[Rancid]

Any links?

There are many articles saying different things, but generally, agree that NYC will recover and do better than most other places

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... f=3loXqR2L

This of course, is bad news for affordability, but apparently the market can still bare it.

I don't know why anyone doubted NYC anyway. That's a wonderful city. I've visited numerous times, and have family, as well as friends that live there. That said, i actually still like Chicago better. Then again, I lived in Chicago so i'm biased.

Chicago is hustle and bustle like NYC, but the people are just so much nicer and courteous. If someone bumps into you Michigan/state/wabash/whatever, they'll say "oh, excuse me". In NYC they'll say "HEY I'M WALKING HERE!!"

[Doug64]

There are many articles saying different things, but generally, agree that NYC will recover and do better than most other places

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... f=3loXqR2L

This of course, is bad news for affordability, but apparently the market can still bare it.

That article had a lot of "maybe's" in it, perhaps a certain amount of whistling past the graveyard, and not a lot of actual facts. For how New York is actually doing (though more the state than the city):

New York is slower to recover economically as COVID restrictions loosen across the nation

Flattening job and unemployment trends coupled with rising consumer costs are likely to lengthen the term of New York's economic recovery, which is on a slower pace than parts of the rest of the country, according to an Albany-based think tank.

In April 2020, New York had 1.9 million fewer private-sector jobs than it did the same month the previous year, which came after the state became the center of the coronavirus pandemic in March, the analysis from the Empire Center for Public Policy showed.

For the next five months, the state's job market showed signs of recovery before hitting a lull. As of February of this year, the state still had about one million fewer jobs than it did in February 2020, the analysis from the Empire Center for Public Policy showed.

But E.J. McMahon, the fiscally conservative think tank's founder and senior fellow, said the problem may be worse when compared to the rest of the country.

“It's hard to look at what's happened in New York and not conclude that there's some aspect of our policy that has helped make it worse,” McMahon said. “The states in the Southeast and the South are more likely to return to something closer to the status quo – pre-2020 – than New York.”

Unemployment rate remains high in NY

Preliminary figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate New York has the second-highest unemployment rate in the country (8.9%), after the state of Hawaii (9.2%), and just ahead of Connecticut and California (8.5%).

By comparison, the states of South Dakota, Utah and Nebraska have the lowest unemployment rates in the country at 2.9%, 3.0% and 3.1%, respectively.

McMahon said that while New York and Hawaii have had to confront tourism declines and cuts to the service industry during the pandemic, the industry trends in states like Florida and Texas are far more favorable than in the Northeast.

According to the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity, the Sunshine State lost approximately 1.3 million jobs from February to April 2020 and recovered at least 735,500 since.

And while the national unemployment rate held at 6% in February, Florida’s unemployment rate reached 4.7%. The state’s unemployment rate last approached 5% at the end of 2015.

McMahon said unemployment trends across states appear tied to the severity of government-mandated restrictions. However, regions like the New York City metropolitan area, which employed a large number of workers in the service industry alongside white collar workers, may see a permanent loss of employment due to remote work.

“The combination of the emptying out of the central business district of New York City, combined with tourism – because travel and tourism in the last quarter century emerged as a much bigger part of the New York City economy – haven’t come back,” McMahon said. "Basically it’s like the worst of both worlds.”

Consumer prices rise as state tries to recover

While state unemployment continues to trend toward a new market equilibrium, McMahon said the changes in purchasing power will leave a far longer-lasting mark in the economy of New York.

“There isn't going to be any getting back to normal.” McMahon said. “We're not going to return at any time to something matching the purchasing and living and patterns and economic cycle of 2019.”

McMahon argues the changes to the consumer price index — that is, the average change in prices over time that consumer pay for a basket of goods and services — increased the cost of living in New York as a result of the pandemic.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall CPI from February 2020 to February 2021, increased by 1.7% across all categories. However, the CPI for food increased by 3.6% over the 12-month period. And the CPI for piped natural gas, tobacco and smoking products, and physician services increased by 6.7%, 7% and 5.1%, respectively.

Rising consumer prices tend to hint at inflation, McMahon said. But it may be too early to tell where the economy is headed.

“Right now inflation in general is still low, but there's a lot of worry that it's going to shoot up, so all of these things will have an influence, obviously, on our recovery and are sources of concern,” McMahon said.

GDP falls in New York, nationally

An analysis of real Gross Domestic Product by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated that while total real GDP fell by 3.5% in 2020, New York’s real GDP decreased by nearly 6%.

The bureau reported the accommodation and food services; arts, entertainment and recreation; and healthcare and social assistance industries led the decrease in GDP nationally.

“Accommodation and food services contributed to the decreases (in real GDP) in all 50 states and the District of Columbia,” the bureau reported. “This industry was also the leading contributor to the decreases in 38 states and the District of Columbia, including New York, the fourth-slowest growing state.”

Outside of the New York City, the New York State Department of Labor said the metro regions with the highest unemployment rate in February in New York were:

• Buffalo-Niagara Falls (8%), Watertown-Fort Drum (7.9%) and Utica-Rome (7.8%) metro areas.
• Non-metro counties saw unemployment rise from 5.6% in February 2020 to 7.3% in February.
• Unemployment rates in Nassau and Suffolk (6.7%), and Orange, Westchester and Rockland counties (6.8%) nearly doubled from February 2020 to February 2021.

New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said the construction industry in New York is the industry farthest along its recovery after regaining three quarters of lost jobs. On the other hand, the educational, government and financial activities industries continue to lose jobs, according to DiNapoli.

[Rancid]

That article had a lot of "maybe's" in it, perhaps a certain amount of whistling past the graveyard, and not a lot of actual facts. For how New York is actually doing (though more the state than the city):

Of course, as it hasn't happened yet. No one can be 100% sure.

Equally so, the "NYC is going to die" articles were also full of maybes.

[SpecialOlympian]

Breaking news: NYC also suffering economic effects of pandemic.

[late]

NYC has been around for centuries. It's had more ups and downs than a roller coaster.

It'll bounce back, it'll be different, but that's in the nature of things.

Which I said earlier in the thread. I have a nephew living there, and we're just waiting for him to say it's back enough to be worth a visit.

[Doug64]

Equally so, the "NYC is going to die" articles were also full of maybes.

The articles saying that NYC is in trouble are extrapolations based on the current facts and trends on the ground--an "if this goes on" assessment. That's quite different from "the trends won't continue," that requires an explanation for why.

[jimjam]

Is NYC dead forever?

What is "dead"?
What is "forever"?
Things change, that doesn't mean they are dead.

Is America dead forever now that it is great again ( ) and one half of the country hates the other half and we get to read about the day's latest mass shooting with our morning coffee? Mass shootings are, after all, nothing more than free speech according to the now bankrupt NRA and the Republican party.

I will grant this, however, I was born in NYC and lived there for 26 way cool years. Where else could you see Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker perform in a small café … etc. ad infinitum. Today I would not even visit NYC. It's way over populated and expensive. It's no fun anymore ….. I had the good years and didn't know it at the time. It is convenient and dumb for "conservative" hate mongers to blame it on "liberals". Wanna play the no win blame game? I'll blame it on greed and the same population bomb that will someday render the human race "dead forever".
Here are some NYC pics I took a long time ago as I roamed the streets:

Prostitute West 42nd street

Gourmet foods, Greenwich Village

Discussing the rules, West Village

Home sweet home, Wall Street

[SpecialOlympian]

The articles saying that NYC is in trouble are extrapolations based on the current facts and trends on the ground--an "if this goes on" assessment. That's quite different from "the trends won't continue," that requires an explanation for why.

Why don't we require an explanation for why trends will continue? Why are we just assuming this is the new normal?

Why are we:

1) Extrapolating from current trends in what is an abnormally depressed economy due to COVID and

2) Assuming NYC is more fucked on average than other places, or just simply considering NYC in vacuum

[jimjam]

Sure and That is why the lefty cunts are running from all the Democratic shithole's to Red States.

Some brilliant and incisive thinking here …………

BTW, here's today's random killing in Fat Donald's Great America:

A gunman walked into the manager’s office of a Stop & Shop grocery store on Long Island on Tuesday and opened fire, killing one person and wounding two others, the police said.

Y'all better go out and buy up a few machine guns before the lefty cunts use daily random killings as an excuse to remove your 2nd amendment rights.

[Doug64]

The New York Post has some suggestions for the next NYC mayor:

Safety, comfort: How NYC’s next mayor can lure back commuters who left

Thanks to COVID, most New Yorkers are no longer captive to a five-day-a-week commute. How does the next mayor lure people back without choking the city on traffic?

The pandemic altered Goth­amites’ transportation habits on a scale not seen since the subway opened in 1904, or since the Triborough Bridge opened in 1936 and the city entered the ­automobile age.

Thirteen months into the disruption, subway ridership is just one-third of “normal”; commuter-rail ridership is down by three-fourths. People want to avoid enclosed transit spaces, but even car-based bridge and tunnel traffic is still down by 15 percent.

The only form of organized transit to return to pre-pandemic levels? Citibike. Last December, ridership was 13 percent above the pre-pandemic December. East River bicycle crossings increased by 21 percent last year.

Less activity didn’t make roads safer. With more room for drivers to speed, New York saw 243 traffic deaths last year, a 10.5 percent increase over 2019. Drivers were more dangerous to themselves, with a 76 percent increase in driver, passenger and motorcycle deaths.

Improving safety, too, will have to be part of the transit-restoration agenda. It won’t happen by encouraging people to drive or hail cars: Before the pandemic, three-fourths of people came into Manhattan via mass transit, not in a car.

So the next mayor has to get people back on the subways, but he or she can’t do it without convincing people that transit is safe. A worldwide survey done by Sam Schwartz Engineering showed no statistical correlation between growing (masked) ridership and COVID-19 cases.

Vaccines, too, make people more confident.

In the meantime, mayoral candidates can lead by example, taking subways and buses all over the five boroughs. It wouldn’t hurt for some mayoral candidate to take a spouse or a friend on commuter rail out to Long Island or Westchester for a dinner out — to remind suburbanites we’re here.

Long-term, the mayoral candidates should impress upon Sen. Chuck Schumer that new, federal funding for transit construction projects shouldn’t go toward Gov. Cuomo’s pet projects, like a new “Empire Station Complex” on the West Side that requires large-scale demolition of a functional neighborhood.

Rather, money should go ­to digitizing subway signals, to provide more frequent, cheaper service. Even when the pandemic has faded, people aren’t going to want to pack onto subway cars when they don’t have to.

The city needs more bus-only ­express routes, like 14th Street, to relieve pressure on the subways. And people who don’t feel safe on the subway shouldn’t feel unsafe cycling: The city should step up its build-out of protected bike lanes.

Pedal-assist e-bikes help older people and people who aren’t in the greatest of shape to get around by bike, but they don’t belong with slower bike traffic. Wider bike lanes can make room for both.

And since New Yorkers enjoy outdoor dining, the restaurants will need more room, too.

All in all, it’s time to rethink the streets — and make them nicer to walk or cycle down, too.

Many drivers don’t think much of the wooden horses the de Blasio administration puts out to denote a “shared street”; the barriers are run over or stolen. The next mayor should devote capital funding to a system of retractable posts to block off streets or lanes to car and truck traffic as needed, without throwing junky barriers all over the place.

Bus drivers and approved truck drivers could even use an electronic signal to temporarily retract the barriers to access a delivery-only lane. Rockefeller Center would be a good place to start.

And what about outer-borough areas choked by traffic? The Biden administration wants to provide funding to undo the highway mistakes of the past — so the city should at least study what it would take to improve the Cross-Bronx ­Expressway for its residential neighbors.

Then, on the opposite side of town, there is the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, still falling down . . . with little interest from the candidates so far.

The streets don’t have to be a disaster area. With some sustained attention, they could be an asset to attract people back.

[late]

The city should step up its build-out of protected bike lanes.

Pedal-assist e-bikes help older people and people who aren’t in the greatest of shape to get around by bike, but they don’t belong with slower bike traffic. Wider bike lanes can make room for both.

And since New Yorkers enjoy outdoor dining, the restaurants will need more room, too.

All in all, it’s time to rethink the streets — and make them nicer to walk or cycle down, too.

Much of Europe is making their cities more bike friendly. In some countries, half of all bike sales are ebikes, it's working.

[jimjam]

First-time buyers made up 41.9 percent of home sales in Manhattan last quarter, the highest share in at least seven years.

[Doug64]

@jimjam, how many of those sales are residents taking advantage of lower prices? Certainly the rental market has seen a significant drop, though there are signs of recovery--how much that recovery will be, no one knows yet.

Low Prices, Record-High Demand: New York City’s Rental Boom Continues

Last month, the median rental price in Manhattan by 4% compared to March, the first dip in five months, according to new data from Douglas Elliman Real Estate and Miller Samuel. Those deals, as well the city’s continued reopening, helped push the number of new leases in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens to record highs.

“There’s still such a high amount of inventory, and tenants know that,” says Hal Gavzie, executive director of leasing at Douglass Elliman. “[They’re] looking at neighborhoods that pre-Covid they could not afford.”

Areas like Boerum Hill and Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, and the West Village in Manhattan, are particularly hot, with demand so high for some units that landlords are asking prospective renters to submit their best and final offers above the advertised rent price—akin to what would be expected in a competitive market for home buyers. Still, the median rental price in Manhattan is down 18.5% compared to a year ago, while Brooklyn is down 16.2% and Queens 13.1%, the report said.

The best deals in Manhattan are on big spaces—apartments with three or more bedrooms—presumably because Covid-19 has caused tenants to seek fewer roommates. The median rental price for such units is down 24.4% to $5,000 in the past year, while smaller apartments have dropped between about 15% to 20%.

Such declines have spurred a rush of signings, as tenants seek to lock in deals while they still can. Across apartment sizes, new signings in Manhattan soared more than fivefold compared to a year ago. The median apartment rented for $2,791 in April, net of concessions like one month or more of free rent, compared with $3,540 in April 2020.

A similar story is playing out in Brooklyn and Queens, though median prices ticked up month over month, by 0.1% and 3.4%, respectively. In Brooklyn, all apartment sizes are renting at a median discount of at least 18% compared to a year ago, with the biggest discounts on those with two or more bedrooms. Luxury buildings have dropped less. In Queens, where there are comparatively fewer transactions, the median rental price in April was $2,370, a 15.7% annual decline.

Prices could normalize closer to pre-Covid levels in 24 months, Gavzie thinks, but much depends on how quickly the city’s commercial market rebounds. The pandemic has caused office vacancies in Manhattan to hit record levels, and as companies formulate their long-term work-from-home policies, it is not clear when—if ever—office workers will return in their old numbers. The longer that rebound takes, the harder hit many retail and residential landlords will be.

Still, beyond the bidding wars in the city’s ritziest rental enclaves, there are signs that the worst has passed. Public transportation is more crowded, and some owners are beginning to once again charge broker fees to tenants, the much-reviled surcharges that are a sign of landlord strength. “I think that we're still a long ways away,” Gavzie says. But “these are all positive signs.”

And one anecdote, of a lifelong New Yorker wondering if that's going to change now after spending a few months in Florida.

Back from Florida—To Stay?

A friend of mine used to say that the best words in the English language are “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve begun our descent into JFK Airport.”

That friend lives in Florida now.

For the last four and a half months, so did my family. There’s a divide between people who stayed in New York City through the Covid-19 pandemic and those who have left. Our family doesn’t really fit on either side of it.

A semi-satirical piece by Luke Winkie in the New York Times in March argued that returning New Yorkers should be made to pay a “resettlement tax” and noted, “I’ve never identified more with this place than I did in 2020. All the values I was taught about New York, from elementary school onward, came true last year: the solidarity, the saltiness, the stubborn resilience whenever outside voices declare the city dead and buried.”

We, too, stayed in New York all through 2020. We lived with the sirens in the spring, and I was on the frontlines of the fight to open schools in the fall. We were never going to leave. We had moved into our dream home in March 2020. We were going to raise our kids in Brooklyn and then retire to Manhattan. I had grown up in Brooklyn, my husband in Queens. Unlike Winkie, though, we saw a city transformed for the worse. People acted horribly. Mask-wearing became religion, not science, and people would scream at one another in the streets over it. Schools became irrelevant, and few seemed to mind. It was also the era of extreme virtue signaling, of “Defund Police” signs in the windows of multimillion-dollar homes in safe neighborhoods as crime spiked all around us. We didn’t love this New York. The “New York Strong” slogan sounded like a joke. For two New York lifers, this was the weakest New York we’d ever known.

In 2021, we finally decided that we’d had enough. We could stay through the pain and the trauma. We could weather the difficult times with our neighbors. What we could not do was stay suspended in a paranoid reality divorced from any scientific data and, worse, impose that on our kids.

My fifth-grade daughter’s school had been fully remote since the beginning of the pandemic. My sons, in kindergarten and second grade, were in a “hybrid” model. That meant they attended school two or three days a week starting at the end of September, except for nearly a month between November and December when Mayor Bill de Blasio arbitrarily closed schools because the city hit a 3 percent positive-testing rate. That rate, basically determined by how many healthy people decided to take the Covid test that week, cost my boys a month of already-limited school. Then school simply reopened, despite the rate not decreasing. No one said a word about how it didn’t make sense; we were all just grateful to have some school back. On the two or three days of “remote learning” each week, the children would get art, music, and, hilariously, P.E. over Zoom. This was not school.

My husband had professional reasons to be in Florida. In a normal year, that would have meant back and forth flights for him and some juggling for me. During a year of sometimes-school, I could not abide him being gone for days at a time while I played Zoom butler to our young sons. It didn’t help that all the news from Florida was that it was like a 2019 wonderland. People were sane! Masks were not worn in low-risk situations! Kids went to school every day!

If he was going to the free state of Florida, we were coming, too. I started researching schools in southern Florida and found a highly regarded one called Marsh Pointe, in an area I’d never heard of—Palm Beach Gardens. Assuming an excellent school would be overcrowded, and possibly limited by Covid from accepting new students, I emailed the principal. Might she have space in her school for our three kids?

I received a jovial email in return: “Yes we have room. Actually we are a public school and do not have any limits on how many students we enroll. Good luck with your move . . . that’s a big one! Call me when you get down here or email me with any questions that you think of.”

I texted the line“Actually we are a public school and do not have any limits on how many students we enroll” to many friends who are parents in the New York City school system. In New York, it’s normal for parents to fret that their child will not get a spot in their zoned school due to overcrowding. The idea that of course we have space— we’re a public school—is a foreign one.

We arrived on New Year’s Day. About 90 minutes north of Miami, between the Bentley parade of Palm Beach island and the beaches of Jupiter, sits Palm Beach Gardens. It’s an area seemingly designed for your convenience. Everything that had always been a struggle in New York is exceedingly easy here. There’s parking everywhere. Kids leave their bikes unlocked and people use golf carts for school pickup. Everything is seamless in PBG. The sun shines, and everyone seems happy.

It was an adjustment.

People back home would ask “is it like being on vacation?” Sometimes it was. I’d work from the community pool while palm trees swayed and birds chirped.

But the truth was that our time in Florida was the most “real life” for us since the pandemic began. We enrolled the kids in sports. The boys played soccer and our daughter played softball. There was no discussion about the kids wearing masks while playing—they would not. Masking outdoors was rare in Florida in general. In February, Governor Ron DeSantis posted a photo on Twitter of himself and a Little League team, no one in masks. There were some gasps on Twitter. Just the week before, I had watched my daughter take her own mask-less team pictures with tears in my eyes. Normal felt amazing, even luxurious. When my daughter’s softball team won the championship, the kids all hugged. It felt human and real in a way that seeing other people as disease vectors for nearly a year had not.

Two months later, Anthony Fauci said, “The risk when you’re outdoors—which we have been saying all along—is extremely low.” He had not, in fact, been saying it all along, but some people, DeSantis and many Floridians among them, understood the low risks and adjusted their behavior accordingly. New Yorkers largely had not.

True, we saw moments of Covid derangement in Florida, too. There was, for example, the useless plexiglass around each child’s desk. On Valentine’s Day, the school asked for treats to be brought in advance so they could be quarantined before being handed out. Our community pool was open, the playground was open—but the fishing dock was closed due to Covid. There was a lot that didn’t make sense. But all of this was miles better than New York’s approach of ignoring any new information about the virus and refusing to move forward. Today, most New York City public elementary schools are open for five-day-a-week learning, yet middle and high schools remain suspended in the “sometimes school” model that Florida had shunned last fall.

Seeing my three children able to go to school every day was a godsend. The school itself was very impressive. When my daughter advanced past her math lessons, she was given harder ones. My second-grader had to do a research report on a famous person in history (he chose Anne Frank). Second-graders in New York are not doing research reports.

That same son learned patriotic music in his music class and came home regaling us with stories about the War of 1812. The school had students wear camo for Armed Services Appreciation Day. They said the Pledge of Allegiance daily. These things would be scoffed at in the New York City school system, where educators tend to pretend we’re not part of a larger country.

The main reason we pulled the trigger on a complicated, albeit temporary, move, though, was for our youngest son. Our older two could have survived remote learning. My husband and I might have dealt with a reeling New York. But our youngest son was struggling. He was four in September when kindergarten began. He had an excellent kindergarten teacher in Brooklyn, but he barely ever saw her in person. Learning on Zoom for a four-year old is not a possibility.

His Florida teacher understood that he was not at the level of his classmates who had been in school every day of the fall semester. Our son blossomed during his nearly five months there. Nothing could beat going to school every day. He had an exceptional teacher who worked with him and cared about his progress.

I had written about opening schools often through the fall. I was angry that New York City and other urban centers had so needlessly failed children. Seeing my kids in school every day in Florida, and knowing that kids in New York and other cities didn’t have this opportunity, made me even angrier. It was profoundly unfair.

“What happened to your hand?”

My kindergartner had three little indentations in his hand one day after school. One was bleeding.

“My friend’s sister scratched me on the bus.”

“Why did she scratch you?”

“I called her ‘a poop’ because she wouldn’t move over.”

Did I love that my son’s hand was scratched? Did I enjoy that he called a girl an, ahem, poop? No. But it didn’t escape me that this was a standard interaction between small kids in under-supervised spaces like school buses, and he was lucky to be having it. Kids need to learn how to engage with each other in real life. We used to understand this, but for over a year, we’ve pretended that small children could have social lives online. They mostly cannot.

I hadn’t kept our time in Florida a secret, exactly, but I also never made any announcement about our move. I would post pictures and anecdotes from the Sunshine State. I discussed my time in Florida on Tucker Carlson Tonight, on Your World with Neal Cavuto, and on various radio shows.

It was temporary, and we knew that. We were in a two-bedroom rental. We gave the children the master bedroom. Our sons shared a bed. Our daughter had a foam mattress on the floor. The kids went to afterschool at the local JCC on Fridays. We’d go out to dinner all the time. Life was good. We made friends and had many friends pass through Florida for visits. Florida became the focal point of so many conversations about handling the coronavirus. It was doing something very different than other large states, and it was succeeding.

We felt spoiled by how easy our lives were while our New York friends, and their kids, remained in a paused reality.

“Don’t make permanent decisions to a temporary problem,” I’d tell friends fleeing New York City last spring. But the problem no longer felt temporary. When our four-month stay neared its end, we extended for two more weeks, not wanting to come home. “Why don’t you stay? You’re so happy here,” Floridian friends said. It was true—but ignoring our life in New York didn’t make it disappear. We have family, we have a house. We had to return, knowing we had decisions to make and much to consider. Like a marriage, it’s hard letting go of the love we’ve had for New York City and of the vision of the future we had imagined for ourselves and our family. But Covid-19 had exposed things about our city that we could not unsee. Now we have to decide if we’re able to let things go, or if it’s finally time to move on.

[Heisenberg]

Went into the city today for an outdoor wedding in Central Park.

It was terrifying! Everyone with any love for Jesus and America has left forever. At this point, the only people left are gangs of feral activist judges, fighting to get control of an ever-dwindling supply of HRT drugs. I asked one if he (she? they?) could please stop spitting on the flag, but all I got in response was "now that we have kicked the Patriots out, we can show our true colours. Long live Hezbollah!"

I tried to point out that with the tax base leaving for Godlier, real American states like Kansas and Tennessee, they won't get socialist handouts any more. But that didn't seem to deter them.

I'm at a loss for what to do. Help me, fellow Patriots!

[SpecialOlympian]

It's a recurring fantasy for rightwingers that urban areas are somehow crime ridden third world hellholes that are on the verge of collapse. Which some of them believe because they willingly embrace all rightwing media sources that only exist to lie to them.

Then when they actually get what they want, like a limit on abortions to two weeks after conception or a trans bathroom bill, the giant corporations move out of their urban centers because it turns out highly qualified professionals don't want to work in a feudal theocratic shithole run by insane people.

Also lol @ that Florida article. The author is a special breed of failperson: the conservative op-ed writer. A political thought leader for an ideology that outright rejects intellectualism. Her job is not to try and convince the base that there is an intellectual foundation to conservatism, but fool liberals into thinking that actually her politics aren't for mouthbreathing dullards driven entirely by spite. She knows exactly what she's doing with that article and it's not written for a Trump supporting dumbfuck who rolls coal or some small business tyrant who thinks he's the ubermensch because he runs a skidoo dealership.

[Rancid]

@Doug64

New york is dead right? Called this bullshit months ago. MONTHS ago. As usual, you jump to the conclusions you want to be true. That's a trend you see on News Max, Fox News, OAN, and all the MAGA morons. Jumping to conclusions that you wish to be true because it satisfies/proves some stupid conservative belief.

https://www.businessinsider.com/remote- ... eas-2021-9

Anyway, basically, people that have left big cities have cited they didn't plan to make that move permanent. Most people that did move, tended to stay within the metro area. While COVID has changed how people live and work, fundamentally, it didn't make people want to leave big cities permanently. People also still want to be near the office, even if they don't come in to work everyday (this is my attitude actually, I intend to hybrid office/home work).

[Godstud]

"New York?

I heard you were dead."






MAGA morons.

[Doug64]

@Rancid, to quote myself, "Certainly the rental market has seen a significant drop, though there are signs of recovery--how much that recovery will be, no one knows yet." That's jumping to conclusions? But while the US Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers for New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island only go up to July, they don't exactly show a burgeoning recovery--while unemployment dropped from 8.8 to 7.6 from March to May, in June and July it rose again to 8.0. And that's in part suppressed by a shrinking civilian labor force, down from May to July by 56,400--if they were still there the unemployment rate would be 8.6. And CNN's Back to Normal Index currently has New York state ranked the worst in the nation at 81%, I suspect largely driven by New York City.

[Rancid]

@Rancid, to quote myself, "Certainly the rental market has seen a significant drop, though there are signs of recovery--how much that recovery will be, no one knows yet." That's jumping to conclusions? But while the US Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers for New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island only go up to July, they don't exactly show a burgeoning recovery--while unemployment dropped from 8.8 to 7.6 from March to May, in June and July it rose again to 8.0. And that's in part suppressed by a shrinking civilian labor force, down from May to July by 56,400--if they were still there the unemployment rate would be 8.6. And CNN's Back to Normal Index currently has New York state ranked the worst in the nation at 81%, I suspect largely driven by New York City.

NY will recover eventually. All of the morons proclaiming big cities are definitively dead/dying are now slowly moving the goal post to instead say "well, they aren't going to recover as far. That's the point I was making". A nice slow prime to deflect from the original point. Slow boil the frog.

Side point. I'd also guess the metrics used to measure recovery are poor (as usual). Kind of like how we focus so much on GDP when it's a really bad metric for what's actually important to people (well being). Of course, we tend to focus on bad metrics not because they are good metrics but because they are easy to measure.

[Doug64]

@Rancid, I never said big cities are dying, some are thriving. I said New York City has serious issues that are getting in the way, and it's an open question whether it will ever reach the level of dominance that it previously held pre-pandemic even if the next mayor gets the city government's act together. If the next mayor fails, the city may well find itself in a downward spiral. As for the metrics used for CNN's Back to Normal Index, here's what they have to say about their methodology: Moody’s Analytics & CNN Business Back-to-Normal Index Methodology