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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Manhattan will be fine. It's reinvented itself many times before.

100 years ago it was filled with warehouses and factories. Those all left and never came back, and they were renovated into housing and offices.

If the offices leave, all those buildings will be renovated into WeWork like spaces (if not WeWork itself) or into more housing. Especially if everyone is working from home, people will want bigger places to rent. A single person may want two or three bedrooms (one for them, one for the office, maybe one for a guest). Not everyone can or likes to work from home, so if offices start closing, a lot of people will still want an office like place to go to to get away from kids and family or just to get more space.

New York is still a cultural center. People will want to live there.

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> New York is still a cultural center. People will want to live there.

New Orleans is also a major cultural center. Some people will pay up to live around culture. But the vast majority of people paying NYC prices are doing so because of access to high paying professional jobs. There's a reason that San Jose is nearly as expensive as NYC. There's not a single major city in the world that survives off culture alone.

Given that the population of Manhattan would double even on the weekends, I'm going to say that a lot of people come in just for the culture, and would love to live there if it were affordable.

> But the vast majority of people paying NYC prices...

Those prices have already dropped and if there's a continued, long-term drop in physical jobs then those prices will drop further, attracting a younger crowd that values aspects of the city other than proximity to a workplace. I've been apartment hunting and a lot of brokers say there's already a huge influx of younger renters, and I have multiple friends looking to migrate from Brooklyn to Manhattan due to rent drops.

Louisiana has little to offer politically compared to CA or WA/Seattle area, at least to me. I'm so happy I skipped a job in 2019 that would have out me in San Antonio this winter. I'll happily pay higher taxes so my power stays on, my partner/etc own their own bodies, and the people I live around actually want to help make this a better place for all. IMO that stability is worth the cost of a blue state+ tech minded city combo.

>New York is still a cultural center. People will want to live there.

True, as well as healthcare - NYC has some of the best healthcare infrastructure & expertise in the world.

lol - it will be interesting to see how much of the “culture” returns after the fiascos of last year.

What fiascos do you mean?

I'd also wager that the people eager to leave NYC are not necessarily the same people heavily engaged in creating culture and innovation.

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