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Comment by the_lonely_road | Hacker News Reader

There are so many issues with this article its hard to believe it got past the editors and into publish. The other top comments at time of my posting already covered the most egregious but I will add this one:

“I understand that this is largely a pre-Covid population, but adding over 600,000 people is like adding the population of Miami."

This is such horseshit that any rational reader should immediate see through it. Miami, the largest city in Florida, and one of the largest cities in the united states, being reduced to just "Miami City" population is an absolute joke.

Miami-Dade, with 2,716,940 people in 2019, is the seventh most populous county in the United States. ... Miami metropolitan area, with 6,166,488 people. Census, April 1, 2020 Miami City: 442,241 people.

Miami City has only ~600,000 because practically every 4 square mile area of Miami is its own incorporated city like Pinecrest, Coral Gables, etc.

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Reminds me a bit of the situation in London. It's entirely true, but highly misleading, to state that the total population of the City of London is between nine and ten thousand people.

Comparisons of both density and total population between different cities are problematic because so much depends on where boundaries that exist for somewhat arbitrary political and historical reasons are drawn. Metropolitan statistical areas sort of give you an upper bound for the latter but not the former. London is a particularly challenging case given that not many people live in the City. (Paris, and to some degree, NYC have the opposite situation where outside of the very core, density is quite a bit lower--especially with Staten Island in the case of NYC.)

Not really, because City of London is a borough of London proper and is really just the business district.

City of London is not the same as city of London.

Metro Atlanta is like this too. You have the core inside the perimeter with about 500,000 people, then a bunch of nearby cities, and a bunch more that still have a lot of commuter traffic to and inside the perimeter. It adds up to about 7 million people.

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

This article is talking about city limits. New York City (city limits) has added 1 Miami (city limits). New York City also has a metro area that is much larger in population than the city itself, so what are you so mad about?

He’s mad because nobody thinks of city limits. Toronto became the greater Toronto area and now it’s 6M people but the population didn’t change, just the imaginary lines around it.

It's comparing two completely different kinds of population centers. Places like Miami were built up after WW2, so populations that might live in a grid in NYC live within 30-50 minutes by car and make the trip regularly, often daily. They're not "in the city," but they're in the city.

“Largest single governing body” then?

The people who run the city also live outside the city limits.

When most people think of NYC they think of Manhattan or the five boroughs, not the greatest metro area. But if you say the city of Miami you general mean the metro area. So it is just missing is all.

Seems like a wild overreaction to a single sentence in an article that you acknowledge is factually true

> hard to believe it got past the editors and into publish.

Whether it is blocking Amazon HQ2, or the disastrous handling of the pandemic (If NY was its own country it would have had one of the highest per capita nCov2-mortality-rates of all industrialized nations), or the deteriorating security situation – decades of one-party rule leave behind a dysfunctional, rotten, place.

All of those failures where known to happen in the moment the root-cause policies were enacted. Dysfunctional places enact them inspite reality's warnings, because by now reality is a white supremacist.

The subway-cars can become a place to forni- and deficate for the homeless for weeks, making it unusable for citizens. But critique cannot make a dent, becaue it is guilty by association.

That's why even if tax-payers flee the place day by day, its institutions must defy that reality. Insitutions like the NYT are a major part of the city's dysfunction. They are to blame, thus you see such rediculous articles getting "past the editors".

One party rule? The mayor before Deblasio (D) was Bloomberg (R)?

And immediately before that, Guiliani...

Maybe not the perfect example of good governance, but certainly not single party rule.

This is exactly what the article was talking about. People predicting the decline of NYC based on these statements, while it turns out that NYC actually gained a ton of residents.

Also, the idea that the subway is unusable to the citizens of NYC is utterly divorced from reality. There are issues, of course, but New Yorkers depend heavily on the subway for their transit.

"The subway-cars can become a place to forni- and deficate for the homeless for weeks, making it unusable for citizens. But critique cannot make a dent, becaue it is guilty by association."

this is the type of stuff people who don't live in NYC say. guess what, I use the subway all the time and things go perfectly well! it's definitely got its problems and there's a real homelessness crisis in NYC (although nothing like the west coast tent cities exists here), but to say it's 'not usable'? you're out of touch.

Recommend watching Louis Rossmann's coverage on how NYC is deteriorating, it is shocking.

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