A Vision of Post-Pandemic New York
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Old people who live in NYC do so because they love it. They're not leaving.
Headquarters aren't going away. If you're in NYC it's for a good reason (access to labor/industry).
A "much poorer New York"? Not more so than anywhere else.
Develop the strictest test-and-trace? That would require them to get their act together, so no. This isn't a well-managed Asian city.
Subway ridership lower? People take the subway because they don't have a choice. Somebody explain to me how people are going to get to work instead.
And on and on.
The author teaches at a university in Virginia. Reading this article it's hard to imagine he's spent any time here in the city at all.
I’d rather the author spend time thinking about what the city could look like as we come out of this to yield a better future for the city. For instance, let’s finally hand over some streets fully to cyclists, so more people can feel comfortable using bikes as a serious mode of transport. Let’s stop subsidizing luxury apartments and malls throughout the city (looking primarily at you Hudson Yards). Can we make it so the trains don’t break when we do need them, so we don’t have to pack shoulder to shoulder on the subways all the time?
Life is definitely going to be different in the city, but I’m not mad if my neighborhood stops being a shopping mall for European tourists and can become a regular community of New Yorkers again.
People still go to festivals and stores despite gun violence. People still drive cars despite accidents. People still go into tall buildings despite terrorist attacks.
This too shall pass. Society will adjust to be better prepared for the next time it happens, in many ways. But this article gets far too sweeping about the wrong ideas.
They might not leave more than before, but they do leave. NYC is a very expensive place to live if you're not rich or don't have a high-paying job.
NYC will change and adapt. But from the perspective of someone living hear stuck in my apartment for the last few weeks, I wouldn't predict a mass exodus of older new yorkers. They are a pretty stubborn lot who live here for a reason. Maybe if we get recurring waves of large scale infections they would leave, but at that point, so would most people who could.
I would predict more wealthy families with school age children who have been considering the suburbs will likely leave, but a percentage of them leave every year.
I think one of the more likely and immediate impacts will be closings (as in going out of business) of many restaurants, delis, and bars and financial hardship for everyone who worked for them.
I got a request from a local restaurant I've been to exactly one time to donate to a GoFundMe to save the restaurant. I'm not sure what to say about that... Doesn't feel like a reasonable 'ask' to me. The place is good, but not sure my current priority for charitable donations should be a 30 seat restaurant with $35 entrees.
Cory is the guest of first Short Story Club event, which happens tomorrow evening! https://www.shortstory.club/
Doesn't this illustrate the issue with market decision making in general?
Rationally wouldn't you want to go on funding the things you wish to happen / enjoy in equal proportion to before the crisis, if the money flows are still the same (e.g. you can still 'virtually' tip the waitress at your fancy restaurant etc?)
I'm really hopeful that the city takes this opportunity to build proper infrastructure for people to bike around safely. There just isn't room for everyone to start driving a car.
Any retreat from public transportation would be astoundingly stupid. And in fact this whole piece is astoundingly stupid. Asian cities are the prior art of density combined with basic public awareness of epidemiology. None of the weird stuff the author talks about happens there to my knowledge.
IMO, I don't really see the MTA coming back from this. The unions won't let them decrease costs (construction or operational). They don't have the capital to make the improvements that would increase automation, and even if they did they'd have a hell of a time getting that through the operating unions. Making the stations nicer just means you're going to wind up with more police chasing more homeless people, creating more opportunities for police-on-citizen violence caught on video.
Could you elaborate on what you mean here? Are you expecting a different governance model?
It doesn't seem feasible to me to simply think 'the subway will stop existing'. The density level of the city has formed around the existence of mass transportation.
Even if a low farebox recovery rate were the problem, the solution isn't increased policing. Many people in NYC simply can't afford to ride the subway, and you're not gonna magically squeeze money out of them.
The MTA was already doing better last few years (thanks train daddy). Relying on fares is stupid anyways. There were lots of pointless station improvements as others said.
As to the costs, union, and automation, I would explicitly trade a huge increase in new line capital costs for driverless or whatever trains, and get all those drivers retrained to contribute to the capital costs. In general, I think workers should be incentivized to assist with their jobs' obselesence, and this will make everything smoother and easier.
Regardless, that is a long way off. We need new signals far more than we need driverless trains, and there is no labor-automation conflict there.
Basically everyone I know is chomping at the bit to get back to the pub and resume life as normal.
If there's an antibody test and enough people are infected, then I imagine that those that are immune will just act exactly as before and perhaps even find paranoid folk frustrating to be around.
A nonzero and significant fraction of people (I don't condone this FWIW) are still wandering around in the parks, having barbecues etc, because they simply don't want to face the idea of a life in which we are afraid of our common man - it's the essence of metropolitan life. The death of sociality is the death of London.
It's also illegal (not an essential journey or exercise), probably for the reason stated above.
If we achieve Polio-style elimination, with a vaccine that confers immunity long enough for the disease to be eliminated - cities like London will absolutely bounce back.
But if we end up with Flu-style situation, where immunity last year doesn't mean you're immune this year, and immunity to the strains in New York doesn't mean you're immune to the strains in San Francisco? It's difficult to know what the outcomes from that would be.
What is this based on? Just because the outbreak is worse in New York now, does that mean it can't be like that somewhere else?
Given that the probable mortality rate for people over 70 is 10% or 15% for this virus, and that any vaccine will not be anywhere near 100% effective for 100% of the population, not living in a densely packed big city is entirely rational.
If there is an exodus, it will be of blue collar workers to states like Pennsylvania.
The offer will intuitively grow as there are more empty places but they may want to game that. It may be part of the problem and why we see lots of empty commercial spaces. If you live in NY it is quite disheartening to see empty storefronts on main streets, it adds to the depressive landscape. I think they may have become more than greedy and charged more than what the places were worth and now in the downturn are in a bind: lower prices and see a lot of the property generate rent (but that would force them to lower their current profitable rentals as well) or keeping it as it is.
The empty storefronts are bad, for sure. But to the landlord, reducing rent in order to generate additional income may revalue the property and put it underwater, which triggers clauses in the deals with investors and banks. And as far as I can tell, the whole thing is driven by how balance sheets can be presented to investors and banks, as much as it is driven by how properties can be rented to businesses.
My personal take is that this system killed SoHo. I also don’t understand anything about real estate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Legit don't know how some people can get published in big websites such as this with such garbage content.
I see this repeated endlessly but I can't track down where it came from. Do you have a source?
> “Like most vaccinologists, I don’t think this vaccine will be ready before 18 months,” says Annelies Wilder-Smith, professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. That’s already extremely fast, and it assumes there will be no hitches.
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/06/when-will-coro... )—to "we'll almost certainly have a vaccine in 12–18 months".
which is to say we were already living in that time. its not that people forget, its that no one wants to remember. things are the way they are wanted to be. this is what we want.
coronavirus was dangerous in 2019, and still no one cared. our worldwide risk vs reward function appears to have a time window of about 3 days.
Being negative for the sake of it, is adding nothing to the discussion.
you say a century like its prehistoric - that's barely more than 1 person ago.
EDIT: to further prove my point, you didn't respond to the part of my post where I said we clearly saw this coming in 2019. it exactly disproves your point - we DID see national lockdowns, we just didn't care.
The overwhelming majority of people, the common person on the street, did not see it coming.
A week or two before my state got locked down I was at a meeting and for Other Business I said we need to establish how to hold next week's meeting online. Everyone there looked down at their hands, clearly thinking they were in the presence of a nut. Finally someone said, in the tone you talk to your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving who is a Fox News nut, "Well if a lockdown would ever happen we can email about it then."
The meeting was a Ham Radio club and so draws from a wide range including both white collar and blue. I didn't mean to talk down about the folks there, who are generally intelligent and thoughtful, and I only told that story to illustrate that the typical person was not thinking about hunkering even that close to the lockdown moment.
China did not report this disease to the WHO until 31DEC.
The first containment restrictions, a quarantine of the greater Wuhan area, was not put in place until 23JAN.
Until a few weeks ago, the earliest known infection presented on 10DEC in Wuhan.
So, how the hell did "we clearly saw this coming in 2019"? Where are the "national lockdowns" you claim existed?