Why People are Leaving New York: It’s Not What You Think

Messing with New York has long been a popular pastime among the right. Conservatives often speak of the Big Apple as a dystopian wasteland. And the attacks have reached frenzied levels since Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, announced the filing of multiple charges against Donald Trump. How dare Bragg initiate such processes, the re…

Messing with New York has long been a popular pastime among the right. Conservatives often speak of the Big Apple as a dystopian wasteland. And the attacks have reached frenzied levels since Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, announced the filing of multiple charges against Donald Trump. How dare Bragg initiate such proceedings, Republicans wonder, when crime is rampant in its own quagmire?

But the truth is that crime in New York does not run rampant. As in many places, crime has skyrocketed during the pandemic, but it appears to be subsiding. Though Republicans refuse to believe it, crime in America’s safest big city is still far lower than, say, Miami or Columbus, Ohio.

Despite this, even before the health crisis, there was a steady, though not huge, flow of people leaving New York. Why were they leaving? Surely the cause was not crime, although impressions may not coincide with reality. Nor does it seem likely that it was taxes; I’ll get to this in a moment. The most important factor, almost certainly, was and is the cost of housing. Regarding the impressions: from the beginning of the 1990s until the pandemic, the great decrease in crime was accompanied by the conviction of the population that crime was increasing. However, curiously, only a minority claimed that it had increased in their area. Apparently, Americans believed that more and more crime was being committed somewhere, but not where they lived.

And for what it’s worth, despite the proliferation of criminal acts, there are large areas of New York that don’t feel threatening to a casual observer. I know that Marjorie Taylor Greene, after a quick visit, called the city a “disgusting”, “filthy”, “repulsive” and “terrible place”. And, of course, there are bad neighborhoods, but to most of us who live in the city, life seems normal, and it’s hard to believe that people are fleeing an urban nightmare in droves. In fact, in many ways, the quality of life in New York is high…if one can afford it.

But can you afford it? New York is a State with a high taxation. It has to be if it wants to pay for relatively generous social programs. Additionally, New York City imposes additional levies. These taxes make living in it more expensive. However, while average tax rates are lower in red states than in red states, in red states taxation is highly regressive: a much larger share of income is collected from the poor and middle class than from the top 1%. richer. As a consequence, the differences between Republicans and Democrats in terms of the tax burden for ordinary families are less than might be expected.

According to the Taxation and Economic Policy Institute, 60% of Texas’ middle-class taxpayers pay 9.4% of their income in state and local taxes. The rate is higher than that for California’s middle-income families. New Yorkers pay more —12.5%—, but surely these three more tax points are not a compelling reason to leave. The large tax gaps affect the top 1%: 11.3% in New York versus 3.1% in Texas. And certainly there are rich people who move looking for lower taxes. But the wealthiest are also the class of people most likely to place a high value on the services offered by a large and sophisticated city. New York remains one of the world’s favorite residences for the extremely wealthy.

However, it is difficult for the middle class to afford to live in it, not so much because of taxes but because of the price of housing. According to Zillow, the median rent for an apartment in New York is $3,500, about $1,500 more than the median rent in Dallas, for example. Given that the median family income in the city is around $70,000 per year, the “housing tax” paid by middle-class households to live in the Big Apple is on the order of 20% of their income, several times higher than the difference in actual taxes. And if you want to buy a house, the distance between prices is similar: Dallas is 40% cheaper. Oh, and as for the number of homeless people you see—a symptom of the social disorder in New York—living on the streets is largely a consequence of the housing shortage and cost. Therefore, the cost of housing, and not crime or taxes, is the main reason people may want to leave New York. It is not much consolation to point out that, in California, the problem of the unaffordability of this basic good is even greater.

The point is that this should not have to happen. The New York metropolitan area is far more densely populated than anywhere else in the United States, with the average resident living in a borough with about 2,000 people per square mile. Even so, many more homes could be built. I live in a neighborhood with about 23,000 inhabitants per square kilometer, and it is nicer and quieter than one probably imagines; No, it’s not a crowded nightmare.

One of the main reasons developers don’t build more homes in the New York area, and thus why it’s more expensive to live in the city, is that they can’t because of zoning, restrictions on land use and, especially in residential neighborhoods, the opposition of its inhabitants. In other words, the lurid fantasies of the right are the least of it. The “Yes, but not here”, and not crime or taxes, is the main problem in New York.

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