Andrea Wilhelm left her apartment in New York City in August and is not sure if she will ever return.
To the software designer of 35 years he loved living in New York: going to Broadway shows, frequenting dog parks and taking the casual walks of everyday life.
For almost 5 years, he voluntarily paid the rents and taxes premium of the city, although he had to move to work in another state.
But the pandemic
“I thought ‘The city is going to come back. By July, everything will be fine. ‘ But I was still not doing well, “he says.
” I wasn’t planning on leaving at all, “he adds. “It was a complete change.”
Increase in moving services
Since March, real estate companies and moving companies have seen a flood of applications from people leaving New York, many of them young families, as the pandemic fuels demand for larger homes and more outdoor space, while facilitating relocation by expanding remote work.
So far, the rise has shown no signs of slowing down, says Liz Nunan, president of the Houlihan Lawrence real estate firm, which handles home sales in suburban New York City, and reported her best year on record in 2020.
“One of the things I learned in 2020 is that I have no idea what the future holds, but I feel quite optimistic on 2021”, He says. “I think we will have a year almost as strong as it turned out 2020 ”.
E n 2020 , relocations of sde New York City They led to l status of New York to record the largest population decline in all E E. OR U. and its first population decline since the decade of 2000.
This exodus has generated a small A universe of articles that debate whether New York City is dead or dying, and what should be done – if anything can be done – to help it recover.
Close Business and Unemployment
Now that the US faces an economic crisis likely to last longer than the pandemic that precipitated it, such concerns are not unique to the US’s largest city. .US.
Urban centers smaller than New York, across the country, have seen desperate signs of a much sought after renaissance (new restaurants, businesses in previously abandoned buildings) almost disappear overnight.
“This is a difficult time for everyone,” says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “The real problem is: can these cities maintain their economic vitality?”
In New York, the The pandemic has closed theaters, emptied offices, stopped tourism and turned shopping and restaurants into hazards that you must take at your own risk, destroying industries that employed a fifth of the city’s workforce.
Up to a third of small businesses in the city p would hate did not survive the pandemic , according to estimates from the local business group Partnership for New York City. Most businesses in the city center do not expect staff to return to the office in full. Some firms have already left.
The situation has pushed the city’s unemployment rate to more of the 12%, nearly double the national average, swelled the ranks of the homeless and drove out more than 549. 000 people like Andrea, which further strained public finances.
In response, New York leaders have raised the possibility of raising taxes and cutting services such as transportation, garbage collection and park maintenance, while calling for emergency help from Washington DC to solve financial problems, prayers that have hitherto fallen on deaf ears.
Michael Hendrix, director of state and local policy for the Manhattan Institute’s free-market think tank, fears that potential cuts will further accelerate exit of people, by damaging the conveniences that make life in New York attractive and leaving a poorer city for those who stay.
“The pandemic is not so much the biggest challenge for New York City,” he says. “It is really the second-order consequences that have dealt a blow to the recovery of the city and its citizens.”
“New York is not dead, but it is on life support,” he says. “Whether your recovery is measured in months, years or decades, it is primarily determined by the degree of leadership that we see in the city. And I think that’s why we should be so concerned. ”
Competition from other cities
In a way, such concerns are exclusively American, reflecting the security concerns and weak educational systems that distinguish so many American cities from their counterparts in Europe and Canada, says Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto. He predicts that the abandonment of cities outside the US will be less dramatic and more temporary.
In the US, however, the urban resurgence early decade of 2000 had shown signs of fading even before the pandemic, as immigration slowed and relocation to the suburbs accelerated.
In New York, the population has been declining since 2016 .
The expansion of remote work caused by the pandemic means that the city now competes with even more places to host businesses and families, a trend It’s unlikely to be completely reversed even after life returns to normal, says Professor Florida.
“Now talented people have options to choose from with remote work. Those choices will be made with care, ”he says. “The big winners are places with a lot of amenities, and the premium for amenities will go up. This means cities with beautiful coastlines or rural areas near the mountains. Places like Miami Beach, Bozeman in Montana or Aspen in Colorado, or the Hudson Valley in New York. ”
Andrea, who initially moved into her mother’s home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she says she hasn’t completely ruled out New York. But for now, he’s planning a cross-country road trip, working remotely while exploring new cities he could potentially live in.
“I’ll get in the car and drive across the country, and I’ll see if something feels good, ”he says. “If not, I’ll see where the world is in September.”
Kevin Pearsall and his wife left New York City in March for Atlanta, Georgia. After years of focusing on his advertising careers, the man from 35 years says they wanted a hometown where they didn’t feel like housing and other living costs they were still exaggerated, even with their healthy six-figure salaries.
Both landed jobs as remote workers for companies in New York, another sign that convinced them that the city was no longer the only place where they could combine professional opportunity and social life.
“All the good things about New York: speakeasies, beer gardens … that’s not as unique as it used to be,” says Pearsall.
“We were already up and running, thinking of leaving, ”he says. The pandemic “just accelerated” the move.
“I know this city will recover”
New York leaders have expressed his confidence that the city will continue to be attractive, pointing out that the departure of a few hundred thousand hardly makes a dent in a city of more than eight million.
“I’m not going to beg people to stay “, said in 2020 Mayor Bill de Blasio. “I know this city will recover. I know. And I know other people will come. They have done it for generations. ”
“We cannot overestimate this moment in history,” he added. “It is a passing moment. There will be a vaccine. And then all the strengths of New York City will reassert themselves. ”
Neighborhoods that emptied during lockdowns in 2020 were the wealthiest in the city, but a Manhattan Institute survey found that two out of five New Yorkers would leave the city if they could live in anywhere they wanted, with greater dissatisfaction among those with lower incomes.
Hendrix says it’s tempting to expect a more affordable city to emerge if the rich leave, but worries such an exodus will still generate more challenges, given the city’s dependence on high-income residents for tax collection.
“It is not necessary for the majority to abandon one the city or that the majority change their lifestyles to make a big difference ”, he says.
Professor Florida says that it is likely that the largest cities, such as New York and San Francisco, remain attractive to young people, who should benefit if rents continue to fall.
But he warns that after previous crises such drops were short-lived. And in other parts of the United States, he expects city malls, including some in the growing “Sunbelt,” southeast and southwestern US, to face big challenges.
“The commercial districts, those places that they were stacking and stacking workers in vertical towers, they are in a real reckoning, ”he says.
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