Fleeing New Yorkers resulted in an estimated $34B in lost income – study

Hence you get the most clueless people managing the properties.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Irrelevant to some, but folks like me couldn't be bothered to even consider it even if my take home salary went 10x.

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.

Data throughput is fantastic. 15-50 mbps upstream, 50-200 mbps downstream already.

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.

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.