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Comment by tacostakohashi | Hacker News Reader

Don't worry, just today the mayor has announced a plan to fix it:

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani...

I worry it may end up like the ‘70s when poor policy started to device large companies to seek greener pastures for their HQ and operations elsewhere.

Sometimes politicians think they have them by their noses and can turn up reaction to fix ineptitude, corruption or both but sadly for the politicians people and businesses can vote with their feet.

This only works if we the people let them. For example, I hear about the example of Kansas City — kcmo vs kcks — and I can't help but wonder, why do we allow companies to do this? It should be trivial for the people of Kansas and Missouri to come together and say we won't allow a race to the bottom.

John Nash won a Nobel Prize for exploring that sort of question. It’s hard.

> why do we allow companies to do this? It should be trivial for the people of Kansas and Missouri to come together and say we won't allow a race to the bottom.

This is prisoner's dilemma 101.

Or, less cynically, cities compete in a free market where they try to compete for a limited amount of capital investment; there's nothing wrong with a city offering more attractive terms to be more business friendly, if they so wish.

Some cities can offer perks like an educated workforce, educational institutions of renown, nice weather, etc. to compensate for a heavier tax burden but everyone and every company has a breaking point after which they decide to pull up stakes.

I love how this thread is talking about bad policy without even discussing any aspect of the policy that is bad.

Perhaps we should pull our heads out of the Fox News punch bowl to take a breath.

Y’all act like democratic socialist policy can’t work even though we’ve spent the last entire history of our country trying the exact opposite strategy only to have it not work out at all. The current status quo which is obviously not satisfactory didn’t come from socialists or leftists running the country.

Cue the “This is the world under communism” memes that are literally pictures of the current world under unfettered under-regulated capitalism.

The boogeyman of “the businesses will move out of NYC” is hilariously out of touch. Where will all these companies get the employees they depend on if they move operations to Kansas? NYC contains nearly the entire population of Ohio within its boroughs. Where do you propose these companies find employees if they all leave NYC?

You’re making the classic business bootlicking mistake of flipping the needs pyramid upside down. We don’t need to beg for businesses to stick around, businesses literally depend on regular working class people to survive. They are worthless without our labor and our dollars as customers.

People did move out of NYC and companies did move HQs out to NJ and elsewhere. NYC lost pop during the eighties and didn’t recover its population till 2000. It was an 10% decline in pop[1]. They went from 125 F500 cos based in NYC down to 61 by 1986. Maybe that’s okay with you if it were to repeat but that’s a lot of a tax base leaving for better pastures.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City

It's important to discuss the reasons for the population dropping in the 1980s and subsequently recovering.

It didn't experience population drops because NYC scared away the businesses and billionaires/millionaires with left-leaning policy. That population loss happened because of macroeconomic trends that were already in motion, as well as local factors that really had very little to do with who was mayor at the time.

Detroit didn't have a population collapse because of who was mayor or what the tax rate on the local businesses was.

It had to do with the economy. The city was going broke and the city was levying more taxes while the city failed to make the environment attractive to companies and individuals. Koch was corrupt, Dinkins inept and it took tough DAs and mayor to clean up crime and make it more livable. They cleaned up most of the mob, some of the graffiti, went after hooligans, made train surfing less attractive and voila, people saw opportunity.

Anyway many fortune 500s left the city from the late 70s to late 80s. NYC sucked.

- Crime cleaned itself up alongside the rest of the country. NYC’s inner city crime woes were a national issue. It just happened to be a lot more urban than other areas. Computerization aided police departments greatly nationwide and especially in NYPD. The end of lead gasoline, overall national economic recovery, and many other factors led to crime declining across the country contemporaneously.

- Koch balanced the city’s budget by 1981 so we can’t really say the city being broke was a root cause for the next 10-15 years

- Taxes can’t really explain this at all. New Jersey to this day still has almost double the corporate tax rate of NYC, just as an example. Why was NYC able to recover and thrive while still maintaining one of the highest overall tax rates in the country? There’s no data correlation.

- NYC wasn’t the only city to have a declining urban core population in the same time period by a long shot. Again, nationwide macroeconomics of the 1980s.

Apparently the rich have already been moving out of NYC: from 2010 to 2022 the percent of people in the US with $1+ million in federal taxable income dropped from 6% to 4% [1]. A whole bunch left during the pandemic (unsurprisingly), according to [2], but it did not say if they came back afterwards. These aren't great articles, just the first that DDG gave me, but it suggests that there may actually be a trend.

[1] https://nypost.com/2025/08/28/opinion/with-the-rich-already-...

[2] https://capwolf.com/why-millionaires-are-fleeing-new-york-in...

Interesting then that during that time period 8 skyscrapers were built in Billionaire's Row

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaires%27_Row

Your first link is an opinion article from the NY Post, I would not consider that to be unbiased reporting (really, we should not be using the opinion section of any newspaper for any of this).

Second link is a financial industry-oriented source, one I've never heard of in any journalistic capacity, and I am not so sure about their motivations to write an article like that.

For example:

> Quality of Life: Rising crime and strained infrastructure.

Rising crime is factually untrue, and NYC is one of the safest cities of any size in the country. Just one example: https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR006/nypd-fewest-murders...

I would also make the argument that primary residence and income tax optimization tricks mean that many of these people with very high incomes still spend a lot of time if not most of their time in NYC. If you're making $1+ million a year in W2 income you most definitely own more than one property and are probably important enough in your work to be able to restructure your income to keep it out of NY State income tax collection. Get paid in stock options, or send your paycheck down to your Florida condo and totally live there 6 months out of the year.

"With this new program we will be able to measure the problem more closely than ever before!" - a NYC bureaucrat somewhere, probably

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