I've been seeing more of these types of stories with a line like this:
> About 3.57 million people left New York City this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7, according to Unacast, which analyzed anonymized cell phone location data.
Sorry, but I don't really trust the "anonymized" very much. Why should some company I've never heard of have access to my cell phone location data in the first place.
The fact that you don't like it, does not mean that there are not people with access to IMEI numbers. Actually, it would be weird if there wasn't since it could be useful for research like this.
So why do you not trust it? You're only explaining how you disagree.
It is anonymized in the sense that they can't write your name into a search feature and find your location history.
However, they could likely ask to buy the all data for "57 years old males born in february with a history of calling to Alaska every 5 days" and single you out.
I heard a talk once from some guy working for a company who analyzes this data (it had something to do with transportation of people; where it would be most efficient to have a new bus route and such), some of the regulations are actually rather interesting (Europe). E.g., location-specific data is not allowed to be sold if the amount of data points is below a given threshold, to avoid de-anonymization scenarios such as the one you have mentioned. Granted, I have no idea how well the regulations actually work, but it did sound as if quite a bit of thought went into it.
Thinking about this, I wonder if companies providing smartphone apps with invasive tracking are upheld to the same standards...
> Sorry, but I don't really trust the "anonymized" very much. Why should some company I've never heard of have access to my cell phone location data in the first place.
Not sure how the second follows from the first. There is a company you've never heard of which access to your cell phone location data. In fact, hundreds, and they buy and sell them in commodity marketplaces just like corn or pork bellies. They sell the data with your name attached for one price, and as anonymized aggregates for a much lower price.
Unacast is just saying that they bought the cheaper anonymized version for the purpose of this analysis. Whether the data are real or not is another matter altogether.
> Sorry, but I don't really trust the "anonymized" very much. Why should some company I've never heard of have access to my cell phone location data in the first place.
If you don't have location services turned off on your phone, chances are they have access to it because you gave it to them (via an app), or gave it to someone who gave it to them.
Does this take into account federal loans and grants for infrastructure spending which is higher in urban areas? Probably not. Does it take into account that many left leaning states like NJ have completely bankrupt pension systems that will need to be rescued at the federal level? Probably not. Also looks like NY scores 38th on gov dependency out of 50 which isnt exactly great. And going back to national highway system assistance, Cali has got to be #1 in receiving federal funds.
That doesn't control for who benefits from the money spent. For example, Alaska is billed for the early warning and radar systems to detect Russian ICBMs, but Alaskans don't really benefit from it because Russia would never bomb Alaska, and most of the jobs go to people shipped in from the lower 48 states, not Alaskans.
Likewise, Nebraskan farmers look like they're on the dole with the corn subsidies, but the other 49 states benefit from lower and stable corn prices, so it isn't clear why Nebraska would get all the costs accounted to them when everyone benefits from it.
I read through your source and it is non-obvious how it is relevant as a whole. It really just seems like a rationalization for a specific view point. The methodology is completely arbitrary. They just assigned seemingly whatever weights they wanted to a handful of loosely related statistical figures. I am not even sure WTH "wallethub" is anyway. It is essentially bullshit.
Also even if state X gets more federal $$ than state Y it is not useful information as each state is completely unique geographically, demographically, industrially, strategically, etc. So there are endless legitimate reasons money might be spent in one place over another.
Among the most federally independent states listed are New Jersey and Illinois, two pretty much bankrupt states who depend on the possibility of a federal bailout to keep borrowing money at reasonable interest rates. So, I think this stat is kinda bunk.
Correlation != Causation does not apply when the system is under the control of single entity. So many of these governments have been run by the same party for decades on end. If these long-term rulers didn't cause the bad outcomes from the time of their reign that only means they were completely ineffective. Why should ineffective government be kept around?
It is plain stupid to not hold elected leaders responsible for actual outcomes produced under their watch.
Precisely - if cities with overwhelmingly progressive constituencies can't get their own house in order - what's the chance that a country will be different?
Best measure of the size of government is budget, and conservatism values small government. There is nothing conservative about a staggering rise in the spending of federal government.
Neither are any of the procedural changes to congress, lack of deliberation or expansion of the powers of the executive branch.
You generally either believe that government should be bigger and managing more things, or smaller and managing less things. The details and dividing lines vary.
We don't have to sympathize with rent-seekers necessarily, but I would wonder if the rest of the city can move as adaptively to wherever opportunity beckons, and whether NY can downscale their city services accordingly.
>Why should we sympathize with a minority of rent-seekers?
I don't really think this is about sympathizing with rent-seekers.
Cities invest in infrastructure to cover anticipated service delivery well before it's due, and the financing for doing so is a multi-decade affair. Before you complain, this includes things like providing running water, roads that are paved, etc. Really core essential pieces of making a city work.
If your tax base moves to suburbs or just plain leaves the city, the city is still on the hook for those payments, so it results in dramatically cut services or increased taxes on residents.
The flight of some of the tax base incentivizes the flight of many, resulting in further cuts to maintenance contracts, preventative work, and the general crumbling of infrastructure. Sometimes this can be gracefully managed by planned downsizing and renegotiating deals with vendors and financiers. In other cases, this doesn't occur and the city simply... dies. While the US is very young and doesn't have many large examples of this, Flint and Detroit come to mind.
Sure, but their current industrial era infrastructure isn’t thousand of years old. Most of it is no older than the infrastructure in the US. Compare the size of London now with 200 years ago.
Kinda. The decay of communities is one thing, but the death spiral associated with municipal infrastructure projects and tax bases is another. A small town might invest in a bioreactor to reclaim solids for resale from their wastewater service at a cost of 5 million dollars, but that'll pale in comparison with the construction of multiple new subway extensions at a price in the billions.
The article was ambiguous about what the $34B was a measure of (income of the departing residents or the tax income generated by the income of the departing residents).
But the underlying paper makes it clear that it's the former. So it's not accurate to say "US citizens saved $34B...". That was their aggregate income, which is still subject to the same federal taxes no matter where in the US they moved. They would have saved on state and local taxes, depending on the rates of their new home jurisdictions.
The average New Yorker has a mere one-third of the carbon emissions as the average American. This is really bad for the climate overall. Dense city living is very efficient; living in the suburbs and driving everywhere is not. NYC is the densest city we have.
And yet you add up lots of small numbers and they end up turning into a big number that destroys the planet, so the small numbers do matter too. It's the total annual carbon emission that determines the fate of our planet, and this kind of pattern of people switching to higher-carbon lifestyles is bad, especially since the pattern isn't exclusively happening to NYC but broadly to lots of cities. Add up all the cities it's happening to and it absolutely does impact the carbon emissions of the planet.
3.57 million people left New York City this year to live out their lives in comfort someplace else, and then 3.5 million people hungry for opportunity arrived to take their place. I hope to see similar results in San Francisco.
Rich people are repleaceable not in the short term but they are very much repleaceable specially rent seekers and those whose earnings come only from owning which describes most of the non financial and some of the financial elite of the city
There's no way this is correct. I live in NYC and this would represent a turn-over of nearly half of our population. It's simply not true. The study is wrong:
> About 3.57 million people left New York City this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7, according to Unacast, which analyzed anonymized cell phone location data. Some 3.5 million people earning lower average incomes moved into the city during that same period, the report showed.
Questionable methodology that clearly yielded incorrect results.
Speaking as someone who lives in a small city, if I weren't tied to my current location and could move to NYC or SF at a non-astronomical rent, I'd jump at the chance.
i tried to negotiate being month to month at my manhattan apt at the same rate and my land lord wouldn't accommodate me. Now the apt has been unrented for a few months and they're asking for a 10% drop in rent and probably won't get it for a long long time. happily commenting from hawaii
Looking at the returns alone is an incomplete picture; a huge part of being a real estate investor is having clever tricks at your disposal to reduce your taxes.
You do. The real tricks around real estate involve depreciation, not selling. You don't sell, you just keep adding properties to your portfolio with your profits to increase your total deduction from depreciation and loan interest, and that way you never end up showing a paper profit even though the total value of your holdings is going up radically over time.
I concur. Here in India I had once finalized an apartment for rent for around Rs. 35000/month. The landlord bailed at the last moment because an agent found him another tenant willing to pay Rs. 2000 more/month. However:
1. I had approached the landlord directly since his previous tenant had been a friend of mine. So there was no agent fee (one month rent) to be paid.
2. The other tenant moved in almost a month after i was supposed to, so another month's worth of rent lost for him.
The landlord didn't realize it would take him almost 3 years to recoup the losses even with the increased rent. I didn't push my case much, and found someplace else to stay.
I have a similar story from buying a house almost a decade ago. My final firm offer was $350k, and the flipper/seller went with another offer that was only $5k more. Only problem was, my offer was bulletproof (I had the full amount of the down payment in cash at hand plus a pre-approved loan offer) and the other offer was not. You can see where this is going: The other buyer couldn't actually come up with the money and didn't get approved for a loan, and then I ended up buying the house for the original $350k several months later, after the flipper had lost a lot more than $5k in all the added actual costs and opportunity costs of holding onto that house for several more months and trying to close on it twice.
The landlord's paying for the building no matter what, so it's possible that depending on how it's leveraged and their income overall, they'd rather lose money and get a reduction in taxable income than break even with lowered rent.
I'm no tax lawyer but I think you get to deduct the costs whether or not the apartment is rented out. Also you can only deduct costs from revenue. This is no VC backed entrepreneur with a growth story where you get more money with a negative contribution margin. ;)
If it’s not a primary residence, you don’t get to deduct the taxes from other sources of income. It’s restricted to deducting from rental income. You can carry the loss forward though.
I don't see any kind of mathematical gymnastics that has landlords making more money on vacancies.
Any tax they'd save would be a fraction what would otherwise be revenue. Besides, real-estate investors attempt to keep their costs (interest, depreciation, etc) all very close to their revenue, not the other way around. Less revenue is simply less of a chance to deduct expenses (not to mention less money for them).
The only way I think it makes sense is if they're sure they're going to be able to rent it for more if they hold out in a way that would make up for the short term loss.
A buddy of mine rents in a 90% vacant building he claims the owners haven't bothered putting tenants in at lowered rents because they're borrowing against the value established by the high rents. It's also a rent control scenario, which strongly disincentivizes ever lowering the rent.
In some constructions you can use it to lower your taxable income, or helps lowering council taxes for empty buildings, etc. My family used these kind of tricks
>In Tribeca, a wealthy neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, residents who left this year earned an average income of about $140,000, Walle said. The typical person moving into the neighborhood earned an average $82,000, he said.
I was going to ask if we might call this "de-gentrification" and if that's a good thing, right? I'm sitting here in disbelief after a quick search reveals that the actual average income is $879,000. So now I'm thinking those numbers above don't mean much of anything.
I lived in the latino part of the brooklyn for a good time it was much better before the hipsters came I will always prefer that to what gentrification brings
What you're calling de-gentrification isn't really the opposite of gentrification. Gentrification is the destruction of long-standing neighborhoods and the displacement of poor people, who may have no good place to go and lose their support structures. Often, those poor people rent their homes/apartments, and so they don't benefit from the increase in prices. Their rent just goes up until they have to leave.
Rich people fleeing doesn't bring them back. Whatever they suffered in displacement is just sunk. In the very long term it may form part of a new cycle of gentrification, but only after the neighborhood has lost a lot of its old value and is usually accompanied by the kinds of desperation that poverty causes.
So it's not a good thing -- though you're right that this study is so dubious that it may not even really be an issue.
Seriously. The argument is that rich people come in, raising rent due to increased housing demand and constant supply, which pushes poor people out. But the reverse (rich people leave, rental demand decreases, lowering rents and allowing poor people to come back) isn’t true. Makes perfect sense /s
Unfortunately we have zoned our cities such that we can no longer build enough housing to accommodate everyone. The pain of that will always fall the most on those who have the least to pay.
I'm sitting here in disbelief after a quick search reveals that the actual average income is $879,000.
I don't live anywhere near NYC, and probably haven't visited more than a half dozen times, and even I know that $140K/year isn't getting you into Tribeca these days (granted, I occasionally glance at the NYT real estate section). I would expect someone covering that beat to be able to do that gut-check and, I dunno, maybe double-check those numbers.
> residents who left this year earned an average income of about $140,000
Averages tend to mask the true reality.
If a corporate executive makes $10 million dollars a year. And the next 100 people makes $100,000 a year. Then the total is $20 million dollars.
When you divide this by 101, you get an average of $198,000. Which is nearly double what the normal person in this example earns.
The better metric is to use the median salary. Which in this example is $100,000. And the executive’s salary is the outlier.
Then again, most executives are paid in tax deferred stock options. And they cash out for a pot of gold after a few years. So this distorts any estimates of general income and wealth of the population.
Mean is not the same as median. Billionaires drag the mean average up but not the median average. Most people in that area are not earning almost 1 million even though it is pricey.
A lot of these people living there have been there for decades. You absolutely could not easily afford to move there today making only that much, but that's different. We're talking long-term existing residents with locked in rent controlled rates and/or coop owners who bought decades ago when it was still relatively affordable.
And yes, all of the "data" in the linked article is complete garbage. Don't take any of it as fact.
Or in context, they estimate NYC lost a net 0.8% of its residents and the average income of the incoming and outgoing cohorts differ by -$8,055/y. It multiplies to a big dollar figure because NYC is big and rich.
It explains that they're extrapolating from three NYC neighborhoods (Astoria, Tribeca, and Williamsburg). I'm not an NYC expert and I'm not going to research these claims further, but I think those are quite well-off neighborhoods and not likely representative of NYC in terms of income or pandemic mobility.
This article feels like Reuters lightly rewrote an ad for Unacast.
Yes. A net 0.8% of residents leaving in a year is believable. An astounding 40% of the city's population leaving, and then another 40% entering the city, which is an order of magnitude higher than any turn-over the city has ever experienced, is clearly not believable. That is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, and they have not remotely provided it. Indeed I suspect this claim will be very easy to disprove by looking at voter rolls, tax rolls, jury pool rolls, DMV rolls, etc.
> It explains that they're extrapolating from three NYC neighborhoods (Astoria, Tribeca, and Williamsburg).
Wow. This is garbage-tier methodology that doesn't remotely deserve anyone paying attention to the "results". Talk about sampling bias galore.
There is a reason that the people with the most aggressive social policies tend to also be the least in favor of federalism/local politics, because of this exact problem: people will just leave.
If your system makes life worse for a certain group of people, you either need to prevent that group from leaving altogether, or ensure that there is no place that they can go to. If you iterate this to the logical conclusion, you end up with something like "globalism."
In this particular case, this is mostly to do with not wanting to live in places with strict lockdown policies, high rates of homelessness and criminality, while simultaneously paying much more in taxes and living expenses, and seeing few of the benefits of being in an urban hub while doing it.
But my point stands: don't forget how quickly people will be willing to upend their lives at the very moment their existence is sufficiently worse than it would be elsewhere. And when you target the wealthy, you target the people most capable of moving anywhere else.
> There is a reason that the people with the most aggressive social policies tend to also be the least in favor of federalism/local politics, because of this exact problem: people will just leave.
I don't think that has anything to do with it. Whether people are in favor of or against local politics is mostly based on whether or not they share the same opinions as their local politicians. For example, look at the fight over California Emission standards. People just want to have things their way - everything else is just hot air and posturing.
What ever happened to making the place attractive so people actually choose to live there ?
You are talking about forcing people into situations that they are unhappy with, like it's normal or ethical.
The people who pay for the infrastructure and services are free to leave to more attractive places when they feel like they are being exploited. It's the city's responsibility to manage itself in a way that keeps residents satisfied. If the residents feel like they are getting the short end of the stick, they are right to leave and many will do so. Then you are left with those who had no choice and good luck getting them to fund your bloated, inefficient and needless projects.
The policy makers are in charge of just that, making policy. The residents have little control over that, but they do control where they live.
The combination of high taxes, corruption, and incompetence really wear on you after a while.
I'm all for high taxes in service of a strong social safety net and a well-run, modern city. I am happy to pay them. But I can't help but feel that my taxes were being outright stolen and squandered in this city.
Everything gives room for corruption and incompetence. The problem is the US has some of the most incompetent government on a local level in the developed world. Part of it is American individualism, part of it is the Republican party starving the beast, part of it is the government as a giant jobs program.
There is no reason we cannot have competent civil servants, long term planning, clean cities, etc.
I'm completely serious when I say we should just outsource everything on the county level and lower to the Swiss or Dutch.
Why do you think that's true? Many (most?) countries don't have competent civil servants, long term planning, clean cities, etc. Why do we just assume Americans can do it when say Italians cannot?
It's absurd to blame Republicans for the Democrats' failures and corruption. The Democrats have a nearly insurmountable demographic advantage that has been steadily building for decades. If they could pass as even semi-competent, they would absolutely wipe the floor with the Republicans. Their failure is theirs alone.
To expand on what abernard1 said, Democrats have had uninterrupted control of some major cities for 60-80 years. The fact that those cities have turned out so poorly can only be blamed on the Democratic politicians in those cities. They are corrupt in every way. As long as people excuse their failures with "But Republicans!", they will continue to get away with their corruption.
> The problem is the US has some of the most incompetent government on a local level in the developed world. Part of it is American individualism, part of it is the Republican party starving the beast, part of it is the government as a giant jobs program.
Blaming individualism and "the Republican Party" is bizarre in connection with a complaint about "incompetent government on a local level." Almost all of the local governments people complain about (San Francisco, New York City, etc.) are completely dominated by Democrats. Of 51 seats on the New York City Council, just 3 are held by Republicans, and only 1 of those isn't on Staten Island. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is all Democrats.
This is not a matter of my team versus your team, but a real dysfunction in our political system. If people in blue cities in blue states blame Republicans for problems with education, transportation, policing, planning, etc., then there is literally no accountability. We saw this happen this summer. George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. Almost everything to do with his training, pay, etc., was decided by the Minneapolis City Council or the Minneapolis Mayor. The last Republican on the city council left office 23 years ago. There hasn't been a Republican mayor of Minneapolis since 1973. That guy served for a day--the last Republican who served a real term left office in 1961.
Somehow, police brutality in Seattle, Minneapolis, New York City, etc., was laid at the feet of Trump has his voters, who have pretty much nothing to do with and no power over municipal services in Seattle, Minneapolis, New York City, etc.
There's a lot of truth in that, but it's not strictly true. The Obama DOJ pursued and enforced consent decrees over a bunch of local police departments; the incoming Republican DOJ announced that they were backing away from them. Certainly, national politics has some influence over local policing.
But I'm mostly with you. I'm kind of dumbfounded by how much attention gets paid to national/federal policing policy, where change is essentially impossible to achieve, when most people live in suburbs, where 2-3 seats on a village or township board can result in nearly arbitrary policing policy changes for that suburb. Swing House seats are a million-dollar proposition; a village board seat in Oak Park might go for less than $5000 invested.
A serious theory of change, and one I think more credible than passing any kind of new federal law: get reformer village boards elected in a scattering of suburbs, get them to pass sharp, meaningful policies (an end to no-knocks, crisis intervention teams, or dream big and have the police stop doing routine traffic enforcement), then prove them out. I've been watching Chicagoland village board meetings for the past couple months, and the modal question that seems to come in policy discussions is "what are the neighboring suburbs doing". Start there! See if you can get a snowball rolling.
There's a lot of truth in that, but it's not strictly true.
And yet, rayiner's comment appeared faded-out from down-voting when I came upon it.
And that's the real problem. He had truth and thoughtfulness in his comment (yeah, you can quibble about federal attempts to override local policy), yet even a smart group of people like regular HN users tribalistically downvoted it. Rayiner sinned by making a coherent argument against throwing Republicans under the bus for metro-area problems.
We are a tribalistic society and it's only getting worse. Trump said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and his supporters would defend him. He was probably right. When evidence of Biden's family corruption surfaced before the election, the media and tech giants actively suppressed and subverted the information.
Ending no-knock warrants or shuffling around police roles just eats away at the edges of the problem. If as a society, we can't find ways to get at truth and logic that cuts through the dynamics that push tribalism, we're doomed to a never-ending race toward the drain.
I've lived in a northern European city for an extended period. I paid higher taxes than in NYC. The difference in public transit, public schools, and social services (some of which I used) was night and day compared to NYC.
There are absolutely endless stories of NYC government incompetence [1] and corruption [2]. Here are a few recent stories that come to mind:
> Don't you think it's exactly the high taxes that give space for corruption and incompetence?
No. We know what causes corruption - lack of oversight. Its why you see very little of it in the federal government, but that same oversight is also why federal projects are expensive. Everything must be documented and accounted for.
As far as incompetence in government, that's easy... smart people can't stand being constrained by rules designed by people that aren't as smart as they are, especially if those rules reduce productivity and stifle creative solutions.
Compare the big cities to the small well off cities in the Bay Area. Go see how much oversight is in the big cities versus the small cities. Then look at the level of corruption.
Now compare the amount corruption in the military industrial complex to the state governments.
The "lost income" is more than 485000 USD per person?
About 3.57 million people left New York City this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7 ... Some 3.5 million people earning lower average incomes moved into the city during that same period, the report showed.
[...]
In Tribeca, a wealthy neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, residents who left this year earned an average income of about $140,000, Walle said. The typical person moving into the neighborhood earned an average $82,000, he said.
How will SpaceX’s Starlink increase the trend to work-from-home or do remote work?
If you can develop software, or write your blog, from a remote island, at the edge of a (dormant) volcano (aka: extreme remoters), then why not? Or from any rural farmland area of the country.
Just video call into your daily Zoom Standup Meeting.
Louis Rossman said it in many of his recent videos.... new york has everything, but also costs alot. You have cinemas, broadway, restaurants, everything.... and you pay for that privilige.
Now, when all that is closed, you have only the "bad" parts (the homeless, crime, noise, bad smells... all that with a "premium price")... so, why stay?
Poor people have no jobs, have to move out.... rich people don't have anything to do there, and move out because they can.
Even worse for San Francisco. Basically just "restaurants" and an easy getaway to outdoors. And worse on all the other fronts as well (crime, homeless, cost of living, etc).
How well a city takes care of these issues in the good times and has rational/sensible policies sets it up for how it will do in bad times.
> Even worse for San Francisco. Basically just "restaurants" and an easy getaway to outdoors.
This wasn't my experience in San Francisco when I visited in 2016 - I saw some of the best live music in small bars I've ever heard, went to a couple of awesome free outdoor events, record shopping was quality, just walking around an area like Mission I came across a lot of interesting cafes, shops, bars, street art, and people.
I was visiting from Melbourne, Australia - supposed live music capital of the world, ranked worlds most liveable city, and it has a lot of the above - and San Francisco felt pretty exciting with a lot to do.
NYC is costly, but not as costly as people think. The lifestyle is also different.
1. Most of my life in NY (pre children), we had no car, no car insurance, no parking, and rare taxis (and before our current mayor, subways worked very, very well, I rarely considered taxis.)
2. Property taxes are comparatively low to other states
3. Access to culture is widespread and cheaper than people think -- there are subsidized tickets for students, etc. Museums are plentiful and often free. Libraries are literally everywhere.
4. Access to jobs is great and you dont crush your soul with hour-long drives. And when you lose/change your job, your next job is also often in the city center, so you dont have to move homes.
I live in DC suburbs now and we have one car. It is hard getting places w/o a car and the train system is good but does not cover as much of the metro as one wishes, and there are last mile issues. Property taxes are way, way higher both both homes and other property (e.g., $800/yr on my Kia minivan), but there isnt a city income tax.
Oh come on, it's among the most expensive places to live in the world by almost any metric. Rent? Probably top 5 most expensive in the world. Groceries? Among the most expensive in the world. Restaurants? Among the most expensive in the world.
This is bare necessities. It's not as if people in Raleigh are spending massive portions of their budget on "Culture" that somehow NYC makes up for it.
>2. Property taxes are comparatively low to other states
Good luck buying in NYC... Not to mention some of the highest income taxes in the US.
An average customer at Amazon apparently buys $600 worth of goods from them in a year so if they got 20 packages then yes this would be a 10% increase. However I for example probably get 2 packages from them a month and a $6 monthly increase hardly seems important, if I leave a light on in my house for too long the increase in my electricity bill probably eclipses that. Depends on point of view I guess.
It is totally expensive, especially Rent. I'm just saying it isnt as expensive as you think in the big picture. Just across the border, all adults need cars. In NYC, you dont usually need a car (at least before the current subway crisis.)
Just across the border, you dont pay city income tax, but you pay absurd property tax.
Not that I disagree much, apart from one thing - that places like NY have 'everything'. If you like nature, mountains, adrenaline sports, weekend adventures without crazy commute, then NY has none.
Irrelevant to some, but folks like me couldn't be bothered to even consider it even if my take home salary went 10x.
If I could work in NY for 5 years and could earn 50 years worth of income and literally retire for life afterwards? I think I could find a way to bear it.
I think that's fair. But there are very few people who are earning, say, $100K/year who could earn a reasonably guaranteed $1M/year if they would only move to NYC. I agree that if you can earn a life-changing amount of money if you only have to move to some (relatively safe) place for a few years, that's probably something most people would consider.
I mean, the Adirondacks and Vermont are pretty amazing and are a weekend trip's distance away from New York. You can even reach them by daily Amtrak from New York. Poconos aren't very far either.
And I've never been to Long Island but it would seem there's plenty of beach/natural shoreline.
There is the entire Hudson Valley, Appalachian Trail and Adirondacks(as dashundchen pointed out).
The Hudson Valley start less than 30 miles outside the city. People in NYC often rent Zipcars run out there for the day.
Not knocking on you here, just really genuinely confused why you’d cite Louis Rossman of all people on earth for his thoughts on places to live. But maybe I’m not in on something here?
Another case of lower income groups responding strongly to financial incentives and higher income groups responding to quality of life incentives. Lower income renters see a discount to be had, higher income renters see an opportunity to get higher quality housing with more space.
The most eye-raising part of this data to me is that 3.5 million people apparently decided 2020 was the perfect year to move to New York. Even if I thought NYC was the place I wanted to live more than anywhere else, I would still heavily consider delaying that move in light of the current health and economic situation. The information on who those people are would be interesting to me.
> About 3.57 million people left New York City this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7, according to Unacast, which analyzed anonymized cell phone location data. Some 3.5 million people earning lower average incomes moved into the city during that same period, the report showed.
Uhhh I'd take this with a HEAVY grain of salt, given that it's based off of anonymized cell phone location data. Were this true, 40% of NYC's population has turned over in the past year, which feels like absolute nonsense from anecdotal experience.
It's absolute nonsense from my anecdotal experience here in NYC as well. I don't even see how it's remotely possible for a full 40% of NYC's population to have turned over in the span of 9 months. New lease signings are down, not up many hundreds of percentage points! Every single thing that would have to be true for this to be true as well, isn't. It's bad methodology from one company trying to get its name in the news and then a media outlet running an uncritical article using this as fact.
We just had an election. Go look at the voter rolls and who actually voted, and for the absentee ballots, where the absentee ballots were sent. There's no way in hell 40% of the voter rolls have turned over since the last time we held an election. The data is out there to easily disprove this ridiculous notion.
I used to do this, and can report the area of London that I lived in turned over 25% of its (voting) residents in a typical 12 month period: that is, before coronavirus time! They may have relocated within London, of course. I assume that New York City is comparable in this respect.
Further assumptions: People not vote-registered are likely to turn over even quicker than that. People who you know personally are more likely to be settled and therefore less likely to move out, just by statistical virtue of having any such personal connection - your anecdotal data will be extremely biased by this.
You need to look further into the voter rolls and actually correlate voters by identity. 25% moving within the city every year doesn't count; the linked article is talking about "Fleeing New Yorkers", not "New Yorkers moving between neighborhoods" (which is commonplace, unremarkable, and doesn't affect NYC's tax revenue in any way).
What we care about here is people that actually moved out of the city entirely, or that moved into the city entirely from elsewhere, not typical movement within the city. If the article is including normal movement within the city in its 40% figure then it's being extremely misleading.
My point is that I do not find it remarkable for that number to be higher than 25% during this period, nor would it be remarkable if more of that churn of people were moving in and out of the city rather than within. (you misrepresent what I said about that).
So the article's reporting fits within my expectation - also noting that a net change of 70,000 people is very small.
The voter rolls will significantly lag outside of election day and - again - is much less likely to include transient residents who won't bother to register, so it's no more likely to be a complete reflection of what has happened than the cellphone data source used here. Something like 40% of the NYC population is not registered to vote.
Everything you're saying here is reasonable/plausible. But it's not at all what the linked article says; it says that there was 40% turn-over of people leaving and entering the city, which is absurd. The first sentence is literally "Millions of people have moved out of New York City during the pandemic, but at the same time, millions of others with lower incomes have taken their place". Not moved within the city, moved out of the city, and being replaced by other lower-income people. That is all completely made up and wrong.
I'm not misrepresenting you; rather, you're misrepresenting the article. The article is indefensibly wrong.
New lease signings, not renewals. Most NYC residents live in their apartment for a lot longer than one year. If 40% of leases had truly turned over then we would be at record highs in new lease signings. But we're not; they're down. That indicates reduced turn-over if anything, plus also some net emigration (but nothing close to these double digit figures).
I admittedly have not looked at the data, but I would have a _very_ hard time believing that the total population of NYC is down 40% based on what I see outside my window and while moving around the city (eg to the go the gym etc). The city feels a little quieter than it normally is, but certainly not the ghost town that a 40% population reduction would be.
It follows from that observation that, if 40% of the population did indeed leave, that they would have to have been replaced by people moving into the city. New lease signings being down suggests this is not the case.
As an anecdote, about 10% of the apartments in my building that I can see out my window are empty (normally ~1-2% are at any given time). The buildings across the street (which are mostly owner-occupied) are all still occupied.
I think, this highlights a bigger problem. You can very roughly split people's mindsets into 2 groups:
* Long-termers. They don't mind delayed gratification. They like planning and saving for the future. Most have complex multi-year degrees or have business experience. They are generally happy with life and want to teach their ways to their kids. What they want from the political environment is a clear set of rules (e.g. taxes, laws backed by a truly independent court system) with minimum interference in their lives.
* Short-termers. They prefer instant gratification. They gather credit card debts on impulsive purchases. They live here and now don't want the headache of long-term planning. They are usually less happy with life and expect politicians to appeal to their emotions. Recognize them through identity gestures, say great words, show attention.
Long-termers tend to earn more, except something in our society changed, and they are quickly becoming a dying breed. So many new social policies, especially in high-density areas, are targeting short-termers and blaming long-termers for inequity. Quite predictably, they are leaving these areas, driving the median income lower.
But, what's even more alarming, the same trend is happening all over the West - the middle class of happy independent thinkers satisfied with life, is vanishing, replaced by unhappy low-earners driven by divisive tribal instincts.
I think you have it backwards: Circumstances drive mindset, to large degree.
If I have a comfortable middle class job, and the assurance of keeping it for a long time, knowing I won't be laid off to pad 3rd quarter results, or forced to train my offshored replacement, yeah, I'll be much happier and satisfied with life.
The mindset change you describe is the direct result of a shrinking class and a generation of entrants to workforce with no expectations of permanence from the employer, and big expectations of being automated out of a job. It's hard to think long term when this is your life.
I haven't been to my office in the city center since March and it feels so much better to be spending my money on local businesses in my area than it does in a lot of the faceless corporate businesses in the city.
I've lived in this area for almost 3 years and feel far more connected to my area because of COVID.
I've seen articles that show Detroit in it's heyday, bustling and prosperous. Today it's much different, of course.
Some say New York, San Francisco and others will bounce right back. I'm not so sure, it just does not sound appealing. I took a vacation to New York a few years back, and I've been to California many times. Right now I have no desire to go to either.
I think they'd better be planning a massive PR campaign.
Hey, in almost all states (there are exceptions), car insurance is mandatory in terms of LIABILITY (civil liability), that is, if a stranger is injured by us. The amount of coverage required varies from state to state. For example, in California, this amounts to up to $ 15,000 bodily injury for one victim and up to $ 30,000 for more than one. In addition, liability for damage to someone else's property is provided - $ 5,000. All this is calculated per exident. Fractional notation is commonly used to express coverage dimensions. More here https://www.americaninsurance.com/if-my-car-registration-exp...
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] thread> About 3.57 million people left New York City this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7, according to Unacast, which analyzed anonymized cell phone location data.
Sorry, but I don't really trust the "anonymized" very much. Why should some company I've never heard of have access to my cell phone location data in the first place.
https://www.wired.com/story/fcc-fines-wireless-companies-sel...
So why do you not trust it? You're only explaining how you disagree.
However, they could likely ask to buy the all data for "57 years old males born in february with a history of calling to Alaska every 5 days" and single you out.
Thinking about this, I wonder if companies providing smartphone apps with invasive tracking are upheld to the same standards...
Not sure how the second follows from the first. There is a company you've never heard of which access to your cell phone location data. In fact, hundreds, and they buy and sell them in commodity marketplaces just like corn or pork bellies. They sell the data with your name attached for one price, and as anonymized aggregates for a much lower price.
Unacast is just saying that they bought the cheaper anonymized version for the purpose of this analysis. Whether the data are real or not is another matter altogether.
If you don't have location services turned off on your phone, chances are they have access to it because you gave it to them (via an app), or gave it to someone who gave it to them.
Source: https://wallethub.com/edu/most-independent-states/36426#main...
Likewise, Nebraskan farmers look like they're on the dole with the corn subsidies, but the other 49 states benefit from lower and stable corn prices, so it isn't clear why Nebraska would get all the costs accounted to them when everyone benefits from it.
Also even if state X gets more federal $$ than state Y it is not useful information as each state is completely unique geographically, demographically, industrially, strategically, etc. So there are endless legitimate reasons money might be spent in one place over another.
It will be interesting to see what happens to NYC's population after the pandemic. I suspect most of the change will have been temporary.
Also, many people fleeing northern cities and California are ending up in Southern cities, which are (spoiler alert) run by the same party.
It is plain stupid to not hold elected leaders responsible for actual outcomes produced under their watch.
I don't think the overwhelmingly... regressive? conservative government you've been running has done overly well either.
Best measure of the size of government is budget, and conservatism values small government. There is nothing conservative about a staggering rise in the spending of federal government.
Neither are any of the procedural changes to congress, lack of deliberation or expansion of the powers of the executive branch.
You generally either believe that government should be bigger and managing more things, or smaller and managing less things. The details and dividing lines vary.
Why should we sympathize with a minority of rent-seekers?
I don't really think this is about sympathizing with rent-seekers.
Cities invest in infrastructure to cover anticipated service delivery well before it's due, and the financing for doing so is a multi-decade affair. Before you complain, this includes things like providing running water, roads that are paved, etc. Really core essential pieces of making a city work.
If your tax base moves to suburbs or just plain leaves the city, the city is still on the hook for those payments, so it results in dramatically cut services or increased taxes on residents.
The flight of some of the tax base incentivizes the flight of many, resulting in further cuts to maintenance contracts, preventative work, and the general crumbling of infrastructure. Sometimes this can be gracefully managed by planned downsizing and renegotiating deals with vendors and financiers. In other cases, this doesn't occur and the city simply... dies. While the US is very young and doesn't have many large examples of this, Flint and Detroit come to mind.
What's that? By what measure? It's one of the oldest continuous governments out there.
Big shifts in governance tend to reset things like municipal bonds and the like.
You mean “most of the rust belt”
It’s less than 1% of the population.
The infrastructure needs don’t change much.
How much of the tax burden did those people support?
That is really the question. One Elon Musk or Larry Ellison can leave town and carry away tax income equivalent to hundreds of other people.
Is there any breakdown of the class of people moving away? Specifically, i'd be curious if they are wage earners? passive income earners?
But the underlying paper makes it clear that it's the former. So it's not accurate to say "US citizens saved $34B...". That was their aggregate income, which is still subject to the same federal taxes no matter where in the US they moved. They would have saved on state and local taxes, depending on the rates of their new home jurisdictions.
For instance, in CA, only about $100M a year out of the $100 billion a year budget is spent on transportation [1].
Because of prop 98 in CA, a minimum of 40% of the budget has to go to education [2].
In NY, it's only 4% spent on transportation [3].
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/California%27s_state_budg...
[2] https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_98,_Mandatory...
[3] https://openbudget.ny.gov/overview.html
If NYC is less expensive to manage per capita, I'm guessing that's reflected in a lower taxation rate. Don't they have a lot of room to raise taxes?
> About 3.57 million people left New York City this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7, according to Unacast, which analyzed anonymized cell phone location data. Some 3.5 million people earning lower average incomes moved into the city during that same period, the report showed.
Questionable methodology that clearly yielded incorrect results.
Hence you get the most clueless people managing the properties.
sell building for 2 million. buy another building for 2 million.
0 taxes paid on growth. and new basis is 2 million.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/06/section1031exchange...
though I was wrong about the stepped up cost basis. was confusing that with inheritance.
1. I had approached the landlord directly since his previous tenant had been a friend of mine. So there was no agent fee (one month rent) to be paid.
2. The other tenant moved in almost a month after i was supposed to, so another month's worth of rent lost for him.
The landlord didn't realize it would take him almost 3 years to recoup the losses even with the increased rent. I didn't push my case much, and found someplace else to stay.
Any tax they'd save would be a fraction what would otherwise be revenue. Besides, real-estate investors attempt to keep their costs (interest, depreciation, etc) all very close to their revenue, not the other way around. Less revenue is simply less of a chance to deduct expenses (not to mention less money for them).
The only way I think it makes sense is if they're sure they're going to be able to rent it for more if they hold out in a way that would make up for the short term loss.
An apartment with an assumed rental value of $X can sit empty and still be assumed to pull $X.
As soon as they start renting it out for $Y, the financials might have to be re-evaluated, which might prompt extra collateral from the borrower.
I have no idea how reliable this comment may have been, but it's an idea...
I was going to ask if we might call this "de-gentrification" and if that's a good thing, right? I'm sitting here in disbelief after a quick search reveals that the actual average income is $879,000. So now I'm thinking those numbers above don't mean much of anything.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tribeca-new-york-city-riches...
Rich people fleeing doesn't bring them back. Whatever they suffered in displacement is just sunk. In the very long term it may form part of a new cycle of gentrification, but only after the neighborhood has lost a lot of its old value and is usually accompanied by the kinds of desperation that poverty causes.
So it's not a good thing -- though you're right that this study is so dubious that it may not even really be an issue.
There are a lot of things that rich people can do besides displace poor people. Maybe you can think of some.
I don't live anywhere near NYC, and probably haven't visited more than a half dozen times, and even I know that $140K/year isn't getting you into Tribeca these days (granted, I occasionally glance at the NYT real estate section). I would expect someone covering that beat to be able to do that gut-check and, I dunno, maybe double-check those numbers.
Averages tend to mask the true reality.
If a corporate executive makes $10 million dollars a year. And the next 100 people makes $100,000 a year. Then the total is $20 million dollars.
When you divide this by 101, you get an average of $198,000. Which is nearly double what the normal person in this example earns.
The better metric is to use the median salary. Which in this example is $100,000. And the executive’s salary is the outlier.
Then again, most executives are paid in tax deferred stock options. And they cash out for a pot of gold after a few years. So this distorts any estimates of general income and wealth of the population.
I wouldn’t put too much weight into this data.
And yes, all of the "data" in the linked article is complete garbage. Don't take any of it as fact.
The original content marketing: https://global-uploads.webflow.com/5dc3e2af6a906d9cc232e1bc/...
It explains that they're extrapolating from three NYC neighborhoods (Astoria, Tribeca, and Williamsburg). I'm not an NYC expert and I'm not going to research these claims further, but I think those are quite well-off neighborhoods and not likely representative of NYC in terms of income or pandemic mobility.
This article feels like Reuters lightly rewrote an ad for Unacast.
> It explains that they're extrapolating from three NYC neighborhoods (Astoria, Tribeca, and Williamsburg).
Wow. This is garbage-tier methodology that doesn't remotely deserve anyone paying attention to the "results". Talk about sampling bias galore.
If your system makes life worse for a certain group of people, you either need to prevent that group from leaving altogether, or ensure that there is no place that they can go to. If you iterate this to the logical conclusion, you end up with something like "globalism."
In this particular case, this is mostly to do with not wanting to live in places with strict lockdown policies, high rates of homelessness and criminality, while simultaneously paying much more in taxes and living expenses, and seeing few of the benefits of being in an urban hub while doing it.
But my point stands: don't forget how quickly people will be willing to upend their lives at the very moment their existence is sufficiently worse than it would be elsewhere. And when you target the wealthy, you target the people most capable of moving anywhere else.
I don't think that has anything to do with it. Whether people are in favor of or against local politics is mostly based on whether or not they share the same opinions as their local politicians. For example, look at the fight over California Emission standards. People just want to have things their way - everything else is just hot air and posturing.
You are talking about forcing people into situations that they are unhappy with, like it's normal or ethical.
The people who pay for the infrastructure and services are free to leave to more attractive places when they feel like they are being exploited. It's the city's responsibility to manage itself in a way that keeps residents satisfied. If the residents feel like they are getting the short end of the stick, they are right to leave and many will do so. Then you are left with those who had no choice and good luck getting them to fund your bloated, inefficient and needless projects.
The policy makers are in charge of just that, making policy. The residents have little control over that, but they do control where they live.
The combination of high taxes, corruption, and incompetence really wear on you after a while.
I'm all for high taxes in service of a strong social safety net and a well-run, modern city. I am happy to pay them. But I can't help but feel that my taxes were being outright stolen and squandered in this city.
Once you accumulate a large pool of money (especially if it's someone else money), the larger the pool, the easier it is to waste it.
We see it with governments, big tech companies, VC funded startups, even when pooling money for a road trip with friends.
I think the enemy is human nature and centralisation, not specific malicious individuals
There is no reason we cannot have competent civil servants, long term planning, clean cities, etc.
I'm completely serious when I say we should just outsource everything on the county level and lower to the Swiss or Dutch.
I agree absolutely. That's what makes it so frustrating.
Take a look at how long metro cities in the U.S. have been run by Democrats, and then tell me this is a Republican problem.
To expand on what abernard1 said, Democrats have had uninterrupted control of some major cities for 60-80 years. The fact that those cities have turned out so poorly can only be blamed on the Democratic politicians in those cities. They are corrupt in every way. As long as people excuse their failures with "But Republicans!", they will continue to get away with their corruption.
Blaming individualism and "the Republican Party" is bizarre in connection with a complaint about "incompetent government on a local level." Almost all of the local governments people complain about (San Francisco, New York City, etc.) are completely dominated by Democrats. Of 51 seats on the New York City Council, just 3 are held by Republicans, and only 1 of those isn't on Staten Island. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is all Democrats.
This is not a matter of my team versus your team, but a real dysfunction in our political system. If people in blue cities in blue states blame Republicans for problems with education, transportation, policing, planning, etc., then there is literally no accountability. We saw this happen this summer. George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. Almost everything to do with his training, pay, etc., was decided by the Minneapolis City Council or the Minneapolis Mayor. The last Republican on the city council left office 23 years ago. There hasn't been a Republican mayor of Minneapolis since 1973. That guy served for a day--the last Republican who served a real term left office in 1961.
Somehow, police brutality in Seattle, Minneapolis, New York City, etc., was laid at the feet of Trump has his voters, who have pretty much nothing to do with and no power over municipal services in Seattle, Minneapolis, New York City, etc.
But I'm mostly with you. I'm kind of dumbfounded by how much attention gets paid to national/federal policing policy, where change is essentially impossible to achieve, when most people live in suburbs, where 2-3 seats on a village or township board can result in nearly arbitrary policing policy changes for that suburb. Swing House seats are a million-dollar proposition; a village board seat in Oak Park might go for less than $5000 invested.
A serious theory of change, and one I think more credible than passing any kind of new federal law: get reformer village boards elected in a scattering of suburbs, get them to pass sharp, meaningful policies (an end to no-knocks, crisis intervention teams, or dream big and have the police stop doing routine traffic enforcement), then prove them out. I've been watching Chicagoland village board meetings for the past couple months, and the modal question that seems to come in policy discussions is "what are the neighboring suburbs doing". Start there! See if you can get a snowball rolling.
And yet, rayiner's comment appeared faded-out from down-voting when I came upon it.
And that's the real problem. He had truth and thoughtfulness in his comment (yeah, you can quibble about federal attempts to override local policy), yet even a smart group of people like regular HN users tribalistically downvoted it. Rayiner sinned by making a coherent argument against throwing Republicans under the bus for metro-area problems.
We are a tribalistic society and it's only getting worse. Trump said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and his supporters would defend him. He was probably right. When evidence of Biden's family corruption surfaced before the election, the media and tech giants actively suppressed and subverted the information.
Ending no-knock warrants or shuffling around police roles just eats away at the edges of the problem. If as a society, we can't find ways to get at truth and logic that cuts through the dynamics that push tribalism, we're doomed to a never-ending race toward the drain.
HN is open minded about intellectual inquiry as long as that inquiry doesn't challenge anything an average Californian already believes
Detroit? NYC? San Francisco? etc. Democrats bring some good, Republicans do too. But Democrats must own the failures in the cities they dominate.
There are absolutely endless stories of NYC government incompetence [1] and corruption [2]. Here are a few recent stories that come to mind:
[1]
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/nearly-100000-new-york...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/nyregion/nyc-schools-covi...
[2]
https://www.wsj.com/articles/five-current-and-former-mta-emp...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/nyregion/thrivenyc-mental...
No. We know what causes corruption - lack of oversight. Its why you see very little of it in the federal government, but that same oversight is also why federal projects are expensive. Everything must be documented and accounted for.
As far as incompetence in government, that's easy... smart people can't stand being constrained by rules designed by people that aren't as smart as they are, especially if those rules reduce productivity and stifle creative solutions.
Compare the big cities to the small well off cities in the Bay Area. Go see how much oversight is in the big cities versus the small cities. Then look at the level of corruption.
Now compare the amount corruption in the military industrial complex to the state governments.
About 3.57 million people left New York City this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7 ... Some 3.5 million people earning lower average incomes moved into the city during that same period, the report showed.
[...]
In Tribeca, a wealthy neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, residents who left this year earned an average income of about $140,000, Walle said. The typical person moving into the neighborhood earned an average $82,000, he said.
If you can develop software, or write your blog, from a remote island, at the edge of a (dormant) volcano (aka: extreme remoters), then why not? Or from any rural farmland area of the country.
Just video call into your daily Zoom Standup Meeting.
How’s the latency of it?
Data throughput is fantastic. 15-50 mbps upstream, 50-200 mbps downstream already.
Now, when all that is closed, you have only the "bad" parts (the homeless, crime, noise, bad smells... all that with a "premium price")... so, why stay?
Poor people have no jobs, have to move out.... rich people don't have anything to do there, and move out because they can.
How well a city takes care of these issues in the good times and has rational/sensible policies sets it up for how it will do in bad times.
This wasn't my experience in San Francisco when I visited in 2016 - I saw some of the best live music in small bars I've ever heard, went to a couple of awesome free outdoor events, record shopping was quality, just walking around an area like Mission I came across a lot of interesting cafes, shops, bars, street art, and people.
I was visiting from Melbourne, Australia - supposed live music capital of the world, ranked worlds most liveable city, and it has a lot of the above - and San Francisco felt pretty exciting with a lot to do.
1. Most of my life in NY (pre children), we had no car, no car insurance, no parking, and rare taxis (and before our current mayor, subways worked very, very well, I rarely considered taxis.)
2. Property taxes are comparatively low to other states
3. Access to culture is widespread and cheaper than people think -- there are subsidized tickets for students, etc. Museums are plentiful and often free. Libraries are literally everywhere.
4. Access to jobs is great and you dont crush your soul with hour-long drives. And when you lose/change your job, your next job is also often in the city center, so you dont have to move homes.
I live in DC suburbs now and we have one car. It is hard getting places w/o a car and the train system is good but does not cover as much of the metro as one wishes, and there are last mile issues. Property taxes are way, way higher both both homes and other property (e.g., $800/yr on my Kia minivan), but there isnt a city income tax.
Oh come on, it's among the most expensive places to live in the world by almost any metric. Rent? Probably top 5 most expensive in the world. Groceries? Among the most expensive in the world. Restaurants? Among the most expensive in the world. This is bare necessities. It's not as if people in Raleigh are spending massive portions of their budget on "Culture" that somehow NYC makes up for it.
>2. Property taxes are comparatively low to other states
Good luck buying in NYC... Not to mention some of the highest income taxes in the US.
Pick your source:
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_current.jsp
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/worlds-most-expensive-cit...
https://www.mercer.com/newsroom/2020-cost-of-living.html
https://abc7ny.com/package-surcharge-nyc-extra-fee-for-deliv...
Just across the border, you dont pay city income tax, but you pay absurd property tax.
Well, how good a deal that is depends on your household AGI versus the value of the property you own/rent in each location.
Irrelevant to some, but folks like me couldn't be bothered to even consider it even if my take home salary went 10x.
And I've never been to Long Island but it would seem there's plenty of beach/natural shoreline.
I mean, who better would you consult, that's pumping out YouTube videos about these problems?
Uhhh I'd take this with a HEAVY grain of salt, given that it's based off of anonymized cell phone location data. Were this true, 40% of NYC's population has turned over in the past year, which feels like absolute nonsense from anecdotal experience.
We just had an election. Go look at the voter rolls and who actually voted, and for the absentee ballots, where the absentee ballots were sent. There's no way in hell 40% of the voter rolls have turned over since the last time we held an election. The data is out there to easily disprove this ridiculous notion.
I used to do this, and can report the area of London that I lived in turned over 25% of its (voting) residents in a typical 12 month period: that is, before coronavirus time! They may have relocated within London, of course. I assume that New York City is comparable in this respect.
Further assumptions: People not vote-registered are likely to turn over even quicker than that. People who you know personally are more likely to be settled and therefore less likely to move out, just by statistical virtue of having any such personal connection - your anecdotal data will be extremely biased by this.
What we care about here is people that actually moved out of the city entirely, or that moved into the city entirely from elsewhere, not typical movement within the city. If the article is including normal movement within the city in its 40% figure then it's being extremely misleading.
So the article's reporting fits within my expectation - also noting that a net change of 70,000 people is very small.
The voter rolls will significantly lag outside of election day and - again - is much less likely to include transient residents who won't bother to register, so it's no more likely to be a complete reflection of what has happened than the cellphone data source used here. Something like 40% of the NYC population is not registered to vote.
I'm not misrepresenting you; rather, you're misrepresenting the article. The article is indefensibly wrong.
It follows from that observation that, if 40% of the population did indeed leave, that they would have to have been replaced by people moving into the city. New lease signings being down suggests this is not the case.
As an anecdote, about 10% of the apartments in my building that I can see out my window are empty (normally ~1-2% are at any given time). The buildings across the street (which are mostly owner-occupied) are all still occupied.
* Long-termers. They don't mind delayed gratification. They like planning and saving for the future. Most have complex multi-year degrees or have business experience. They are generally happy with life and want to teach their ways to their kids. What they want from the political environment is a clear set of rules (e.g. taxes, laws backed by a truly independent court system) with minimum interference in their lives.
* Short-termers. They prefer instant gratification. They gather credit card debts on impulsive purchases. They live here and now don't want the headache of long-term planning. They are usually less happy with life and expect politicians to appeal to their emotions. Recognize them through identity gestures, say great words, show attention.
Long-termers tend to earn more, except something in our society changed, and they are quickly becoming a dying breed. So many new social policies, especially in high-density areas, are targeting short-termers and blaming long-termers for inequity. Quite predictably, they are leaving these areas, driving the median income lower.
But, what's even more alarming, the same trend is happening all over the West - the middle class of happy independent thinkers satisfied with life, is vanishing, replaced by unhappy low-earners driven by divisive tribal instincts.
If I have a comfortable middle class job, and the assurance of keeping it for a long time, knowing I won't be laid off to pad 3rd quarter results, or forced to train my offshored replacement, yeah, I'll be much happier and satisfied with life.
The mindset change you describe is the direct result of a shrinking class and a generation of entrants to workforce with no expectations of permanence from the employer, and big expectations of being automated out of a job. It's hard to think long term when this is your life.
I've lived in this area for almost 3 years and feel far more connected to my area because of COVID.
Some say New York, San Francisco and others will bounce right back. I'm not so sure, it just does not sound appealing. I took a vacation to New York a few years back, and I've been to California many times. Right now I have no desire to go to either.
I think they'd better be planning a massive PR campaign.