LETTER FROM NEW YORK
Le New York Times don’t want to believe it. “Are New Yorkers fleeing the city? » The figures are there, revealed by the American census. 277 residents leave New York every day, twice as many as a year ago. Excluding the change in statistical methodology, the New York population fell by 100,000 people between July 2018 and July 2019 and would only have 8.4 million inhabitants. Big Apple is the most deserted city in the United States. Behind it, the two main American cities, Los Angeles and Chicago, are also seeing part of their population move (120,000 and 84,000 respectively).
Tax pressure
What happened when it was believed that urban centers with their bobo cafes, their expensive if not refined restaurants, and their factories transformed into apartments attracted “millennials”? Precisely, they have attracted them too much: prices have become prohibitive, rents have soared (75% in ten years in Los Angeles), while public transport remains appallingly dilapidated. As a result, families and the middle classes, driven out by gentrification, are fleeing to warmer and sunnier skies: Las Vegas (Nevada), Phoenix (Arizona) and Dallas (Texas) welcome 100,000 newcomers each year. They are also settling in more remote areas where, thanks to the Internet and trendy cafes, you can live the same life, or almost, as in the fashionable neighborhoods of Brooklyn.
The phenomenon was undoubtedly accelerated by the increase in the tax burden, which can be explained both by the political choices of the Democrats who manage New York and certain large states on the Pacific coast and the tax reform of the Republican Donald Trump: local and state taxes are no longer deductible from federal tax, which has greatly increased the bill since 2017. We can see this in New York, where the middle classes are caught in a vice, between the very rich and the poorest .
40% born abroad
This relative disaffection for the city was masked until last year by the arrival of immigrants. According to a survey of The Atlantic, since 2010, the demographic growth of the metropolises of New York, Philadelphia and Chicago was explained more than 100% by the influx of foreigners, while this rate reached 80% in the regions of Boston, in the east of the States United States and Los Angeles to the west. Their arrival shaped the great metropolises.
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