NYC is dead forever – here's why | Hacker News Reader

NYC is dead forever – here's why

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24175351

I live in Manhattan and this article is complete bullshit and riddled with errors. For example, he's claiming that rents are down 30-50%, which isn't remotely true.

I'm not going to bother wasting my time on a point-to-point refutation on all the ways it's wrong, but suffice it to say it is completely wrong. Yes, the city is suffering, but not remotely to the degree portrayed here.

Yeah I keep checking rents and they really haven’t come down much. Maybe 10% at most from a very high peak. I wish people would stop getting me excited by claiming there are some huge deals to be had.

I feel the same way about the supposedly cheap lobster I hear about.

Yes same! Where is it?!

>, he's claiming that rents are down 30-50%, which isn't remotely true.

Based on conflicting information via google search, I'm guessing it's the sale transactions[1] that are down ~30% to 50% or more. Therefore, author mistranslated sales volume statistic into sale prices.

If sellers are not willing to lower prices but potential buyers don't want to pay because they think the properties are now worth less because of COVID, it seems that the logical outcome is less sales transactions.

[1] example story: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/manhattan-apartment-sales-wo...

excerpts:

>The total number of sales in the second quarter fell by 54%, the largest percentage decline in 30 years,

>The number of new signed contracts for co-ops fell 78% in June compared with a year ago,

>Signed contracts for condos were down 74%. Co-ops in the $2 million to $4 million range were hit hardest in June, with an 86% decline.

Always find it interesting the narrative difference between those who stayed in the city and those who left. Each side wants to be right.

I'm biased but I don't think I've ever seen the city more beautiful than this summer with outdoor dining, street closures for more walkability, etc.

It seems like there has been more litter on the streets in my neighborhood than there was pre-pandemic, and there was already a lot there pre-pandemic.

I love the reduced cars on the road and outdoor dining.

Thanks for sharing the other side of the story. Manhattan will thrive as the pandemic subsides and the skeptics will be proven wrong just as when they bad mouthed NY through the ‘80s

I disagree. Even if NYC goes "dead" for a while -- maybe even for a generation -- it will eventually come back.

In every continent today, most major cities have been around for millennia, surviving through all kinds of natural and man-made disasters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_continuously_in...

It seems that as long as populations in surrounding areas survive (i.e., as long as populations aren't wiped out, as apparently happened with, say, Mayan cities), large cities tend to persist century after century, coming back again and again.

The part that scares me most is the finances.

The New York City subway is a crumbling, ancient embarrassment for a world class city. The costs of doing anything with it are astronomical. With this financial crisis, who can say it will plausibly get any better than it is now in the next 15 years? It is more likely to get even worse!

For me, and probably millions of other people, the subway is the key to accessing the things I love in NYC. I used to take it every weekday to and from work and every weekend to and from entertainment and dining. It is something where changes in the quality will be felt immediately.

As someone who is currently moving out of a major city, I think this is overblown. COVID will end, probably next year, and the vacuum that drew people and dollars into NYC will resume. Some people and businesses will move out during COVID. Many will move in once COVID is over and rents have fallen.

The article is mostly anecdotal and, at this time, has grammatical errors. The thing it does most effectively is advertise its author's comedy club.

I think the age of one of the largest generations and the timing of the pandemic is important to think about.

If you were getting to your 30s, you are about at the age where dual income career minded couples start to have children. The opportunity to work remote is convenient to those couples that were looking to move to a smaller more affordable area as their children made it to school age.

It’s not that the pandemic will never end, its that it gives a lot of people an easy way to relocate as they do not have to quit their current job and/or find a job while living outside the area they are trying to move to.

Even if their job requires them to start working in the office again, they’ll have already had time to get settled in their new area and will have a much easier tome finding a new job there.

Please note that this article was written by the "Bitcoin" guy

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-man-behind-bitcoin-geniu...

I wouldn't take anything he says seriously. There's probably a buck in it for him to flip to write something like this.

Here is my anecdotal experience:

* Moved to Manhattan in 2017 for work. When covid hit full steam in March, I decided to stick it out for a while, hoping things were turn or that the reaction to the virus was overkill. Turns out covid was legitimate, and started planning my move in April / May. Moved out at the end of June to live with family in one of the outer boroughs. Living in Manhattan was awful during that time. The city is a pain to live in when circumstances were good, but was pretty much unbearable with covid. It made no sense to stay - I was paying awfully high rent to live in the city and not enjoy it.

* My landlord was a baby boomer business owner who recently brought a 2nd retirement home out of state and was planning on retiring. Covid accelerated her plans, and not in a good way. She is trying to sell her Manhattan home and use the proceeds to pay the mortgage for her new place. She originally listed her home for $1.5M, and now its listed at $1.1M and is still struggling. Her story is likely not unique.

* I work with a team of 7 people at work, 4 of whom (including me) lived in the NY - 2 in BK, 1 in Queens, 1 in Manhattan (me). All are millennials - 3 moved in with family, 1 moved out of state.

* I would say 9/10 millennials I know who could move out of NY has already either moved in with family or out of state.

To emphasize - this is my anecdotal experience. Mine could be exceptional, but I doubt it.

I love Manhattan - moving to the city was the best decision I ever made and I was certain I was going to die there. However, recent events are the most depressing I have seen in my life. I hope NYC bounces back, but I don't see that happening for a long time, and I don't think I'll be around for when it does, because I am at the point in my life where I am looking to start a family.

I started a family in NYC and we are still here. It’s very possible to do it without being a billionaire and it’s a fantastic experience rich way to grow up. I grew up in the burbs and that was great too. There is no one way to do things. But if you really love NYC don’t believe you can’t have a great family life here.

If covid did not exist, I would agree with you. But for me, it's not worth the extra hassle, just my opinion.

It read to me as a yet another rant, until this:

>In 2008, average bandwidth speeds were 3 megabits per second. That's not enough for a Zoom meeting with reliable video quality. Now, it's over 20 megabits per second. That's more than enough for high quality video.

I think the author has a point. Not exactly because of the bandwidth (for instance we're a remote company but we almost never use video in calls). Advances in technology (mainly the SaaS-ification of everything) slowly prepared everybody for remote work becoming mainstream. The pandemic only accelerated it, and forced C-level managers to admit that remote work won't kill their companies. If not the virus, the shift would've still happened a few years later. Just more gradually. So from that perspective the author is right - some changes are irreversible, because technology has made it so.

Anecdotally, I've seen about 10:1 ratio of people talking about leaving NYC vs people actually doing it. In fact, NYC has had a net negative migration rate for a long time (eclipsed by birth rate). The company I'm with right now recently declared they will never reopen their offices but NYC employees are staying put. I can foresee a substantial mid-term decrease in commercial real estate that may finally bring residential real estate back down to Earth.

I read the whole article.

NYC nor any other major city will die from this.

10,000 people want to leave NYC on a Facebook group? NYC has what, 8 million people?

Half the article is talking about the kind of fears that watching the local news will get you. You think Phoenix doesn’t have any homeless people? You think people don’t get shot occasionally in Phoenix? New York City is literally statistically safer for murder per capita than many of these smaller cities.

I think the author over-emphasizes how much bandwidth will keep all work remote, too. Sure, it’ll work for some tech jobs, but the narrative that productivity has increased across the board is not backed up by convincing numbers. Only about half the country works a “desk job” from my understanding.

I know for me, personally, as soon as it’s safe to go back to the office, I’m doing it. I’m tired of subsidizing my employer’s need for real estate. I want my kitchen table back. But I know that’s a personal anecdote.

The 1918 pandemic didn’t mean that NYC died and I don’t see how this one is very different.

Mark my words, we won’t be talking about COVID-19 in 2025.

> I read the whole article.

But we only the read the titles and react around here. /s

I agree with your sentiments overall. The whole thrust of the article feels anecdotal. We will feel some acceleration of remote working trends over the next decade+ as a direct result of covid but it's not going to happen overnight.

Yep. I really didn’t see any convincing arguments whatsoever.

The thing about large cities is that their trends move slowly. It isn’t evacuated in a year. Meaning there’s time for economics to self correct. If there’s any sort of exodus, prices will fall and people will move in.

But that didn't happen with Detroit.

> New York City is literally statistically safer for murder per capita than many of these smaller cities.

This little trick is a pet peeve of mine.

Per capita crime statistics mean nothing to the people living in a city. It doesn't matter that each person you run into each day is slightly less likely to be a criminal if you run into 100x more people in NYC than in a small suburb.

What matters is the question "how likely am I to be the victim of a crime?". The answer is: a lot more likely in NYC than a small city.

Doesn't "murders per capita" answer that question?

It's "murder victims per capita", not "murderers per capita", so it doesn't matter if you run into 100x more people in NYC.

And even if it was murderers per capita, it would require the assumption that each murderer is murdering a constant percentage, regardless of location, of the people that he sees.

The more I think about it, the less sense your argument makes.

Property crimes like burglary and arson are committed against your property, and so the natural denominator is per household size. As long as household size is pretty invariable among cities, then per capita is going to correlate quite highly with household size.

How about crimes like murders? Most murders are people killing someone they know. Your social circle is limited more by human capabilities, so it's not going to increase just because you live in a denser city. So again, your likelihood of being murdered will correlate with murders per capita.

Another take on the statistics: if your argument is that you are more likely to run into the number of criminals because of a higher density of interactions, then consequently the number of crimes per criminal should also go up. I don't have any hard numbers on these statistics, but I would be extremely shocked if they bore you out here.

A final comment is that actual crime statistics is measured by the number of crimes committed per residents living there. There is actually some bias here: some of the highest numbers here are measured in places like Times Square which combines extremely high tourist traffic (and hence high pickpocket rates) with extremely low residential numbers. But if you talk about entire city-level rates, those effects are going to be muted. If you again assume that the number of victims of a single crime is constant, then the number of crimes committed per population, and that the victim of a crime is chosen uniformly at random, then the crime rate per capita is pretty much the inverse of the likelihood of being a victim of a crime.

Your math is deeply wrong. You’re only in more jeopardy in NYC if you manage to become 100 people in NYC.

Wow. What an article.

I live in middle-America, things don't seem so dire here. I hope the author is wrong, I hope NYC comes right back. My wife and I vacationed there and had a ball.

Things will probably be different, but I hope it returns in some form or fashion.

Who's robyn?

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