- Natalie Sherman
- Business Correspondent, New York
image source, Andrea Wilhelm
Andrea Wilhelm left New York and is traveling the US looking for potential new cities to live.
Andrea Wilhelm left her New York City apartment in August and isn’t sure if she’ll ever return.
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.
For almost 5 years, he voluntarily paid the rents and taxes premium from the city, even though he had to relocate to work in another state.
But the pandemic exhausted her.
“I was thinking ‘The city is going to come back. By July, everything will be fine.’ But it was still not fine,” he says.
“I wasn’t planning on leaving at all,” he adds. “It was a complete change.”
Increase in moving services
Since March, real estate companies and movers have seen a deluge of applications from people leaving New York, many of them young families, as the pandemic fuels demand for bigger homes and more outdoor space, while that facilitates relocation by expanding remote work.
image source, Getty Images
Moving companies have seen an increase in demand in New York since the crisis began.
So far, the rise has shown no signs of slowing, says Liz Nunan, president of real estate firm Houlihan Lawrence, which handles home sales in suburban New York City and reported its best year on record in 2020.
“One of the things I’ve learned in 2020 is that I have no idea what the future holds, but I feel pretty optimistic in 2021,” he says. “I think we’re going to have a year almost as strong as 2020 turned out to be.”
En 2020the relocations ofsde new york city they took athe state of new york to registrar largest population decline in all of EE.UU. and its first population drop since the 1970s.
This exodus has spawned a small universe of articles debating whether New York City is dead or dying, and what, if anything, should be done to help it recover.
Business closures and unemployment
Now that the US is facing an economic crisis that is likely to outlast the pandemic that precipitated it, such concerns are not unique to America’s largest city.
Urban centers smaller than New York across the country have desperately watched the signs of a long-sought renaissance — new restaurants, businesses in formerly abandoned buildings — disappear almost overnight.
“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?”
image source, Getty Images
The pandemic has destroyed businesses, such as theaters and restaurants, that employed roughly a fifth of New York’s workforce.
In New York, the pandemic has closed theaters, emptied offices, halted tourism and turned shopping and dining into hazards you must take at your own risk, destroying industries that employed a fifth of the city’s workforce.
Up to a third of the city’s small businesses pthey would hear not surviving the pandemic, according to estimates by local business group Partnership for New York City. Most companies in the city center do not expect staff to return to the office in full. Some firms have already left.
The situation has pushed the city’s unemployment rate to more than 12%, nearly double the national average, added to the ranks of the homeless and prompted the departure of more than 300,000 people like Andrea, further straining Public finances.
In response, New York leaders have raised the possibility of raising taxes and cutting services such as transportation, garbage collection and park maintenance, while asking Washington DC for emergency help to solve financial problems, pleas that even they have now fallen on deaf ears.
image source, Getty Images
Apparently fewer people love New York than before.
Michael Hendrix, director of state and local policy at the Manhattan Institute’s free-market think tank, fears that the potential cuts will further speed people out, hurting the amenities that make New York life attractive and leaving a city more poor for those who stay.
“It’s not so much the pandemic that is the biggest challenge for New York City,” he says. “It’s really the second-order consequences that have dealt a blow to the recovery of the city and its citizens.”
“New York is not dead, but it is on life support,” he says. “Whether his recovery is measured in months, years or decades, it’s primarily determined by the degree of leadership we see in the city. And I think that’s why we should be so concerned.”
Competition from other cities
In some ways, such concerns are uniquely American, reflecting the security problems and weak education 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.
image source, Getty Images
The pandemic has affected the fragile urban renaissance in cities like Chicago.
In the US, however, the urban revival of the early 2000s had shown signs of fading even before the pandemic, as immigration slowed and the move to the suburbs accelerated.
In New York, the population has been declining since 2016.
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 fully reversed even following life returns to normal, says the professor. Florida.
“Now talented people have choices 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”.
Andrea, who initially moved into her mother’s house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, says she hasn’t ruled out New York entirely. But for now, she’s planning a cross-country road trip, working remotely while she explores new cities that she might potentially live in.
“I’ll get in the car and drive across the country, and see if anything feels right,” he says. “If not, I’ll see where the world is in September.”
image source, Kevin Pearsall
New York’s high cost of living helped convince Kevin Pearsall and his wife to leave.
Kevin Pearsall and his wife left New York City in March for Atlanta, Georgia. After years of focusing their careers on , the 35-year-old says they wanted a hometown where they didn’t feel housing and other costs of living were still overkill, even with their healthy six-figure salaries.
Both landed jobs as remote workers for New York companies, another sign that convinced them that the city was no longer the only place where they might combine professional opportunity and social life.
“All the good things regarding New York: speakeasies, beer gardens… that’s not as unique as it used to be,” says Pearsall.
“We were already underway, thinking regarding leaving,” he says. The pandemic “just sped up” the move.
“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 makes little dent in a city of more than eight million.
“I’m not going to beg people to stay,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in 2020. “I know this city will bounce back. I know. And I know other people will come. They have for generations.”
image source, Getty Images
Will New York be able to recover?
“We cannot overestimate this moment in history,” he added. “It’s a passing moment. There will be a vaccine. And then all the strongholds in New York City will assert themselves once more.”
The neighborhoods that emptied out during the 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 might live anywhere they wanted, with dissatisfaction greatest among those with incomes Lower.
Hendrix says it’s tempting to hope that a more affordable city will emerge if the wealthy leave, but he worries that such an exodus will create even more challenges, given the city’s reliance on high-income residents for tax revenue.
“It doesn’t take a majority leaving town or a majority changing their lifestyle to make a big difference,” he says.
Prof Florida says larger cities like New York and San Francisco are likely to remain attractive to young people, who should benefit if rents continue to fall.
But he cautions that following previous crises such declines were short-lived. And in other parts of the United States, he expects shopping centers in cities, including some in the growing “Sunbelt,” facing major challenges.
“Commercial districts, those places that stacked and stacked workers into vertical towers, are in for a real reckoning,” he says.
