- Natalie Sherman
- Business Correspondent, New York
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Image source, Andrea Wilhelm
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Andrea Wilhelm left New York and is traveling the US in search of potential new cities to live in.
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Andrea Wilhelm left her New York City apartment in August and is not sure if she will ever return.
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The 30-year-old software designer loved living in New York – going to Broadway shows, frequenting dog parks, and taking the casual walks of everyday life.
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For almost 5 years, he voluntarily paid rents and taxes premium from the city, although he had to relocate to work in another state.
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But the pandemic exhausted it.
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“I thought ‘The city is going to come back. By July, everything will be fine’. But it was still not good,” he says.
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“I wasn’t planning on leaving at all,” he adds. “It was a complete change.”
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Increase in moving services
Since March, real estate companies and moving companies have seen a flood of applications from people leaving New York, many of them young families, as the pandemic drives demand for larger homes and more outdoor space, at the same time. which facilitates relocation by expanding remote work.
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Image source, Getty Images
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Moving companies have seen an increase in demand in New York since the crisis began.
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So far, the increase has shown no signs of slowing down, says Liz Nunan, president of the Houlihan Lawrence real estate firm, which handles home sales in suburban New York City, and reported its best year on record in 2020.
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“One of the things I learned in 2020 is that I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m feeling pretty optimistic in 2021,” he says. “I think we will have a year almost as strong as 2020 turned out.”
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En 2020, the relocations ofsde new york city led al state of New York to registrar the largest population decline of all EE.UU. and its first population decline since the 1970s.
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This exodus has spawned a small universe of articles debating whether New York City is dead or dying, and what should be done – if anything can be done – to help it recover.
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Business closure and unemployment
Now that the US faces an economic crisis likely to last longer than the pandemic that precipitated it, such concerns are not unique to America’s largest city.
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Urban centers smaller than New York, across the country, have watched in despair as signs of a much sought-after renaissance – new restaurants, businesses in previously abandoned buildings – disappear almost overnight.
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“This is a difficult time for everyone,” says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “The real problem is: can these cities maintain their economic vitality?”
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Image source, Getty Images
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The pandemic has destroyed businesses, such as theaters and restaurants, that employed roughly a fifth of New York’s workforce.
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In New York, the pandemic has closed theaters, emptied offices, stopped tourism, and turned shopping and restaurants into hazards that you must take at your own risk, destroying industries that employed a fifth of the city’s workforce.
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Up to a third of the city’s small businesses pwould hate not survive the pandemic, according to estimates by the local business group Partnership for New York City. Most businesses in the city center do not expect staff to return to the office in full. Some firms have already left.
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The situation has pushed the city’s unemployment rate to more than 12%, almost double the national average, swelled the ranks of the homeless and prompted the departure of more than 300,000 people like Andrea, further straining the Public finances.
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In response, New York leaders have raised the possibility of raising taxes and cutting services such as transportation, garbage collection and park maintenance, while calling for emergency help from Washington DC to resolve financial problems, pleas that even now they have fallen on deaf ears.
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Image source, Getty Images
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Apparently fewer people love New York than before.
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Michael Hendrix, director of state and local policy for the Manhattan Institute’s free-market think tank, fears that potential cuts will further accelerate the outflow of people, damaging the conveniences that make life in New York attractive and leaving a city more poor for those who stay.
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“The pandemic is not so much the biggest challenge for New York City,” he says. “It is really the second-order consequences that have dealt a blow to the recovery of the city and its citizens.”
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“New York is not dead, but it is on life support,” he says. “Whether your recovery is measured in months, years or decades, it is primarily determined by the degree of leadership we see in the city. And I think that’s why we should be so concerned.”
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Competition from other cities
In some ways, such concerns are uniquely American, reflecting the security concerns and weak educational systems that distinguish so many American cities from their counterparts in Europe and Canada, says Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto. He predicts that the abandonment of cities outside the US will be less dramatic and more temporary.
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Image source, Getty Images
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The pandemic has affected the fragile urban renaissance in cities like Chicago.
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In the US, however, the urban resurgence of the early 2000s had shown signs of fading even before the pandemic, as immigration declined and relocation to the suburbs accelerated.
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In New York, the population has been declining since 2016.
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The expansion of remote work caused by the pandemic means the city is now competing with even more places to host businesses and families, a trend that is unlikely to be completely reversed even after life returns to normal, says the professor. Florida.
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“Now talented people have options to choose from with remote work. Those choices will be made carefully,” he says. “The big winners are places with a lot of amenities, and the premium for amenities will go up. This means cities with beautiful coastlines or rural areas near mountains. Places like Miami Beach, Bozeman in Montana or Aspen in Colorado, or the Valley of the Hudson in New York. “
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Andrea, who initially moved into her mother’s home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, says she hasn’t completely ruled out New York. But for now, he’s planning a cross-country road trip, working remotely while exploring new cities he could potentially live in.
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“I’ll get in the car and drive around the country, and see if something feels right,” he says. “If not, I’ll see where the world is in September.”
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Image source, Kevin Pearsall
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New York’s high cost of living helped convince Kevin Pearsall and his wife to leave.
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Kevin Pearsall and his wife left New York City in March for Atlanta, Georgia. After years of focusing on their advertising careers, the 35-year-old says they wanted a hometown where they didn’t feel that housing and other costs of living were still over the top, even with their healthy six-figure salaries.
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Both landed jobs as remote workers for companies in New York, another sign that convinced them that the city was no longer the only place where they could combine career opportunity and social life.
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“All the good things about New York: speakeasies, beer gardens … that’s not as unique as it used to be,” says Pearsall.
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“We were already on the move, thinking of leaving,” he says. The pandemic “just sped up” the move.
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“I know this city will recover”
New York leaders have expressed confidence that the city will remain attractive, noting that the departure of a few hundred thousand hardly makes a dent in a city of more than eight million.
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“I’m not going to beg people to stay,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in 2020. “I know this city will rebound. I know. And I know other people will come. They have for generations.”
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Image source, Getty Images
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Will New York be able to bounce back?
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“We cannot overestimate this moment in history,” he added. “It is a passing moment. There will be a vaccine. And then all the strengths of New York City will reassert themselves.”
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The neighborhoods that emptied during lockdowns in 2020 were the wealthiest in the city, but a Manhattan Institute survey found that two in five New Yorkers would leave the city if they could live anywhere they wanted, with higher dissatisfaction among those with incomes. Lower.
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Hendrix says it’s tempting to wait for a more affordable city to emerge if the wealthy leave, but he worries such an exodus will create even more challenges, given the city’s reliance on high-income residents for tax revenue.
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“It doesn’t take most of them to leave the city or for most to change their lifestyle to make a big difference,” he says.
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Professor Florida says that larger cities, such as New York and San Francisco, are likely to remain a draw for young people, who should benefit if rents continue to fall.
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But he cautions that after previous crises such declines were short-lived. And in other parts of the United States, he expects city malls, including some of the burgeoning “Sunbelt,” southeast and southwestern US, to face big challenges.
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“Business districts, those places that piled up and stacked workers on vertical towers, are in a real reckoning,” he says.
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