For someone not familiar with NYC at all, what was going on in the 80s?
It wasn't all bad. Some of my favourite artists and musicians lived in the city of that era. They were paying low rents or squatting while working on their craft.
Once the disinvestment had run its course developers swooped in and bought some of the most desirable property for cheap. New buildings went up. A generation of kids raised in the suburbs discovered cities were awesome. And those starving artists either became successful or were forced to move out.
The working poor and working class who built the city, maintained the city when everyone else walked away they were discarded. Sent to live in unfashionable suburbs hours away. Rising ever so briefly as "essential workers" while COVID wrecked the economy and ravaged the cities knowledge workers.
Drug use and HIV infection went hand in hand in those days and there was just so much death.
Most of midtown manhattan storefronts were just boarded up and covered in graffiti.
Thread about the decay in general.
What happens is as the tax base leaves the city has less money to take care of itself leading to more people leaving, etc. The opposite happens as people move back in.
I’d never count NYC out but it was clearly in need of a correction. After the riots and the regime in charge supporting it, the increase in muggings and robbery, and the blandness to much of what Manhattan has become, I know a few people that left. Especially with remote work being more viable.
And I don't say this as a twisted conservative wanting to see liberal cities burn. I'm pretty fucking liberal and NYC is going pretty much off a cliff at the moment.
In exchange no one would complain that city government, the state authorities, and trades would be fantastically overpaid and overstaffed.
This was also good for people that worked in industries that cater to the rich (waiters, doormen, weed delivery services, etc, etc).
Things were hardly perfect but aside from the very poor and people being squeezed out of neighborhoods due to gentrification most groups were doing well enough to be satisfied.
The problem is that the whole thing depends on a few thousand very wealthy people sticking around. If they no longer care enough about the restaurants, museums, clubs, private schools, house parties, whatever to want to be in NYC pay taxes and spend lavishly then the whole thing falls apart. The worst part is that there’s no way to gracefully dial back—-wages and benefits are sticky.