(Submitted title was "New York City population declined by 5.3% since 2020". )

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

New York will, like always, come back.

But! The benefit to our mid size cities is great. We need these mid size cities to grow, and from my understanding, they have! Larger mid size cities mean a better national network for travel, more opportunities for jobs, growth, and movement of people/families. I'm here for all that.

The amount of pushback these measures got, when we were literally just trying to save lives and prevent disability through long covid absolutely staggers the mind and erodes my faith in humanity.

Or you could reasonably conclude that the policies enacted during COVID are yet another example of how we prioritize the elderly over children in the United States, arguably because children don't vote and the elderly do.

We sacrificed the educational, emotional, and psychological development of children during the pandemic to help 90 year olds live to 91. Was this the right thing to do? I don't believe there's a clear answer to that - it's a tradeoff and one that many people felt was not worth it. That doesn't make them bad or selfish, they're just on the opposite side of very difficult question with no clear answer.

I'll point out again, covid killed over 1 million people in the US alone. That doesn't even account for the ~ 10% of infected who got stuck with the lingering effects of long covid.

Yeah, we asked kids to attend school remotely from home. Some didn't have parents that kept them on task, and suffered. The pandemic was hard on everyone, but even in places that didn't lock down, loved ones getting sick and dying takes a toil. I felt like I was rolling the dice every time I visited my grandmother.

The same goes for the elderly. You don't lock down the world to keep them safe (which in NY was a disaster under Cuomo anyway). You take measures to secure their well-being without paralyzing everyone else. And FWIW, there are plenty in that age group who would rather risk COVID to see their grandchildren than live out their remaining years in isolation.

If anything is irrational, it's the ridiculous priorities that were imposed by the lockdown.

Given the information we had at the time, and how violent the virus was ripping through communities it was the best, worst choice we had at the time. Sure it meant you didn't get to go to your social functions or parties you craved, but we kept the curve down and allowed medical facilities and practitioners brace for the infection wave.

It wasn't irrational at all, and if you found wearing a mask a "ridiculous priority" you were part of the problem. Sometimes someone higher up than you needs to impose a restriction or law to protect others.

I have to say this is ridiculously callous. My grandmother cried every day until she passed. I would like to see an investigation into pandemic preparedness. I don’t think we have been getting our money’s worth.

A generation was paralyzed because it had 1 year remote school instead of in person? Kids are just fine. I think they rather got a much more valuable lesson on how to act in a crisis.

People still got paid. Business got done. My kid learned. People got married. People got divorced. Children were born, people died. No evidence of a "paralyzed generation".

My youngest kid has incredibly strong math and verbal skills compared to my older kid, and I suspect that's because the youngest sat and listened to the online instruction along with his sibling.

Absolving all culpability and foisting it on "the government" or "shutdowns" is just as weak as using hyperbole to make misleading claims about how a generation was "paralyzed". Difficult to get shit done? Sure. Not paralyzed.

Not sure how we can isolate and measure just school-from-home effect on kids across age groups, various places etc. but I strongly believe there was some harm and it was not tiny. How much, and if not temporary again I can't say (but maybe some huge long term stats on things like grades, counseling frequency, suicides, BMI etc. can, but who knows if they won't show just 2nd order effect of parents suffering too).

[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/more-140000-us...

What about the other 499 children who missed 2+ years of in-person classes?

That remains to be seen. The 2022 PISA tests suggests that in developed countries, children have missed on the equivalent of 0.5-0.75 of a year's worth of learning.

[1] https://www.economist.com/international/2023/12/05/the-pande...

> nothing is going to magically bring a dead parent back.

nothing is going to magically bring back those years either, for all 500 students.

Maybe the effect of going through a pandemic was a stressful event harmful to school performance, independent of whether your schooling was in-person or remote?

>Education ministries the world over will envy the handful of rich places that have a cheery story to tell amid the gloom. In Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, test scores not only held steady over the pandemic period, they actually ticked up in at least one of the three subjects in which pupils sat exams. Israel and Switzerland are among other countries that appear, at least as judged from these data, to have done reasonably well.

>Some of these outliers protected learning by keeping school closures short. Across the OECD’s dataset there is a modest association between the length of time schools stayed closed and children’s subsequent performance in tests. Teachers in Switzerland ran fully remote or hybrid timetables for only six weeks (the average among countries in Europe was around 29). Closures in Japan were also comparatively zippy: in 2020 schools in that country shortened their summer breaks in order to claw back some of the class hours that children had lost up to then. Singapore, likewise, decided to alter school holidays to maximise learning time.

But did lose those years of in-class instruction, as the PISA tests have shown, post pandemic scores were down from historical trends. The article says that there was a correlation between lockdown intensity and/or catch-up school days and test performance, so I think it's fairly reasonable to conclude that lockdowns did cause a loss of learning.

>Aren't you learning your whole life?

You can also make money your whole life, but that doesn't mean it's totally fine to steal a year's worth of salary from you.

>Do you use everything you learned in school?

And did the pandemic related lockdowns conveniently only caused students to miss the knowledge that they didn't need?

For all the problems of kids staying home, I'd much rather stay home from school and learn online by being healthy than get COVID and stay home from school without learning anything at all. Especially when you consider the 10% of cases that have long term consequences. We saw a few examples of university age athletes giving up their athletic careers because of potentially permanently reduced lung capacity caused by long COVID so it's not just the older generation that has consequences.

I don't feel it's a fair characterization of these methods to say that the main benefit was getting 90 year olds to live to 91. I think the main benefit was slowing down the spread enough that hospitals weren't badly over capacity so that people who needed emergency care mostly could get it. Letting COVID spread like wildfire through the population would result in more people needing emergency care than we had resources for.

Supervised by who, though?

Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you about the risks. But those of us that were working remotely from our office jobs while our kids stayed at home had enormous privilege over the people who still had to go to their jobs in person. Like all the cheering we did for first responders: first responder parents? Oh, well they’re screwed.

IMO we should have prioritized (in the areas where it’s climate appropriate) outdoor schooling. I’m sure there would have been a steep learning curve but it would have been possible, a lot of schools have plenty of outdoor space available.

I'm not sure how you reconcile your claim that you don't believe there's a clear answer to whether it was wright with the emotion-laden and leading statement you made just before.

Everyone suffered during the pandemic. There was no way to spare anyone, it was a traumatic experience for everyone. Having a dead grandmother and grandfather would be much more impactful on their life than the school they missed.

The parent commenter stated that the way we handled COVID made them lose their faith in humanity. I was pointing out that there were a series of choices to make, none of them good, but just because someone wanted to make a different tradeoff does not ipso facto make them a bad or uncaring person.

Was I snarkier than I should have been, sure. That was immature of me.

I'm not really too sure about that.

Or arguably because death is final, death came for the elderly more than the children with this disease, and we were trying to save lives.

We can debate the philosophy of saving people near end of life vs. allowing children to continue with close-contact education. But it's revolting that the first place your mind went was "save the vote".

Hell, old people who vote lean Republican, so if you're going to play a shrewd voting population game with a pandemic, wouldn't it have been in the interests of the "pro-isolation" coalition to let it run amok?

---

One final note, moving away from your premise: The reason we needed to lock down besides saving lives from COVID directly was that our hospitals and funeral homes couldn't handle the burden. You can't treat people with heart attacks and broken bones if the ICU is filled with people dying of influenza-class viruses.

Maybe if our healthcare system can keep up with a disease's infection rate, we let society chug on - as we have each year when preventable, transmissible diseases kill tens of thousands of people per year.

Death always comes for the elderly though. The metric of "years of high quality life saved" is important to apply here.

I was all for the shutdowns starting in March 2020, and was arguing in favor of it, but it then went on for way too long. NYC schools remained closed until fall 2021, and even then they kept shutting down individually for awhile afterwards as part of the COVID protocol. In hindsight it went on for way too long.

Did it actually significsntly save lives or prevent long covid? I'm wondering if any countries didn't shut schools that we could compare to?

I would guess maybe in the initial wave by not overwhelming hospitals it would save a few lives. But when the policies were continually extended thier return on investment dropped as the harms they inflicted increased and the value they provided decreased. Perhaps a better approach would have been to tell the at-risk populations about the risks and mitigations to let them decide what level of protection they wanted for themselves (not talking about others since the whole masking thing turned out to be effectively useless without at least N95s).

My main point is that I know we could save tons of lives by banning cars (not just traffic fatalies but forcing people to walk could prevent many chronic issues), but that doesn't mean the cost/benefit is justified by ignoring the downsides, forcing large opposing population segments into it, and merely stating it was to save lives.

Car safety is somewhat different. While the harms of a car-dependent society are subjectively hard to come to terms with, especially for those who have grown accustom to it, it's a lot easier to objectively measure and predict.

massive? lol. It was like an additional $300 a month.

No, we didn't. Source: had young children during the pandemic and just finished paying back debt I accrued from having to quit my job.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/child-tax-credit/

It sounds like you might have missed out on it due to not knowing about it, which would be unfortunate.

In other words, forcing kids to school at home was the most in-equitable policy in our generation, if not many.

Even things like "has a stable Internet connection" is not a given.

1) School closures were good, kids weren't harmed at all and it saved lives!

2) Schools provide the basis for future success and are critical to our social and economic well-being!

My stance is that, as mediocre as many public schools are, they provide a better environment for learning than home life for the majority of children. We should be moving toward making public schools great. (I'd be the first to agree that a broken system makes that a very difficult task.)

Was someone forcing the grandparents to visit their infected grandchildren? In my own case, I didn't see my own grandmother for two years during COVID other than via Zoom/FaceTime. She has a history of bad lung infections, so none of us wanted to get her sick. This was despite her having four great-grandchildren and being a widow. When she finally got COVID this year for the first time, she developed some blood clots, but was able to pull through and now is back to great health.

I think the damage to children who were isolated from one another was much worse, and unlike the elderly, they couldn't really understand why we lived so unnaturally. If elderly people wanted to "just see their grandkids," they knew the risks and made a choice. Every death is sad, but I have a hard time thinking we should adopt harsh and even draconian measures just to protect those who ought to know better.

Absolutely! I was already under personal quarantine of sorts before the pandemic even started, because I had immune compromised people under my care. I would bever expect society to turn itself upside down to accommodate my particular situation.

How many years of learning loss is “just wanting to see grandkids” worth?

And when did the benefits of closing school stop being worthwhile-how many years after the vaccine was widely available? Because the ongoing disruptions to education were measured in years- all while grandma and grandpa were living it up at bars and restaurants.

Are you factoring in the many other ways that children and families could be kept safe (masking, air filtration, UV sanitizing, outdoor classrooms+heaters, etc)?

The pushback on school closures isn’t because people hate grandma, it’s because some people are capable of a cost-benefit analysis and looking at second order effects when we do so. “Hurt millions of kids to spare thousands of grandmas” folks made me lose my faith in humanity.

>>How many years of learning loss is “just wanting to see grandkids” worth?

Luckily this wasn't the problem, because kids were still learning, maybe at little slower pace, but on the other hand got to learn a lot of things they otherwise wouldn't get to learn in school. Do you use all the knowledge you learned in school? Have you not learned anything new since then?

Opposite for me. Maybe people still care about freedom and agency after all.

It was a no-win situation. Trying to save lives inflicted measurable harm. Doing nothing would also inflict measurable harm. Either side presenting their position as the "correct" position is just biased.

I would also assert that tying your faith in humanity to an unwinnable situation is probably not the correct move, but YMMV.

I think the broader issue with this sort of choice in a pandemic is it does have downstream effects. People going to school everyday could cause an uptick in community cases that then makes necessary trips like the grocery store more dangerous for those who do want to isolate as much as possible. Especially relevant in a city where many people are living together in apartment complexes.

So I agree there's no clear answer here, and I think pre-vaccine I would've kept my kids home regardless. But more generally I am very dissatisfied with how homogeneous and inflexible the school system is, and that is something we should push for change in. Funnily enough, my district has done a full 180 since COVID and this past year stopped accepting doctor's notes to excuse absences! They are quite literally encouraging people to send their kids in even while sick. A friend's son has mono right now and the HS is threatening to hold him back over absences (grades are fine still because ofc that matters less than attendance record.

Maybe complain to the state departments of education and health. Many states have laws on what constitutes an excused absence and procedures around communicable diseases. Many times the local people in power don't know or would rather do whatever they think is best until the state steps in.

Overall the entire situation was completely ridiculous on many levels, but it was the pro-lockdown forever crowd that made me lose my faith in humanity.

Also, my kids were in daycare the whole time outside of Mar to May 2020, and they were spreading all sorts of viruses just like they were before COVID. How the government chose to allow the most prolific spreaders to congregate day after day, but prevent less prolific spreaders is very inconsistent logic.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/seattle-...

Read what you just wrote and ponder on it for a bit.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/test-scores-show-how-...

Are you proposing that old people should be the first off a sinking ship?

Old people have lived life. They should have stayed home and isolated. Kids had practically zero risk. The difference in risk between a healthy 12 year old and the average 80 year old was orders of magnitude different.

Here’s an easy example: why does the US pay doctors more via Medicare (for people over 65) than via Medicaid (for poorer people, including kids).

That is what I wrote, the elderly have more political power.

The same legislature that allocates society’s resources towards healthcare for people age 65+ also chooses to allocate less resources to people who happen to be poor (or have poor parents).

The Additional Medicare Tax is another lovely reminder of how society’s resources, because funnily enough, even though it has been widely known Medicaid does not even pay enough to keep the lights on, there is no Additional Medicaid Tax.

Could you point that out? I saw that the elderly had power - not the wealthy. Many elderly are also poor. Much of the political influence on Medicare comes from those who are working as they near retirement. For example, talks about raising the required age do not affect those already receiving it, but future recipients. Those are the people involved. The people receiving it could care less since the already have their's.

The reason the poor recieve less is because it's not single payer and is funded by other taxes. The general population (voters) feels that the vare minimum is all they deserve (for better or worse, that's how it is).

Again, there is a Medicare tax because it is a non-means-tested single payer system. There is no Medicaid specific tax because it is intended for a small minority of indignant individuals. As with other welfare programs, it paid for out of the general taxes and nothing specific.

It's a money and voter base issue. Yeah, that can be correlated with being old, but there's more to it.

Multiple groups can have varying amounts of power. In this case, I am using the fact that one group is getting a better benefit than another group as proof that the group getting the better benefit has power. Why else would they have it, and why else would those that do not have go without?

> The reason the poor recieve less is because it's not single payer and is funded by other taxes. The general population (voters) feels that the vare minimum is all they deserve (for better or worse, that's how it is).

This is my point. Voters skew older, and providing healthcare to the poor at least equivalent to Medicare is not a priority.

> Again, there is a Medicare tax because it is a non-means-tested single payer system.

This is incorrect. Medicare premiums get more and more means tested every year.

https://www.ncpssm.org/documents/medicare-policy-papers/medi...

Even Social Security is means tested, look up bend points in the benefit formula.

And at the end of the day, all taxes are fungible. Government received money and pays money for benefits. Who gets how much is a political exercise.

I already told you - the people working to get it later are included in the group. It's not just old people.

"Voters skew older, and providing healthcare to the poor at least equivalent to Medicare is not a priority."

It's not a priority because the poor are a small voting segment. The voting segment concerned with Medicare include the elderly and those who are working and thinking about their future retirement, which is a huge segment.

"Medicare premiums get more and more means tested every year."

That's not exactly means-tested. You get Medicare if your old enough, then yes you have premiums and deductibles since this is insurance after all. You even have contribution requirements for things like part A. The permium cost can vary based on income, but that doesn't affect the actual coverage or eligibility.

Yeah, money is fungible. The laws are pretty clear on the funding sources and amounts for the entitlement programs, unlike with welfare programs that are more open-ended and less predictable.

Bend points are not means testing. You get your benefits regardless of your situation. The insurance just pays out based on a formula to adjust to cover the more basic expenses. You can see this intent in the way the formula for payouts is designed as a replacing percent of income as well as in the tax cap.

Stuff like Medicare and Social Security are not welfare programs that are means tested. The costs and benefits can vary based on contributions and income but you are entitled to the benefit. These programs are not powerful just because of the old people. The workers expecting these benefits in the future are a huge source of the political power. It's the money and the fact that people have been paying in with an expecting of benefits that's the difference.

> The insurance just pays out based on a formula to adjust to cover the more basic expenses.

Both of these are means testing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_test

> A means test is a determination of whether an individual or family is eligible for government assistance or welfare, based upon whether the individual or family possesses the means to do without that help.

> The workers expecting these benefits in the future are a huge source of the political power. It's the money and the fact that people have been paying in with an expecting of benefits that's the difference.

I see what you are saying, but I don’t think many people buy it anymore. The demographics alone make it quite obvious that workers today should not be expecting those benefits, not to mention the continuous devaluation of them already for many years.

The old/young divisions are thoroughly established. Technically, I guess the division is old and young expecting inheritances versus young not expecting inheritances. There are just so many examples. California’s prop 13, defunding state colleges in favor of indebting students, tiered taxpayer funded DB pensions and retiree healthcare that are only available to older employees.

NJ just cut taxes big time for people 65+:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/nyregion/property-tax-cut...

Rising a child is incredible difficult nowadays, and government shouldn't close schools and daycare.

It was a shitty situation all around, and I'm definitely not arguing that schools should have remained open that spring. But it's silly to pretend that education was not affected across the country by the switch to remote.

If only there was a way we could stop the elderly from contracting covid from their grandkids that didn't involve isolating children from social interaction and learning at the most crucial periods of their development.

I have an idea, maybe the people most at risk of dying can isolate themselves so everyone else doesn't have to.

Okay, what's the least harmful? It seems obvious to me the easiest solution (blanket ban of in person schooling) was chosen rather than trying to minimize harm.

Just off the cuff, regarding high risk teachers, why not have _them_ work remote with an in class, lower risk, TA to handle the physical interaction required?

I can't say I have all of the solutions or even a good suggestion but I can say that, after the initial closing of schools when there was very little information, once the risk factors became much more apparent, there was a minimal amount of rethinking of policy because everyone had already taken ideological stances when there was only ideology to make decisions with. That extends well beyonds schools as well but schools and retirement homes are essentially the opposite ends of the spectrum of risk and seemed to, at best, have the same solutions applied to them.

I had a much longer comment written but I really don't want to relitigate covid for the umpteenth time.

NYC no doubt has a lot of things going for it, I think being the financial center for the hegemony is the deciding factor. In my view survival of NYC probably has less to do with local crime than the outcome of future wars.

I think that’s what has made it, and the other global cities like it, so extremely resilient over a long period of time. That and financial services being, thus far, an evergreen industry.

I concur. Some cities that have outlived their empires -- Rome, Istanbul (Constantinople), London, Baghdad, Alexandria, Cairo, Kabul, Mumbai.

Even NYC, Boston, Philly predate the US constitution.

This is a great point! I like the fact that the US is more decentralized and isn't dominated by a single large city. Germany is similar in this regard. I understand the appeal of NYC, especially to the young, but if other cities reap the rewards of increased inward migration, then I think it's a positive thing for the country overall. People too might realize they can have a better quality of life without the insane competition for resources.

I don't know about the US, but here in Canada the 2016 census was already showing meaningful decline in communities with >100,000 people, with communities of 1,000-29,999 people picking up most of the slack. COVID may have accelerated things, but signs of a 'counterubranization' movement were already presenting itself long before we ever heard of COVID.

Detroit won’t return to the way it used to be, but it will regain its footing in its own way over time.

However, unlike the situation in the 1980's, there's no desire to address any of their problems because it undermines so many ideological premises the residents cling to. Coupled with the most morally narcissistic people on the face of the Earth, I don't see any turnaround.

The mechanisms necessary to avoid becoming Detroit are not there

1. These declines are until mid 2022. NYC's population has rebounded since then big time. 2. No, it's not crime deterring people. Crime is heading back close to historic lows. It's cost of living that's deterring people. 3. Rich people are moving in/staying/people in NYC are getting richer. It's the poor who cannot afford to live in NYC that are leaving.

I’m curious how much the Polish will put up a fight since they’ve had the Kennedy expressway separating them from the advance on the Northwest side; they’ve always been one of the largest ethnic groups, but if they’re anything like the state of the Ukrainians where there wasn’t enough young generations holding down the neighborhood I expect they’ll fall over in 10 - 15 years if things stay on course (that's from my boomer Ukranian landlord who grew up there and whose mother, whom didn't speak English and was the actual owner, lived above me in a two-story).

[0] https://joinhandshake.com/blog/employers/where-are-college-s...

An interesting possible dynamic is that long-term dynamic stays in place but fewer new people move in.

"The median wage of those who left the city in 2022 was $49,000, which was 18% less than those who left in 2021.

Among those who left the city in 2022, 64% were non-White, which was higher than the 58% in 2021 and the 62% in 2019 and 2018."

Although I would not say there was any group who is a majority in NYC.

I think it is far likely composition effects from: - High-income people who work remote or hybrid started demanding more space for work and living. Given NYC housing is basically fixed (there is almost no building), this trend has decreased the average number of people per housing unit. - As the article notes, "the city’s populace is overall older and wealthier": wealthier people use more housing per person and tend to have fewer children.

There are absolutely tradeoffs involved in living in a big city, maybe especially NYC. You might still choose to do so absent any specific work-related reason but no one can seriously suggest that taking a daily commute off the table couldn't seriously change the decision someone makes about where they live.

I've been interested in the idea for years, but I haven't seen any on Zillow that match the intersection of price <> accommodations, and I'm wondering if I'm looking in the wrong place.

The study mentions remote work being part of the reason for the shift; this also confounds "city-to-suburb" versus "city-to-Midwest" migration since it's harder to cross-check against employment statistics - again, without more detailed surveys.

[1] Demographer :)

If you click the drop down where it says "DP05: ACS Demographic and Housing Estimates" you can select which year's estimate you want to use (or use the Decennial Census). If you want a specific geographical area, click Geos.

Then you can get data at whatever level you'd like.

I'd been living in NJ for a few years before the pandemic and,just before the pandemic, had finally saved up enough for a down payment. We started looking summer of 2019, and were picky and not in a rush so were still looking when the pandemic hit. What this meant is I got to do a compare/contrast on my town's housing market. Right after everything shut down, there was no activity for a few weeks, but by spring things were restarting (with masking, or even virtual showings). What I saw is that inventory didn't increase -- maybe even decreased actually, as people weren't eager to move -- but demand became insane as people fled the city. Houses went for $50k or more over asking regularly -- the same houses we'd looked at the summer before and passed on because of shoddy construction or suspiciously strategically placed drywall in the basement.

I actually kept a spreadsheet to help me figure out how much we'd have to bid to have a chance without over bidding. We were finally successful in 2021, so got to take advantage of the super low rates, even though we ended up paying more up front.

Here's the summary stats I ended up with, sale dates 2020-06-25 through 2022-03-18

    Square Feet Listing Price Sale Price List vs Sale List vs sale % diff
  Mean 1,993.36 $568,002.74 $615,661.54 $52,770.80  9.67%
  Median 1,872.50 $550,000.00 $610,000.00 $51,900.00  9.60%. 
  Max 3,700.00 $1,399,900.00 $1,400,000.00 $225,000.00  37.28%
  Min 1,140.00 $300,000.00 $285,500.00 ($127,000.00) -19.54%
  Quartile 25% 1,607.25 $495,000.00 $527,750.00 $14,750.00  2.78%
  Quartile 50% 1,872.50 $550,000.00 $610,000.00 $51,900.00  9.60%
  Quartile 75% 2,300.00 $625,000.00 $690,499.50 $91,250.00  16.72%

The metro area is wider, things like Jersey City and Westchester etc.

Florida also ranked #1 in domestic migration, #2 in international migration, and #1 with the most people moving in per day at 1,218. Texas followed Florida in both total net migration (349,575) and most people moving in per day (958). Florida’s total population has reached more than 22.2 million and sits third in the nation behind California and Texas, previously surpassing New York.

New York and California, two of the biggest markets to the South and South-Central regions, experienced the largest out migration, followed by Illinois.

https://tampabayedc.com/news/how-many-people-moved-to-florid...

If the only reason you are paying all that rent money for that tiny apartment is so you can take the subway to work, and you can work from Yonkers over Zoom just as well, why not?

I haven't moved because I already owned a place in an exurb, but if I had to go into Boston daily as I did for a while, that wouldn't be sustainable but I can go in for a show in the evening (or a customer visit). There are probably a lot of people for whom their housing calculus changes if they don't have to regularly go into a downtown office.

If it’s only an expensive studio apartment that’s keeping one here, I agree, they should save the cash and make room for the rest of us.

> For example, most people moving to Florida moved from New York, the fourth largest state in population and a longstanding origin of Florida-bound movers.

https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2023/07/04/florida-i...

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/state-to-stat...

"IDK, they sound like "Heyyy, I'm wolkin' here" and they have new york tags and italian surnames. I haven't asked them where specifically they're from. They seem to love it here though. We have 3 families in my neighborhood."

People who could, bought a house in Florida, New Jersey also the Carolinas, some in Texas. Also many people just "went back home", that happens every year since NYC is a popular destination but also grinds people left and right. If you're average middle class and need to have a "normal" job to make a living, NYC is not only unfair but also straight up abusive.

That's why a large group of employed people and business owners also left, not only the unemployed.

The drivers are erratic and irresponsible.

Everything is a scam or hustle of some kind.

The cultural institutions like museums and libraries are extremely poor even compared to mid-tier northeast or midwest cities.

And finally, the public schools are mostly awful and even the universities are a tier below cities of similar size.

For most though, it's about housing cost - those move to Jersey or MAYBE LI. That's a larger group, too.

Florida has no income tax.

There are two ways to gather crime stats: NYPD reporting them, surveys.

Here's a problem with the former: the stats are easy to game: how people are charged, which crimes are responded to, and which reports are taken are all subject to adjustments. Anyone who's tried to get the police to file a report knows: you need to sometimes persuade.

Then you have the DA. In Manhattan, Alvin Bragg was elected on a platform of de-incarceration. That means that he believes the 'carceral system' disproportionately punishes the poor and POC and further tears them from their communities. In his Day 1 essay, he outlines what he did: look the other way at property crimes such as shoplifting, and low level muggings and the like. He won't charge, and the police aren't going to stick their necks out for a suspect that's not getting punished (charges dropped or declined to prosecute).

I'm happy to pull some stats from articles I saved that prove this. I saved them because it's incredibly unpopular (it's viewed as a 'right wing talking point' historically which renders it false prima facie). I can tell you anecdotally the aggression is something I haven't seen ever, mostly from vagrant types that live in stations and live a life of freedom to punch, smoke, defecate and worse. I know of physical assaults in mid town I hadn't heard about in decades, and I've seen hairy situations during rush hour that haven't existed in my entire time here.

Are people fleeing? That's an easier debate. The city has a cycling in of students, new grads and internationals, and a cycling out of marrieds, and the terminally fed-up with communal living and loud crowded commutes.

But the city won't die.

Keep in mind, crime has risen for each of three years through 2022, and while that trend is worrisome, the actual number of crimes is only back up to 2006 levels. https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/crime-statistics/histori... That's not a year known as "the bad old days" or particularly dangerous, though you can certainly write the alarming headline, "highest crime in 16 years." (FWIW indications are the trend reversed this year https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-06/nyc-crime...)

The population decline coincides with the pandemic and remote work, and from my own personal experience here that's a much bigger driver of people leaving. Many people fled to their vacation homes and never came back, other people bought new places upstate and moved.

Like all cities, but probably more than most, NYC is at an inflection point where it's figuring out what its future looks like as work habits change. The offices won't all fill back up but aren't easily converted to housing. And frankly NYC's industries, though dynamic and high end, continue to face tech disruption, and Silicon Valley only has more economic strength every year.

So there could be even more population loss. Rents seem to be softening. There could absolutely be a down period here, economically and otherwise. But if you look back at the history of the city, these have been the most fertile times culturally. Crime in the 70s and 80s went hand in hand with punk rock in LES, art scene in SoHo, independent film wave, birth of hip hop. There were some actual businesses that came out of all that. I don't want NYC to become that bad again, it's not good for the people who live here, but if there is a lull as the city figures out what it is, there will be a silver lining.

NYC is a ton of fun, but it is also, to sum it up in one word - hard.

People who have lived there 10/20/etc years and not lived elsewhere underestimate how much easier life outside the 5 boroughs can be.

Some scoff at NYC people owning a weekend/vacation home, but the funny thing is due to costs... it's not just the 1%.

I have had plenty of friends who rented in city while owning their weekend home. I have friends that did the math and realized a car + vacation home 2x the size of their apartment was cheaper than selling their 2bed & buying a 3bed, etc.

The crux of the problem is that there isn't a ton of housing and you are competing with the global 1%. In my previous building there used to be a guy upstairs who talked about the Ferraris he kept at his home in London. My current building has a number of trust fund kids including an under-25 year old child of petrostate president/PM living in the biggest, best units upstairs.

I basically make good FAANG money, but these people are another dimension, and they are everywhere in NYC. This effect goes down every level of the economic ladder where you are competing for housing with people who you would not normally be competing elsewhere.

Keep in mind NYPD had its budget cut by billions of dollars and lost record numbers of officers over the same period. Part of accurate crime statistics is actually finding an officer to report a crime to and then them giving you the time of day. And that's if you haven't given up on the city already and aren't "mindin' yo own business".

I lived in NYC from 1984 through 2021 and I can tell you unequivocally that in 2021 it seemed more like 1988 than 2006.

If anything, the mid-2000s felt like the safest period of time that I lived in the city -- at the height of where a good party would be held in the same kind of places dead bodies would be dumped a decade or two earlier.

Look at murders. Dead bodies will not be hidden.

And murders are also showing returns close to historic lows.

Also, the cities people are moving to have much higher per capita crime than NYC (nearly every mid to major US city has much higher per capita crime than NYC because NYC is incredibly safe for a US city).

Here are the numbers (from July...this is what a quick DDG returned, but I'm sure more recent numbers will be similar).

https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00088/nypd-citywide-crim...

Homicides were down 35% since July 2022. Homicides almost certainly do not have the "reported" crime issue at least in the US.

Looking at cities that do not have the same reporting problem that these large cities with a certain political bent you can see that murder does not track with non-violent crime aka property crime and only has a loose correlation to other violent crimes.

it is entirely possible for Theft, robbery, Rape, etc to be increase while murder is decreasing.

Further according to U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics issued in March 2023, between 34% and 58% of violent crimes were reported to police. For property crimes, the percentage reported to police was between 28% and 44%.[1] It may seem add on only 34% of violent crime would be reported, but we have seen many reports in recent years of police treating victims like criminals in the first place so many people will just move on and never involve the police even with violent crime.

Then there is the reported 90,000+ package thefts [2] that occur that NYPD does not put on their comstat figures they release as these are considered minior offenses, but have a real impact on daily life (aka broken windows)

[1] https://www.westsiderag.com/2023/07/09/column-how-many-uws-c...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/nyregion/package-theft-ea...

This was a block and a half past a bus stop where the driver had previously been stopped. As I was stuck, run over, with myself and my bike stuck in the front right wheelwell, the driver opened the door and spent all of his time kicking me until I could pull the bike free, rather than help. Then he closed the door and drove away.

I sat on the sidewalk and calmly collected myself and my busted bike and called the non-emergency line for the 114th Precinct. Here's what the cop answering the phone told me:

"Hey jackass, do you actually think we're going to file a report against a city employee? click"

That's why I don't talk to the NYPD.

Where do you see that? Looking at their spending, that does not seem to be the case:

https://ibo.nyc.ny.us/RevenueSpending/nypd.html

Anyway, wasn't the election of former police officer Eric Adams supposed to be a turning point for the city? Did the tough-on-crime mayor not have a measurable impact on crime? I noticed in San Francisco they elected a moderate Mayor (London Breed) and tossed out their reformist DA in a recall but it does appear the crime problem seems intractable even for hardline moderates.

OP is incorrect. The NYPD has had its budget consistently increased each year.

There is one asterisk, in 2020, where the then-speaker attempted to hide the increases to the police budget by allocating the funding for police embedded in schools to the Department of Education, but this was caught pretty quickly. So the actual total amount budgeted for police up-front did not decrease, and of course the amount actually paid was much higher (because the police have gone over their budget every year consistently for a very long time).

There wasn't much support among elected officials for actually decreasing police funding. The mayor at the time made a pretty mild criticism of police violence and then the police union threatened to assault his daughter, so he reversed course and that didn't leave much room for even lip service to reducing police funding from the top.

SanFran seems to have this policy when it comes to shoplifting, never mind your eyes, or the video, since the police dept has a policy to never respond to retail theft, retail theft crimes are dropping... it is like magic.

...which is also starting to happen in NYC.

Can't shoplift from stores if they don't exist.

Curious though if you actually lived in that neighborhood your whole 25? years in NYC?

I think personally my experience is that while city-wide crime might be similar to when I moved here nearly 20 years ago, I do not live in the same area. For example I had 2 mentors that started a decade before me. The "up and coming" areas they lived in their 20s were BK Heights & East Village (not alphabet city). The equivalent "up and coming" 20 something who I mentor is probably in Bushwick.

Bushwick 2023 is certainly grittier than Brooklyn Heights was in 2000.

In my experience, the places that were sketchy back then in Manhattan are still sketchy today, but the radius of sketch is much smaller and the demarcation line much brighter.

To use your examples, I agree that bushwick today is grittier than BH in 2000, but my impression is that it compares similarly to, say, avenue C in 2000, where there were hipster bars and restaurants popping up, but it was still considered less safe than the area around washington square park. I don't live in bushwick, though, so I'm sure its an imperfect comparison.

Thanks. Now I have an irresistible urge to MacGyver some crazy geopolitical circumstances where the NYPD invades Finland. That will be my life's work.

Everything is outrageously expensive.

Middle class gets crushed.

If you've wealthy, no point in having your main residence in NYC (see, more taxes).

Will get worse before it gets better.

I moved out of New York City in 2020. The overriding reason was not this, it was just a fluke that I got a very compelling out of state job offer in 2019, and they requested I move in 2020.

However, I am making about about $150-$160k as an SWE, and it goes a lot further here (although having to spend $700-$800 a month for a car, which I did not have to do in NYC, bites into that a little). I have a new, big, apartment with a front door to a tree-lined street in a nice walkable neighborhood near my workplace for less than $2000 a month. In New York I would have an older, smaller apartment on a higher floor in not as nice of a neighborhood for more a month.

I know people say to move to the Bay area because that's where the action is for tech jobs and where you make connections etc., but I don't see why not take a step on a way for a decent paying job in a cheap city where you can accumulate savings while your skillset is increasing.

The juniors/associates I work with making <$100k a year say they can barely afford their expenses now here. I don't know what they'd be doing in the Bay Area or New York. They have roommates too.

I saved up a ton of money down here, and gained experience as well. If I move back to New York (or to the Bay Area), I do so on surer footing - I have a lot of money saved up for a rainy day now.

It also makes for a situation where those with lower income - even associate/junior SWEs at Fortune 100 companies - can't afford to live in cities like NYC, San Francisco etc.

My boss did similar until he nearly lost his mind WFH with a working spouse and toddler all running around the room.

Meanwhile my current team is remote and my 24 year old coworker in Miami rents a 2 bedroom with his non-working wife. This is, I cannot stress this enough.. completely unheard of in NYC.

If voters like expensive housing, I guess we'll keep getting expensive housing.

Most famous people you know have enough flexibility that they can be in their West coast / Florida / Mountains / Beach / Westport / Greenwich / Short Hills / etc home 183+ days per year.

And, really, general quality of life. When you just want to spend quiet time at home, somewhere outside of the big city is going to provide something more quiet and comfortable. And when you want to do the things that the city uniquely has to offer, you go there while you do those things. NYC, nor anywhere else you might want to be, is certainly not walled off to outsiders. There is no advantage to being there all the time.

Sure Mr Tribeca might have had an awesome loft in Tribeca, but he also has like a 100 acre estate on the Hudson. And a place in Montauk. And and and..

“In the pandemic’s wake, we see an altered population and it raises longstanding concerns about the cost of living, the growing wealth gap, the need to preserve a strong middle class, and the challenges of serving an aging population, while ensuring that families are able to raise their children here. We need the city to remain competitive on the world stage and a place where people want to move, put down roots and thrive.”

Literally so many people want to move here, but you look on all of streeteasy on a given day and there’s like 500 apartments. In a city of millions.

Sure you can pay more and get something. But it used to be that you traded a lot of quality of life (in unit washer dryer, dishwasher, ac, no walkups, cars, space, etc) for a lower price and the social aspects of living in a city. People don’t believe it, but cities used to be cheap. Now you literally pay more for less in all respects especially during Covid. As the prices have been spiraling up, you also get demographic shifts of only rich people or literally homeless shitting on the streets so you lose the cultural elements of having a diverse income unless you go deep into Brooklyn.

I’m not arguing that NYC is not fun still. It’s still great. But without housing for a semi normal price (I can’t even get a place with a dishwasher for less than 2.5k in most areas), and a lot of it, the trade off for living in nyc is making less and less sense.

>Literally so many people want to move here, but you look on all of streeteasy on a given day and there’s like 500 apartments. In a cities of millions.

I'm currently in my mid-30's. Throughout all of my 20's, I thought it would be a blast to live in NYC. Then I had a good stretch where I visited it a whole bunch of times, hanging out with friends and family who lived there, and you know what I noticed? Unless you were an older family member who owned a home/apartment, every younger person was renting and the topic of conversation among locals, both locals who knew each other and locals who just met one another, was about where they're living, how much their rent is, what kind of battle they had to go through to get the place, what kind of battles their friends went through to get their places, and then they'd compare the different amenities they had or didn't have. I watched these same conversations - some of which were told like war stories - play out again and again and again and again.

Then, you get into the whole issue of bed bugs, how prevalent they are in NYC and how much of a nightmare it is to deal with them, and you realize that life in NYC is largely spent just trying to figure out how to have a place to live, and it suddenly feels incredibly stupid to bother to try and move there. The nightlife and entertainment and culture, as cool as they are, just aren't worth it if you're constantly hassling with such a basic need.

But that's just me. /shrug

I can't speak to the bedbugs problem, I've been lucky I suppose.

My (now) wife & I both got well paying jobs at banks out of college almost 20 years ago. Our entire signing bonuses went to apartment fees & deposits. We were each in a situation where 1 paycheck per month went to the rent. Neither of us had a dishwasher, let alone a washer/dryer, central air, any aircon.. etc. Our buildings had bugs&rats, and walls thin enough to hear neighbors phone calls.

Marrying and moving up to nicer places, we still had no washer/dryer across the next 2 apartments.

Finally when we felt like we had "made it" in our mid-30s, we bought a new condo and finally have a washer/dryer. It cost more than my parents, in-laws, and sister's homes combined.. and then multiplied by two. It has only 2 beds (not 3 like the aforementioned homes). My kitchen has a stove the size of a fisher price play kit, and the oven doesn't fit standard sized baking trays. I have only 1 zone AC which can't manage to keep the different rooms within +/-5F of each other.

I could live like a proverbial king in 95% of the rest of the country on this budget.

$0.60 per mile is $6k per year at 10k miles per year, which is a decent amount of driving. $9k per year at 15k miles per year.

However, you can usually get more than 200k miles/10 years out of a car, so those costs above are very high end costs. Unless you opt for luxuries, I think annual car spend can easily be brought down to $6k, or $500 per month. Even less if you opt for liability only insurance, and live in a place that does not require you to drive 10k miles per year.

You definitely spend more than $10-12k/year once you have a family for even a modest amount of space.

And that's the average cost of car ownership, it's easy to find a cheap car.

Many NYers need to construct elaborate fantasies to delude themselves that actually living in NYC is totally economical/convenient/rational, and not just their personal preference. Something about a river in Egypt.

In reality while it's fun, its also often inconvenient, expensive, or both.

Yes, people talk about their rent and their apartments (amongst many other things!), but it's because it's one of the things they all have in common— they rent. And because we loved to collectively complain about things.

And not once in the 10 years did I have bed bugs. I think I knew one other person with them (barring I'm sure a few who never shared).

All that being said, there is absolutely a housing shortage AND things in NYC are tougher than anywhere else. But I liken NYC to the doughnut added to the baseball bat when batters warm up— once you take it off (and live anywhere else) everything feels easier.

It works ok in your 20s because you may not have pets/kids/ailing parents/etc to worry about. And you don't realize that you are treading water while your friends outside the city are moving onto more established phases of their lives..

New Yorkers have been doing this for decades upon decades. When I moved here in the early 2000s I thought it was weird too, but it's totally normal to ask those sorts of questions of each other here. It's been difficult to "make it" here for as long as New York has been New York. My grandmother once told me towards the end of her life about how she and my grandfather had tried to live in NYC back after WWII and how hard it was, how they didn't last long. I didn't even know they had lived anywhere besides the Boston area until then.