Home » News » The Real Reason People Are Leaving New York City: It’s Not What You Think

The Real Reason People Are Leaving New York City: It’s Not What You Think

Attacking New York City has long been a popular pastime on the right.

Conservatives often describe the Big Apple as a dystopian wasteland.

And the attacks have reached a fever pitch since Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced multiple indictments against Donald Trump.

How dare Bragg pursue these cases, Republicans wonder, when the delinquency Is he out of control in his own territory?

But crime in New York isn’t really out of control.

As in many places, crime has skyrocketed during the pandemic, but it appears to be subsiding; believe it or not the republicans, crime in the big city Safer of the United States is still much lower than that of, for example, Miami or Columbus (Ohio).

However, even before the pandemic there was a constant, though not huge, flow of people leaving new york.

Why were they leaving?

Probably not because of crime, although perceptions may be at odds with reality.

They were probably not the taxes; I’ll get to that in a minute.

The main factor, almost certainly, was and is the housing cost.

About perceptions:

From the early 1990s until the pandemic, a large drop in crime was accompanied by a public belief that crime was increasing.

Interestingly, however, only a minority of the public said that crime was increasing in their area – Americans seem to have believed that crime was increasing. in some placejust not where they lived.

And for what it’s worth, despite the recent rise in crime, large parts of New York don’t seem threatening to a casual observer.

I know that Marjorie Taylor Greene, after a quick visit, described the city as “disgusting”, “dirty”, “repulsive”” y “a terrible place“.

And there are, of course, bad neighborhoods. But for most of us who actually live here, life seems, well, normal, and it’s hard to believe that large numbers of people are fleeing an urban nightmare.

In fact, in many respects the quality of life in New York it is high, if you can afford it.

But can you afford it?

New York is a state with a high tax levelto pay for relatively generous social programs.

And New York City imposes additional taxes. These taxes make life more expensive in New York.

However, while the average tax rates are lower in the red states than in the blue ones, the taxes in the red states are highly regressive:

they collect a much larger share of income from the poor and middle class than from the top 1%.

As a result, the differences between the red and blue families’ tax rates are smaller than might be expected.

According to the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, 60% of middle-class taxpayers in Texas pay 9.4% of their income in state and local taxes.

This figure is higher than the tax rate paid by middle-income families in California.

New Yorkers pay more, at 12.5%, but those three more tax points probably aren’t a compelling reason to leave.

Large tax differences affect the richest 1%:

11.3% in New York versus 3.1% in Texas.

But they are also the type of people who tend to place a high value on the comforts of a large and sophisticated city;

New York remains one of the favorite residences of the extremely wealthy.

For the middle class, however, living in New York is really difficult, not so much because of the taxes but because of the cost of housing.

Here’s a very rough indicator (I’m sure the experts can come up with a more exact measure, but the conclusions probably won’t change):

Zillow says that the median rent for an apartment in New York is $3,500about $1,500 more than the median rent in, say, Dallas.

Since the median family income in New York is about $70,000 a year, the “housing tax” middle-class families pay to live in New York is on the order of 20% of your incomeseveral times greater than the difference in actual taxes.

And if you want to buy a house, the price difference is similar: Dallas is 40% cheaper.

Oh, and to the extent that you see homelessness – a symptom of social disorder in New York – homelessness is largely the result of a expensive and unavailable housing.

So the cost of housing, not crime or taxes, is the main reason people may want to leave New York.

It is not much consolation to realize that the problem of inaffordability of housing is even worse in much of california what .. here.

The point is that this does not have to be happening.

The New York metropolitan area is much more densely populated than any other part of the United States, with the average resident living in a census tract with 15,000 people per square kilometer.

Even so, many more houses could be built: I live in a neighborhood with 60,000 inhabitants per 2.6 square km, and it is nicer and quieter than you probably imagine; no, it is not a nightmare of crowded humanity.

One of the main reasons developers aren’t building more homes in the New York area, and therefore living here is expensive, is that they aren’t allowed to because of zoning, land use restrictions, and -especially in the suburbs- the community opposition.

In other words, never mind the lurid fantasies of the right:

The main problem in the New York area is NIMBYism (NIMBY is an acronym that stands for “Not in My Backyard”), not crime or taxes.

c.2023 The New York Times Company

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2023-04-25 12:52:43
#Whats #wrong #York

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