Young people are leaving, disgusted by soaring rents. Criminality? Let’s not talk about it. The price of restaurants: insane. Culture? Inaccessible. And then the streets of Manhattan remain sparse, Covid and telecommuting oblige. Not to mention the 60,000 homeless, the floods that threaten with climate change… It’s time to
pack up and decamp to Miami or Austin. Or not. For nearly thirty years, we’ve heard the same refrain here: New York isn’t what it used to be. The golden age has passed.
Decline threatens.
When we arrived, the city was barely recovering from the rampant crime of the 1980s. Real estate was treading water, weighed down by the exodus of whites to the suburbs. And then there was September 11, 2001. Then the crash and the recession of 2008-2009. Then Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Then the pandemic and its supposed permanent effects on the most densely populated city in the United States. Then this coming crisis, fueled by inflation. Hiring of young people for a first job is down 30%, with entry-level salaries no longer sufficient to pay a median rent of nearly $3,600. The city is still more expensive and the number of serious offenses has increased by 26% in one year.
Yet many still want to live in New York
Yes, you have to really want to live in New York. But precisely: many want it. In twenty years, the city has grown by more than 800,000 inhabitants. Not bad for a foil. New York’s secret is that it never stops changing. It stretches, retracts, metamorphoses. Barely installed, New Yorkers experience change on a daily basis and play “it was better before”. A recent New Yorker post pokes fun at this mania: “I have to tell you the truth, New York has changed irrevocably in the two hours since I moved here.”
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Problems? There are, and how! But none is unsolvable. The city is changing. In its good days, thanks to sensible reforms, such as those, under discussion, which aim to unblock the construction of housing; or, on bad days, under the effect of violent convulsions. The smoke of crises need not clear for the world to return to plunge into this unique cauldron of culture, races, brilliant ideas, subversive art and gargantuan deals. New York is not screwed.
