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3.57 million people left New York City this year to live out their lives in comfort someplace else, and then 3.5 million people hungry for opportunity arrived to take their place. I hope to see similar results in San Francisco.
Remember which political party runs the city.
>In Tribeca, a wealthy neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, residents who left this year earned an average income of about $140,000, Walle said. The typical person moving into the neighborhood earned an average $82,000, he said. I was going to ask if we might call this "de-gentrification" and if that's a good thing, right? I'm sitting here in disbelief after a quick search reveals that the actual average income is $87…
If your system makes life worse for a certain group of people, you either need to prevent that group from leaving altogether, or ensure that there is no place that they can go to. If you iterate this to the logical conclusion, you end up with something like "globalism."
In this particular case, this is mostly to do with not wanting to live in places with strict lockdown policies, high rates of homelessness and criminality, while simultaneously paying much more in taxes and living expenses, and seeing few of the benefits of being in an urban hub while doing it.
But my point stands: don't forget how quickly people will be willing to upend their lives at the very moment their existence is sufficiently worse than it would be elsewhere. And when you target the wealthy, you target the people most capable of moving anywhere else.
i tried to negotiate being month to month at my manhattan apt at the same rate and my land lord wouldn't accommodate me. Now the apt has been unrented for a few months and they're asking for a 10% drop in rent and probably won't get it for a long long time. happily commenting from hawaii
The combination of high taxes, corruption, and incompetence really wear on you after a while.
I'm all for high taxes in service of a strong social safety net and a well-run, modern city. I am happy to pay them. But I can't help but feel that my taxes were being outright stolen and squandered in this city.
About 3.57 million people left New York City this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7 ... Some 3.5 million people earning lower average incomes moved into the city during that same period, the report showed.
[...]
In Tribeca, a wealthy neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, residents who left this year earned an average income of about $140,000, Walle said. The typical person moving into the neighborhood earned an average $82,000, he said.
How about: US citizens saved $34B by not having to stay in the highest COL areas? Why should we sympathize with a minority of rent-seekers?
I don't really think this is about sympathizing with rent-seekers.
Cities invest in infrastructure to cover anticipated service delivery well before it's due, and the financing for doing so is a multi-decade affair. Before you complain, this includes things like providing running water, roads that are paved, etc. Really core essential pieces of making a city work.
If your tax base moves to suburbs or just plain leaves the city, the city is still on the hook for those payments, so it results in dramatically cut services or increased taxes on residents.
The flight of some of the tax base incentivizes the flight of many, resulting in further cuts to maintenance contracts, preventative work, and the general crumbling of infrastructure. Sometimes this can be gracefully managed by planned downsizing and renegotiating deals with vendors and financiers. In other cases, this doesn't occur and the city simply... dies. While the US is very young and doesn't have many large examples of this, Flint and Detroit come to mind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't have to sympathize with rent-seekers necessarily, but I would wonder if the rest of the city can move as adaptively to wherever opportunity beckons, and whether NY can downscale their city services accordingly.
It serves as a cautionary tale when your budget isn’t as agile as those who make up the tax base.
I've been seeing more of these types of stories with a line like this: > About 3.57 million people left New York City this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7, according to Unacast, which analyzed anonymized cell phone location data. Sorry, but I don't really trust the "anonymized" very much. Why should some company I've never heard of have access to my cell phone location data in the first place.
Not sure how the second follows from the first. There is a company you've never heard of which access to your cell phone location data. In fact, hundreds, and they buy and sell them in commodity marketplaces just like corn or pork bellies. They sell the data with your name attached for one price, and as anonymized aggregates for a much lower price.
Unacast is just saying that they bought the cheaper anonymized version for the purpose of this analysis. Whether the data are real or not is another matter altogether.