USA: No other city has been hit worse: How New York tries to get back on its feet after Corona

Anyone who lives in New York has to be tough. Because difficult times are ahead of New York.

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There are clichés that are so burned into the mind that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between madness and reality. One of these clichés is hidden behind the phrase “New York Tough”: The idea that the residents of the largest American city are made of hard wood – and were thus better prepared for the corona virus that hit the city on the Hudson and East Rivers has raged particularly badly in the past few weeks and officially killed more than 16,000 people.

Governor Andrew Cuomo said a few weeks ago that anyone who lives in New York has to be “tough” because “this place makes you hard-wearing”. This is meant positively, emphasized Cuomo – and of course he alluded to the hit song “Theme From New York, New York”, intoned by Frank Sinatra, among others, in which the city that never sleeps says: “If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere, if I can do it in New York, I can do it anywhere. He was therefore convinced, said Governor Cuomo, that the New Yorkers would also overcome this crisis together.

The truth is: The city of New York officially has around 8.4 million inhabitants; This means that only around 200,000 fewer people live in the metropolis than in the whole of Switzerland – on a land area that is roughly the same size as the Canton of Solothurn. In view of this mass of people who live together in the smallest of spaces, it would therefore be presumptuous to claim that there is an ideal New Yorker. New York: This is the area around Central Park in Manhattan, where sophisticated apartment buildings line up, in which a 260 square meter apartment can quickly cost 15 million dollars.

But New York is also the Spring Creek Towers, a collection of ugly apartment blocks in Brooklyn, near the John F. Kennedy International Airport. Around 13,000 people live in this mini-city, mostly elderly, poor African-Americans. And nowhere else have so many New Yorkers died as a result of the coronavirus in recent weeks – the death rate, extrapolated to 100,000 people, was 612, according to statistics from the local health department. For comparison: Around Central Park, in the fine residential areas of Manhattan, the city authorities recorded a death rate of around 100 people per 100,000 residents.

Survival is easier in the apartment on Central Park

The statistics show that the people who live in the Spring Creek Towers are “tough” and have to be “tough”. On the other hand, if you have a nice apartment with a view of Central Park, survival will be easier. In addition, many Manhattan residents have run away and are temporarily relegated to the glamorous resorts of The Hamptons on Long Island. Because many wealthy exiled New Yorkers will most likely refrain from returning to the city after the long summer vacation, the school authorities there are already expecting increasing student numbers, as the “Wall Street Journal” reported this week.

In view of such anecdotes, some experts are already proclaiming the “end of the decade of cities” and predicting a “renaissance of the satellite cities”, the suburbs that a few years ago were regarded as stuffy by young Americans. Michael Hendrix, who works for the Manhattan Institute think tank, underpins this thesis with figures that suggest that American megacities – sounding names like New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco – already lost residents before the corona crisis, not least because of the high cost of living . This trend will now accentuate, says Hendrix, in view of the health and economic problems that the metropolitan areas are now confronted with.

In addition, there is the dispute about coming to terms with the crisis, which could paralyze New York in particular; so the tatters are flying between Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo, although both have meanwhile had to admit that they had initially misjudged the extent of the disaster.

So hard times are ahead for New York. The city will have to adapt and, if necessary, reinvent itself. But the cliché wants it that those people who are loyal to New York are tough. Sinatra said it aptly: “It’s up to you now, New York, New York.”

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