Breaking News: New York is dead
It’s popular these days to once again proclaim the death of New York City. When I moved to New York in 1994, the city was still hungover from Wall Street’s overdose on junk bonds and leveraged buy-outs in the 1980s. There were also the politicized aftershocks of the Central Park Jogger case. BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY, Trump wrote in a full-page ad published in four city newspapers. It turns out that Trump would have put five innocent men to death, but at the time, the ad inflamed fear and hatred in a city on edge after a uniquely horrific assault. I remember studio apartments were virtually unsellable, if only I’d had any money to buy one at the time.
Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which would push the city to question its position as a symbol of globalism, freedom, and America’s economic power. Tourists would never again feel comfortable here. City residents would flee for the safety of the suburbs. No one would ever want to work in a skyscraper or ride the subway again. Many people in the rest of the country already had their doubts about skyscrapers and subways. Instead, lower Manhattan was resurrected as a vibrant 24/7 community with a residential population more than double what it was.
Currently, the city is still struggling to fully regain a sense of post-pandemic normalcy. New York suffered deeper job losses as a share of its work force than any other large US city, suffering an 11.8 percent decline in jobs the first year of the pandemic, almost three times the loss on the national level. And New York still has a deficit of roughly 300,000 jobs relative to pre-pandemic levels.
The schadenfreude of the rest of the country watching us suffer is palpable. Fox News and MAGA-World can’t get enough. Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis are piling on, having bused more than 40,000 migrants to the city since last year. DeSantis, in particular, is relishing the pandemic-induced migration of New Yorkers to Florida, numbering approximately 60,000 people in each of the past two years. One of the reasons for the appeal of Florida right now, DeSantis boasts, is that the state remained open for business throughout the pandemic.
There is no doubt that shutdowns and mandates took a toll on New Yorkers, but it’s worth examining the differential impacts of the pandemic in the two states. As of this month, New York tallied 6.8M cases of Covid-19 and 79,266 deaths. By May 12, 2020, just two months after the first death, 28,188 New Yorkers would be dead from Covid-19, more than one-third of all deaths, to date; 20,000 of those were New York City residents. At the initial peak of the crisis, New York suffered 775 deaths per day compared to nine deaths per day this week. While New Yorkers are uniquely optimistic and resilient, this experience is a shock that we may never fully put behind us.
By comparison, Florida saw 7.5M cases of Covid-19 and 86,294 deaths, somewhat larger numbers than New York but similar in scale. In contrast, however, the state is still experiencing a weekly average 42 deaths per day. And just 69% of state residents are fully-vaccinated compared to 79% of New Yorkers.
These two charts from the Coronavirus tracker in The New York Times tell the story of dramatically different pandemic experiences in the two states.
Despite a similar total death toll, the distribution of deaths couldn’t be more different. In New York, the impact of the virus was swift and dramatic. Seeing the impact on its population, as well as the acute toll on its healthcare infrastructure and professionals, New Yorkers rallied a wartime response to get the virus under control. In Florida, by contrast, the virus hit later and with somewhat less ferocity at each peak. Its response, however, meant that the impact of the virus would necessarily linger, not just in terms of cases, but also deaths.
The result of this early and deadly effect of the virus, when we knew very little about what to expect from day to day, has been an enduring mental and emotional strain on New Yorkers that is more lasting and severe than other parts of the country. New Yorkers died because we didn’t know enough about treatment, and we didn’t have a vaccine. Floridians have seen a much steadier stream of death, in spite of the availability of better treatments and multiple vaccines.
They will tell you what they learned from us is that masks, mandates, and shutdowns are anti-American and don’t work anyway. And they still doubt whether the virus is really any worse than the flu. Whether any of that is true, they have decided that the death toll is less important than the economic impact.
Last November, Columbia Business School real estate professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh published a paper with colleagues from Columbia and New York University suggesting that New York is in the midst of an urban doom loop. He describes it this way: Remote work makes office space less valuable, lowering the city’s revenue from real estate taxes, encouraging white collar workers with money and newfound flexibility to move out, taking their spending power and tax dollars with them, decimating local businesses and restaurants, leaving once-vibrant neighborhoods dark, inviting homelessness and crime, encouraging more people to leave and more businesses to close. A trainwreck in slow motion.
The New York Times picked up this story in February, and then, the following day, a piece appeared in The Atlantic entitled “How Florida Beat New York.” Staff writer Jerusalem Demsas summarized Florida’s recent appeal for many New Yorkers citing high housing costs as a significant motivator which has been ignited by remote work flexibility. High housing costs generally reflect strong demand from lots of people to live in a particular area. New York isn’t doomed or dying, he wrote, but it’s a cautionary tale for high-cost Blue states generally, that even relatively small disruptions can lead to acute crises for cities.
And on the same day, just to reinforce the message, Stephen Ross, CEO of NYC-based real estate developer Related Companies, is featured in a piece in The New York Post saying New Yorkers will continue moving to Florida. “It’s tax issues, and there’s the security issues.” Even a New York real estate developer is trashing New York. That’s the news cycle we’re in.
I’m an optimist, and I don’t buy into all of this gloomy news, but I can still see that New York is facing stiff headwinds. I’ve been asking myself, how bad is it? Does Florida really have all the answers? In my opinion, housing, education, crime, and healthcare seem like obvious determinants of quality of life. How do we stack up?
As of last year, New York rose to the top of the list of the most expensive cities in the world, tied with Singapore. It’s a dubious distinction. But the least expensive cities aren’t places that I’ve ever considered visiting, let alone living. Housing costs are a top driver for New York’s place on this list, along with recent factors like inflation, the strong dollar, and supply chain issues. And we know rising housing costs have driven homelessness in recent years, generally, and accelerated homelessness throughout the pandemic, more specifically.
Homelessness is a serious problem, not just for New York, but for several wealthy cities, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, and Portland. These “superstar cities,” as economists call them, attract an abundance of knowledge workers, who drive economic growth and, in turn, housing demand, which drives up the cost of housing. In cities where housing costs consume more than 30% of workers’ income, homelessness spikes.
Homelessness isn’t correlated with the things we think. Not generous safety net programs (actually the opposite is true) or warm weather (see Boston). Or unemployment (homeless is, in fact, most endemic in areas with robust labor markets and low unemployment — and virtually non-existent in cities like Detroit and Philadelphia where poverty rates are very high). Or even mental illness (Utah, Alabama, and Kentucky have some of the highest rates of mental illness in the country).
High housing costs and broken housing policies that enable anti-development nimby-ism are primary drivers of homelessness. We fundamentally need to build more housing, and not just luxury housing. New York issued building permits at a rate 30% lower than Florida in 2020. And homelessness has been cut in half in Florida since 2007 to 128 per 100,000 residents. In New York, the rate has increased more than 40% in the same period, to 469 per 100,000 residents.
On education, Florida boasts high school graduation rates better than New York’s for a fraction of the investment in K-12 education. In 2019, Florida’s high school graduation rate was 87.2% compared to 82.8% for New York. And for that, Florida spends $10,376 per pupil, less than half what New York spends. But New York teachers also earn nearly twice their Florida counterparts. Reflecting its large percentage of highly-skilled knowledge workers, though, New Yorkers boast a significantly higher level of educational attainment. Fully 37.5% of New Yorkers have a BA or higher, ranking 9th in the county, while only 30.5% of Florida residents do, ranking 30th.
On crime, it’s more complicated, in part, because it’s difficult to get state and national level data that reflects the most recent figures, but by most measures, New York is safer than Florida — and New York City is consistently ranked the safest big city in America.
In 2020, the last full year for which reliable comparative data is available, New York’s property crime rate was 1,411 per 100,000 people compared to Florida’s rate of 1,769. These represent declines of 72% and 76%, respectively, since 1991, compared to the national decline of 62% over the same 30-year period. Violent crime rates are 363.8 in New York and 383.6 in Florida per 100,000, representing similar large 30-year improvements of 69% and 68%, respectively. Murder rates jumped dramatically from 2019 to 2020, but New York still maintained an edge over Florida; 4.11 in New York compared to 5.97 in Florida. (Incidentally, the average homicide rate is 40% higher in Red states.)
I’m not going to excuse or apologize for crime rates, other than to say, I don’t see crime as a rational reason to choose Florida over New York. My father lives in Central Florida, and he tells me they won’t leave the house without a firearm. It’s simply too dangerous, he says. I’ve never heard anyone in New York City tell me that.
Similarly, on important healthcare metrics, New York outperforms Florida. While life expectancies in New York and Florida are very close (77.7 and 77.5 years, respectively), only 5.2% of New Yorkers lack health insurance compared to 13.2% of Floridians. These differences may contribute to the lower infant mortality rate in New York (3.9 per 1,000) compared to Florida (5.5). Again, I don’t see a reason for Florida to boast.
After looking at all of these issues, it’s the cost of living where Florida has New York beat. And the cost of living — or the high cost of housing, specifically — is the single largest driver of homelessness in New York State and New York City. You’ll earn more in New York, but you’ll pay more for the privilege of living here — access to schools, healthcare, mass transit, public safety, and parks, not to mention, culture, history, and the arts. But if these things don’t matter to you, or at least, not as much as warm weather (humidity and hurricanes included) and square footage, then I would concede Florida might be for you.
But please don’t listen to DeSantis when he tells you how sick or dangerous or sad New York is. Or how wrong we were about Covid-19. He’s just trying to promote himself, his book, and his campaign. And don’t tell me it’s BREAKING NEWS that an octogenarian billionaire is relocating to Palm Beach. That’s not news. For what it’s worth, the five largest US cities, including New York City, all had net migration increases among Gen Z during the pandemic. Florida, on the other hand, experienced an outflow of 8,000 young adults, despite gains among every other generation. That’s news.
As for the future of New York, don’t bet against it. Throughout history, cities have proven to be inevitable — inexorable engines of economic dynamism and industrial advancement as well as social and cultural vitality. The greatest cities in the world are, by necessity, innovative and resilient. From geopolitical tensions and inflation to remote work and the explosion of artificial intelligence, we are in a period of dramatic change, and cities offer our best opportunity to confront these disruptive issues. These forces will not deter New York but will ultimately make us stronger as we address them head on.
New York is more than a city, it’s a state of mind. New York is unstoppable.
