Four myths about NYC in the time of Corona
To say Donald Trump’s comment that New York City is a ghost town grinded my gears would be an understatement. But frankly it’s unfair to pin it on him alone. The news media has has generally perpetuated an image of New York City as a dangerous, crime ridden, drug & homeless infested City. Its image was polished under Giuliani and in many respects, sadly, September 11th and its aftermath may represent the peak of New York City’s primacy in American pop culture consciousness. After a relatively brief but painful recession, Mike Bloomberg led a very successful recovery and capably led the City through the Great Recession, but once Mayor Di Blasio was elected, mismanagement and discontent from elites eroded New York City’s reputation in the public conscious. In many respects we now hear many of the old retreads from the 70’s & 80’s. Violent crime and drug addiction are not nearly what they were but day-to-day, knowing now how the message is spun, it can be difficult hard to separate fact from fiction about qualify of life here, particularly with so many retreating to their homes in the pandemic.
COVID-19 has led to its own set of negative views on the future of NYC . There are 4 myths that we hear over and over:
New York City is a ghost town
NYC is a dangerous place to be in a pandemic
NYC has become crime ridden
There has been constant protesting & looting
Is New York City a ghost town? Initially, for sure, anyone who could get out of the City left and the became City eerily quiet. Many fled to their second homes, others to stay with family or close friends. And from my perspective, it was for good reason. The situation was dire with so hospitals overrun that the USS Comfort docked in the Hudson, tent hospitals were built in Central Park, Morningside Church & the Javits Center, makeshift morgues were built in in refrigerated trucks on sidewalks, and hundreds of thousands who were sick. Given that 8.5MM people were in New York City and late-spring anti-body testing revealed over 20% were sick, it’s not hard to do the math in how bad things were such that 2MM people were infected within 8 weeks. One could argue that from March 1st through April 15th, New York City was a very dangerous place to be and as someone who stuck it out all the way through, the feelings of fear and emptiness was palatable. At one point, my building’s superintendent sent an email to all residents simply asking who was still here to assess how much they needed to risk the safety of building staff and subsequently, requested volunteers to man the front door if there was a full lockdown and distributed keys to the building. I’ve also never seen it so easy to find a parking spot and viewed the appearance of a plane in the sky or a taxi as a welcome surprise. But in time, most who left out of immediate fear returned as the City healed and the hospital wards emptied.
I wouldn’t dare argue either that fewer people have left the City than have come over the past year. All of the demographic figures point to that. But it’s also important to view the New York City population as a flow rather than a stock. Every day, hundreds of thousands rush into the City for work from the outer suburbs or from the far reaches of the globe for tourism. With travel restricted, Broadway & other live events shut down, cultural institutions open with restricted attendance and most non-essential businesses working generally remotely, most visitors aren’t here. You don’t notice this much in residential neighborhoods but it is quite apparent in midtown Manhattan. It’s also important to consider that from a migratory perspective, hundreds of thousands come to the City every year to start their careers, immigrate to America or undertake higher education studies (most don’t know that NYC has more college students than any other City in America). There things generally haven’t been happening since COVID hit. Meanwhile, many leave every year as they graduate college, move to lower-cost destinations, have families and seek more space in the suburbs or choose to live closer to their original homes. COVID-19 has accelerated all of these trends without the natural replacement of new arrivals. But I believe that the pause of inflows and the acceleration of outflows are temporary and will revert to longer-term trends as the pandemic wanes. Tourists will return, offices re-open drawing regular commuters from the suburbs & college graduates will continue to stay or come here to capture the energy of the City at start of their careers. In short, people make New York City and are a renewable resource. The trend will normalize.
Is New York City a dangerous place to be in a pandemic? It was when New York had the highest concentration of COVID cases, but I don’t believe that it was due solely to the density of the population, the use of Mass Transportation or any other physical or social construct. New York City was the first hit major population center hit by COVID-19 (outside of Wuhan, China), but it wasn’t for any other reason that it is the largest source of entry to the United States (and one of the largest in the world) and we know that the virus came here from many places around the world. It spread unchecked and undetected for many weeks. Did the daily population movements, office environments & packed mass transportation systems spread the virus? For sure, and in retrospect it was not taken seriously enough, particularly given the lack of testing, but once the City locked down and the crisis abated, the City outperformed the rest of the country. Subsequently, we have seen crises in much less densely populated locales such as Los Angeles, North Dakota, Miami & Arizona, all of whom had advanced warning of the pandemic, access to PPE and the opportunity to impose mitigation mandates. As of the time when I write this, New York City’s concentration of COVID cases trails the nation, particularly in the most densely populated areas and I’m not surprised. Living in the City means giving up your personal space in many sorts of ways for the benefits of nightlife, cultural institutions, an endless dating supply (if you’re single) & more restaurants than you can ever find (even at this point). There’s a bit of a social compact here that’s jarring to outsiders, but it’s fundamentally supported by being conscious of yourself, your surroundings and the impacts of your actions on others. It’s this consciousness that in my view, raises the proportion of those who wear masks, wash hands and in general, inspires more selfless behavior. There’s a reason New Yorker’s are considered to be opinionated & outspoken; there are a define set of norms and if violated, those norms have a bigger impact, so we speak up. This culture supports compliance with public health measures and in my view (along with some element of developed herd immunity) are a big reason why infection rates have remained low in most areas of the City since the first wave.
Has NYC become crime ridden? There are two elements here that are true:
The City felt a lot sketchier as fewer people were here. I believe that a lot of people in an area, whether tourists, locals or other visitors has a crowding out effect. The shady characters are there; you just notice them and the safety in crowds makes most feel safe
HOWEVER — By historical levels, even with this year’s crime spikes, violent crime is down 80% from where it was 30 years ago. Furthermore, violent crime increased significantly in all major cities in 2020. Despite a relatively violent 2020, the crime rate in New York City runs at 25% that of Chicago, is half as dangerous as Los Angeles, has a third less crime per capita than San Francisco and typically runs at a rate comparable with London. New York has had its fair share of problems but it remains among the safest big cities in the United States, despite the challenges from the pandemic.
Has there been constant protesting & looting? After the murder of George Floyd, protests in New York City were the worst I have ever seen but aside from some regular protests at 96th & Broadway, Occupy City Hall and Union Square, largely abated by July. In nearly all cases, the protests were peaceful and a full accounting of the situation in June has suggested that the NYPD generally escalated the protests and drove the bulk of the violence. In the worst of the protests, I was regularly driving my nanny to/from Brooklyn It required listening to traffic reports regarding the location of the protests, checking the Citizen App and using Waze, but rarely was my drive — which often went by the Barclays Center — the Center of protests in Brooklyn — ever disrupted.
Seeing stores in New York City looted was one of the most distressing moments of my time here and led to legitimate fear. It led to a nearly week’s long curfew and quarantine of Manhattan where vehicular traffic was banned into Manhattan below 96th street. I can attest to that as the roadblocks were literally out my window. However, it has been falsely reported that the looting and the protests were related, that it was a few bad apples that acted poorly in a crowd of otherwise peaceful people. There was no relationship whatsoever to the protests and the looting except that they were occurring simultaneously. The night of the worst looting in midtown Manhattan, ALL of the protests were in Brooklyn. The NYPD didn’t take the situation seriously enough and was trying to manage the protests initially with effectively their BAU staffing. Once they called all officers went into duty, the looting stopped but the protests didn’t? Why, because there were different people (we’ll never fully know who because the City didn’t go after them aggressively) who used the cover of a City on edge and a police department stretched thin and understaffed due to the protests to commit the acts as crimes of opportunity.
Early in the summer, I had a bit of a weird counter-take that the summer of 2020 would be some amazing magical time when summer in the City was perfect, like some underground club in some up-and-coming neighborhood, but nobody would know it because no one was here. It didn’t turn out that way; I was way too optimistic about how quickly we’d recover from the pandemic and how responsibly we would take virus-mitigation measures as a society. But it was an enjoyable place to live, I’m glad I stayed and many of my neighbors share this view. Quality of life still isn’t what it was, but I still remain confident that the City will come back as the pandemic fades. But in the meantime, let’s not make sticking it out as a masochistic or heroic decision.