option, so is shopping for those places that are the cheapest to live while still providing the quality of life you want.
#15114418
Unthinking Majority wrote:If NYC is dead forever then so is every other major city in the world. In think it's hyperbole.

Democrat-run cities are in trouble. Macy's and Bloomingdale's are leaving Chicago for example. I imagine a lot of other high end shops will too.
#15114448
Even though I've lived here for a few years now, I'm not actually in love with New York as a place. I think it's profoundly overrated.

That said, the only people saying it is "dead forever" because of Covid-19 are country club dorks with second homes in Connecticut or the Hamptons. If they were to piss off and never come back, maybe New York actually would become the "greatest city in the world". :lol:
By ness31
#15114458
Bandwidth will never replace face to face interaction. And working from home really isn’t as productive as going into the office.

I hope NYC comes back. I’ve not tried the pizza yet :)
By Doug64
#15114465
Heisenberg wrote:Even though I've lived here for a few years now, I'm not actually in love with New York as a place. I think it's profoundly overrated.

That said, the only people saying it is "dead forever" because of Covid-19 are country club dorks with second homes in Connecticut or the Hamptons. If they were to piss off and never come back, maybe New York actually would become the "greatest city in the world". :lol:

You might want to take a look at what the columnists say the emigration is doing the NYC’s tax base.
User avatar
By Chad
#15114482
From: Doug64
New York "city has the largest homeless population of any American metropolis, which includes 114,000 children. The number of New Yorkers living below the poverty line is larger than the population of Philadelphia, and would be the country’s 7th largest city. More than 400,000 New Yorkers reside in public housing. Another 235,000 receive rent assistance."

I'll bet that NYC comes back better than ever once the Police are allowed to stop and frisk any and all residents of NYC including "The Newest New Yorkers" This may be an opportunity to buy into NYC at a lower cost than former decades and it is definitely a good time to get into the political system and straighten out all of the give away programs that the Democrats are responsible for. When I remember the old saying Do not throw your pearls to the swine it reminds me of Pork Barrel Pelosi and her squad of green piglets that are going to eat all of the green tax payer dollars that they can get from all of America if they are not eliminated from America's political arenas. Although Cuomo...AKA ...Killer Cuomo banned effective treatment of the Fauci/Wuhan-WHO flu resulting in possibly 26,000 deaths or murders by him attempting to practice medicine with Political Intentions, many New York residents still love him. It is an old Name and New York loves it's heritage. The pizza from New York can be bought just about anywhere nowadays but in NY with a cold beer on a cold day it does taste the best. Hope it comes back without sanctuary cities and HUD Ghettos during President Trump's second term. Never vote for Antifa Loving, BLM Supporting, Police Defunding, Leftist, Communist Democrats this Century.
#15114567
Doug64 wrote:You might want to take a look at what the columnists say the emigration is doing the NYC’s tax base.

People have been fretting about the "tax base leaving" since at least the 1970s.

"NYC is dead forever" is a lot like "a second civil war is imminent". It's mostly a weird fantasy for the far-right to jerk itself off to.
#15114615
Current state of New York city:


The pattern in New York City used to be to elect a Republican to clamp down on crime and create a budget surplus, then a Democrat to spend it. But with everyone who doesn't like how things are handled now moving out, clamping down on crime (or having police at all) being racist and the mainstreaming of TDS, this probably won't happen. The Democrats in charge of the place will keep looking for scapegoats and paying themselves and those who are left there will support it.
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