New York: how the most populous city in the US faces the exodus of its inhabitants due to the coronavirus

“I was thinking, ‘The city will be back. It’ll be fine by July.’ But it still wasn’t right,” she says.

“I had no intention of leaving at all,” she adds. “It was a complete change.”

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 making it easier the transfer by expanding remote work.

So far, the increase has shown no signs of slowing down, says Liz Nunan, president of real estate firm Houlihan Lawrence, which handles home sales in suburban New York City and had its best year yet in 2020.

“One of the things I’ve learned in 2020 is that I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m feeling pretty optimistic about 2021,” she says. “I think we’re going to have almost as strong a year as 2020 turned out to be.”

Andin 2020the transfers ofsde CNY they have taken athe state of New York a chancellor largest population decline in all of EAND.uu. and its first population decline since the 1970s.

This exodus has spawned a small universe of articles discussing whether New York City is dead or dying and what, if anything, should be done to help it recover.

Now that the United States is facing an economic crisis that is likely to last longer than the pandemic that caused it, those concerns aren’t unique to America’s largest city.

Smaller New York city centers across the country have desperately watched signs of a long-sought renaissance — new restaurants, businesses in previously abandoned buildings — disappear almost overnight.

“This is a difficult time for everyone,” says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “The real question is: can these cities maintain their economic viability?”

In New York, the pandemic has closed theaters, emptied offices, halted tourism, and turned shopping and dining into perils you must take at your peril, 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 survive the pandemic, according to estimates by local business group Partnership for New York City. Most inner-city businesses do not expect staff to return to the office in full. Some companies have already left.

The situation has pushed the city’s unemployment rate to over 12 percent, nearly double the national average, added to the ranks of homelessness, and displaced more than 300,000 people like Andrea, putting a strain on public finances.

In response, New York leaders raised the possibility of raising taxes and cutting services such as transportation, garbage collection and park maintenance, calling on Washington DC for emergency help to resolve financial woes, pleas that it too they have now fallen on deaf ears.

Michael Hendrix, director of state and local policies at the Manhattan Institute’s free-market think tank, fears potential cuts will further accelerate people, harming the services that make New York life attractive and leaving a poorer city for those who they stay.

“It’s not so much the pandemic that’s the biggest challenge for New York City,” she says. “It is precisely the second-order consequences that have dealt a serious blow to the recovery of the city and its citizens”.

“New York isn’t dead, but it’s alive,” he says. “Whether its recovery is measured in months, years or decades, it’s mostly determined by the degree of leadership we see in the city. And I think that’s why we should be so concerned.”

In some ways, such concerns are uniquely American, reflecting the security concerns 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 United States will be less dramatic and more temporary.

In the United States, however, the urban revival of the early 2000s had shown signs of abating 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 pandemic-induced expansion of remote work means the city is now competing with even more places to accommodate businesses and families, a trend that is unlikely to be fully reversed even after life returns to normal, says the Florida professor.

“Now talented people have choices with remote work. Those choices will be made carefully,” he says. “The big winners are places with lots of amenities, and the premium for amenities will go up. That means cities with beautiful coasts or rural areas near mountains. Places like Miami Beach, Bozeman Montana or Aspen Colorado, or the Valley of the Hudson in New York”.

Andrea, who initially moved into her mother’s home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, says she hasn’t ruled out New York entirely. But for now, she’s planning a cross-country trip, working remotely as she explores new cities where she could potentially live.

“I’ll get in the car and drive across the country, and see if anything fits,” she says. “If not, I’ll see where the world is in September.”

Kevin Pearsall and his wife left New York City in March for Atlanta, Georgia. After years of focusing his career on advertising, the 35-year-old says he wants a hometown where he didn’t feel housing and other costs of living were still excessive, even with their 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 could combine professional opportunities and social life.

“All the good things about New York: speakeasies, beer gardens…it’s not as unique as it used to be,” Pearsall says.

“We were already on our way, planning to leave,” she says. The pandemic “just accelerated” the move.

New York leaders have expressed confidence that the city will remain attractive, noting that the departure of a few hundred thousand people 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 is going to bounce back. I know. And I know other people are going to come. They’ve been doing it for generations.”

“We cannot overstate this historic moment,” he added. “It’s a passing moment. There will be a vaccine. And then all the strongholds of New York City will reassert themselves.”

Neighborhoods that emptied during lockdowns in 2020 were the city’s wealthiest, but a survey by the Manhattan Institute found that two out of five New Yorkers would leave the city if they could live wherever they wanted, with dissatisfaction highest among those with lower incomes. .

Hendrix says it’s tempting to hope a cheaper city will emerge if the wealthy leave, but fears such an exodus will create even more challenges, given the city’s reliance on high-income residents for tax revenue.

“It doesn’t need a majority to leave the city or a majority to change their lifestyle to make a big difference,” she says.

Professor Florida says bigger 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 after previous crises such declines were short-lived. And in other parts of the United States, he expects malls in cities, including some in the growing “Sunbelt,” to face major challenges.

“Business districts, those places that stack and stack workers in vertical towers, have to deal with,” he says.

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