By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
The predominant urban center in North America, New York City is the primary American locale for the arts, culture, finance, the media, and intellectual life. I first visited New York in 1958, many, many times thereafter, and last time in December 2018. Who could not love it?
Yet today, New York faces a looming existential crisis brought on by the coronavirus. The city is a shadow of its pre-pandemic normal. In the most populated, most dense, most diverse American metropolis, more than 23,000 have died.
In the heart of Manhattan, national chains including Kate Spade, Subway and Le Pain Quotidien have shuttered branches for good. J.C. Penney and Neiman Marcus, the anchor tenants at two of the largest malls in Manhattan, recently filed for bankruptcy and announced that they would close those locations.
From SoHo to Fifth Avenue to Madison Avenue, once packed sidewalks are now nearly empty. There are virtually no tourists, a fraction of the usual army of office workers goes into work every day, many residents stay at home, worried for their health, and many of the wealthy have left the city for second homes.
New York City accounts for a very large share of the country’s transit ridership. Many people don’t own cars and use buses and subways – which are now seen as incubators for the virus. Crowded public transportation facilitates the spread of a highly contagious, airborne disease.
Though New York’s subway system has stepped up its disinfecting of trains and buses and has launched an app that tells riders on some lines how crowded rail cars are, many people remain reluctant to use them.
The pandemic sparked an exodus of frantic wealthier residents fleeing the city for the suburbs or countryside, an estimated 420,000 of them since March, gutting upscale neighborhoods now facing up to 40 per cent vacancy rates.
Many are looking to buy houses in small towns along the Hudson River in upstate New York, or nearby Connecticut. Real estate agents say these are selling hours after they go on the market, with buyers sometimes paying full price in cash after seeing the houses only on video tours.
After all, suburban, exurban, and small-town residents don’t live in dense urban neighbourhoods. They get around in their private cars and have far more room inside their houses; as well, they have back yards. Today’s technologies make it increasingly easy for employees to work far from dense megacities.
New York City’s left-wing mayor and New York State’s governor, though both Democrats, are at odds over what to do to stem the tide.
Mayor Bill de Blasio took a shot at Gov. Andrew Cuomo Aug. 6 for trying to lure the wealthy back to New York with the promise of tax breaks. The mayor stated he would like to raise taxes on the rich if federal coronavirus aid doesn’t come through.
“If our federal government fails us and doesn’t provide a stimulus we should immediately return in Albany to the discussion of a tax on wealthy New Yorkers,” de Blasio said. “Wealthy New Yorkers can afford to pay a little bit more so that everyone else can make it through this crisis.”
Cuomo has been pleading with rich city dwellers who left the city for second to come back, and dismissed calls for boosting taxes on the rich to stave off a potential 20 per cent cut to major programs, like school funding.
“We do not make decisions based on the wealthy few,” de Blasio declared. “I was troubled to hear this concept that because wealthy people have a set of concerns about the city that we should accommodate them,” he added. “That’s not how it works around here anymore.”
It’s a very divided city. Today the top one per cent in New York take in over 40 per cent of the city’s income while much of the city’s population find themselves left behind. This is due in large part because of a precipitous fall in middle income jobs.
The pandemic will only exacerbate the problems of a great, yet troubled, metropolis.
No comments:
Post a Comment