That's obnoxiously self-centered to say that if the city government doesn't fix your personal issues with it, one of the five biggest metro area in the world will become empty in decades. Sure, New York could lose the ability to maintain a vital and legal small business sector, but the city is not going anywhere. The worst that could happen is a period similar to the horrible 70s, with difficult finances and poor opportunities for people, until the city gets its head out of the sand.
You seem to be massively misunderstanding what he meant by "basically a ghost town". All he meant is that lots of people will leave, opportunity will be reduced, etc. You seem to be taking it far too literally.
And no, it's not obnoxious or self centered to say that if the NY government doesn't fix it's massive number of problems that bad things are going to happen. It seems pretty clear that's the case.
Yep, what OP is getting at is that in time, as a side-effect of out-migration the cool things that draw people to NYC will start to slowly disappear entirely. The small bakeries, the things that bring charm to neighborhoods all over the city. Safety is by far the biggest one. Chelsea is legitimately a dangerous place to walk around and I've lived in pretty seedy areas before, especially in college (where my neighbor was robbed at knife-point and my apt was broken into by heroin addicts multiple times).
What he means is that the people who remain will be those who are too poor to leave. Whom will be slowly replaced by wealthier and wealthier transients. Which is sad, by far the worst kind of gentrification.
>The small bakeries, the things that bring charm to neighborhoods all over the city.
You're starting to see this in bits and pieces already. New rental space is primarily going to chain restaurants and box stores because the rent is too damn high for anyone not corporate to get started. _The Atlantic_ was talking about the issue of lots going vacant for months at a time because the owners are holding out for insane lease prices...in part because they need to pay insane taxes on the property.
I love New York (in small doses) but it's not tenable as it exists right now.
All of this is wrong. Leaseholders are holding out for higher rents not because of taxes but because of property values and the corresponding loans they have.
If they rent out something for a discount, it will read to a reevaluation of their entire property, which would then lead to them being underwater and impossible for them to borrow more money.
This is true not just in New York but all of the US where property owners are heavily indebted and rely on debt to both grown and maintain their businesses.
Having to default means that they basically can’t borrow anymore and can’t continue their businesses.
It has nothing to do with taxes, which would drop if they rented out their property for less.
> Yep, what OP is getting at is that in time, as a side-effect of out-migration the cool things that draw people to NYC will start to slowly disappear entirely. The small bakeries, the things that bring charm to neighborhoods all over the city.
You don't need any kind of net migration to do this, gentrification has already done it over the last 20 years. People who move there now don't care about that, though. They care about the city being Disneyland for rich people.
Communication is a two way street dude. As a speaker, its your responsibility to consider your audience when encoding your thoughts as incredibly inefficient, verbose, and imprecise human language. As a listener, your responsibility is to consider the speaker and what they mean in their context. Its also your responsibility to clarify things that you think its possible that you have misunderstood. It is of course the speaker's responsibilty then to double check that you've understood things if they get the chance.
I think we should expect better use of vocabulary from the audience at HN, who tend to be better educated than the general population. Expecting people to say "people will become discouraged and leave" instead of "NY will become a ghost town" -- when the former is what they actually mean -- is not unreasonable.
Sure, I will concede that it is the listener's responsibility to seek clarification when responding to an ambiguous statement or claim. But here, there was no ambiguity, just hyperbole.
Hyperbole is used far more often here (and on the Internet in general) than it ought to be. We can, and should, have nuanced discourse here. Let's keep the bar high.
Its not an insult. But feel free to take it the wrong way. I just hope that next time you violently disagree with someone, you stop and think "what are other ways i could interpret this that make more sense?"
You keep placing the responsibility on the wrong person. Worse, you're assuming that the person you're speaking to doesn't know their own flaws. That is insulting.
New York State and California have lost enough population that they are likely to loose at least one representative in the house of representatives.
This "too big to fail" argument is BS - they are failing and once cities start to go into death spirals they can accelerate in astonishing ways.
And just to make things extra spicy, thanks to COVID job mobility has never been greater. This isn't your fathers economy. Any of these cities taking anyone for granted do so at their own peril. San Francisco's insane policy of supporting shoplifting up to $900 has caused Wallgreens to pull out entirely, Target closes at 6PM now - what do small businesses do where their only locations are in areas afflicted with these sane policies? When losses exceed revenue they go out of business. As if COVID wasn't bad enough :p
Do you have the data for this? I just saw a story showing that CA flight is largely a talking point more than an actual phenomenon. Would love to see the numbers here.
> 2020 Migration Trends: U-Haul Ranks 50 States by Migration Growth
...
Growth states are calculated by the net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks entering a state versus leaving that state in a calendar year. Migration trends data is compiled from more than 2 million one-way U-Haul truck customer transactions that occur annually.
...
California ranks last by a wide margin, supplanting Illinois as the state with the greatest net loss of U-Haul trucks. California has ranked 48th or lower since 2016...
Please correct me if I am wrong, but this appears to be a common mistake; they aren't reporting a per capita number, but a total number. When this happens, California will rank near-first (most of a good thing) or near-last (most of a bad thing) because it has the largest population.
Doesn’t the higher population affect both numbers? More UHauls are leaving CA than entering, even if both numbers are large. I think I see what you’re saying, that if you normalize per capita, they could be anywhere in the “net leaving” cohort. But it’s still a high number of UHauls going out for 5 years running.
There might be other factors. Maybe people leave CA with more belongings than they arrive with. Maybe new CA jobs pay for relocation, then people eventually do a self-serve move out of CA.
Still, I found it to be an interesting data point. The UHaul outflow date starting in 2016 corresponds to the SALT deduction reforms and the worsening annual fire conditions. Both seem like plausible “tipping point” factors to kick off an exodus, among other commonly cited issues.
New York’s population loss isn’t coming from downstate, it’s people leaving dying economies in the southern tier and north country and not coming back.
California is a huge state. And led the US economy during COVID. And had the largest and fastest post-lockdown recovery. Oh, and during that time actually strengthened its position as the world's 5th largest economy.
Yes, SF is having serious, self-inflicted issues. But SF/tech is actually a tiny portion of the CA GDP (since most tech revenue a la Apple doesn't actually get booked to CA). CA either leads the nation or is in the top 5 (states) for the following industries: movies, video games, manufacturing, agriculture, tourism, aerospace, biotech, government contracting, and energy.
Walgreens closed 17 stores in SF in the last 5 years. The on-the-record reason given for the closures, in statements to the city council, is petty theft.
CVS is closing stores in similar numbers and has stated that SF is "one of the epicenters of organized retail crime". In many instances the stores security guards were physically assaulted.
I’m skeptical about this reasoning that the company supposedly provided. I don’t think we should assume that they’re under any obligation to tell us the truth about why they’re shutting locations.
I think the real reason is “Amazon, Target, and dollar stores are eating our lunch.”
Without the attached clinics and pharmacies I don’t think Walgreens/CVS have a strong business to begin with.
This publicly-facing explanation puts all the blame on others, not their own store management. Not their understaffed, dumpy stores with high prices and bad products.
Can you think of a single product category that Walgreens or CVS does better than its equally convenient competitors?
