MESSAGE
| DATE | 2021-03-01 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Catastophic destruction of urban economy from
|
wsj.com
Opinion | The Old New York Won’t Come Back
Peggy Noonan
7-9 minutes
You can know something yet not fully absorb it. I think that’s happened
with the pandemic. It is a year now since it settled into America and
brought such damage—half a million dead, a nation in lockdown, a
catastrophe for public schools. We keep saying “the pandemic changed
everything,” but I’m not sure we understand the words we’re saying.
It will be decades before we fully appreciate what the pandemic did to
us, and I mean our entire society—our culture, power structures, social
ways, economic realities. We’ll see it more clearly when we look back
from 2030 and 2040. A lot is not fully calculable now, and some problems
haven’t presented themselves. One is going to be the profound
psychological impact on some young people—how anxious and frightened
this era will leave them, even how doom-laden. Kids 5 and 7 years old
were trapped in a house surrounded by screens, and the screens said
“germs” and “death” and “invisible carriers.” The pictures were of
sobbing people on gurneys. We should be especially concerned about kids
who are neglected and have no calm in the house, because they were left
most exposed to the endless vibrations of the adults on the screens, and
had no schools or teachers to help them.
But we’re in a transformational time. Some things that might have
changed inch by inch over the next few decades were transformed in one
large, incredible, 12-month shift. So many institutions will have to be
nimble and farsighted now or they won’t survive. They’re going to have
to be creative and generous and leave old intransigences behind. To lead
in times like this will require the eyes of an artist who sees the broad
shape of things, not an analyst who sees data points.
Look at the cities. I’m not sure we see the implications of what has
happened there. In New York we are witnessing, for the first time in a
century and a half, the collapse of the commuter model. You had to be in
the magic metropolis if you were going to be in the top of your
profession—finance, theater, law, whatever. Many couldn’t afford to live
in the city because it’s where the top, moneyed people were, so they
lived in the near-outside—New Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut. That is
what my people did when they came to America a century ago, settling in
Brooklyn and commuting to work as cooks and maids in the great houses of
Manhattan.
But now you don’t have to be in the city. The top people are everywhere.
You can be pretty much home and be the best. The office towers of
Midtown are empty.
In the past year the owners of great businesses found how much can be
done remotely. They hadn’t known that! They hadn’t had to find out. They
don’t have to pay that killer rent for office space anymore. People
think it will all snap back when the pandemic is fully over but no, a
human habit broke; a new way of operating has begun. People will come
back to office life to some degree, maybe a significant one; not
everything can be done remotely; people want to gather, make friends,
instill a sense of mission; but it will never be what it was.
The closed shops in and around train stations and office buildings,
they’re not coming back. The empty towers—people say, “Oh, they can
become luxury apartments!’ Really? Why would people clamor for them, so
they can have a place in the city and be near work? But near work has
changed. So you can be glamorous? Many of the things that made Manhattan
glamorous—shows, restaurants, clubs, museums, the opera—are wobbling.
A lot of cities, not only New York, are going to have to reinvent
themselves, digging down and finding newer purposes, their deepest
value. They’re going to have to take stock in a new way: New York has
the greatest hospitals, universities, the media, parks. What else?
And they will be doing this within a hard context. Public spending is
skyrocketing due to greater need; the city and state budget deficits are
through the roof. New York is Democratic and public sentiment will be
for tax increases, big ones.
Here are some numbers from the Partnership for New York City, a business
group. The city has lost 500,000 private-sector jobs since March, 2020.
Tens of thousands of small businesses, and 5,000 restaurants, have
closed. Less than 15% of office workers are back in the workplace they
left a year ago.
Tourism, an approximately $70 billion industry, won’t be back until
theater is back. When? Judith Miller had a good piece in City Journal on
how Broadway’s older houses can’t be retrofitted for social distancing
and still make a profit. No one is sure theatergoers will rush back.
Theater will be reborn—man will always have shows and stories—but as
what? Whatever comes—hybrid productions, tape and live, or more small
and intimate theaters—it will have a whole new profit structure and
financial realities. Show folk will tell you: A lot will depend on what
the unions allow. Can they be nimble and farsighted? Or will they think
everything is just an unending 2019?
The Partnership for New York City reports 300,000 residents of
high-income neighborhoods have filed change-of-address forms with the
U.S. Postal Service. You know where they are going: to lower-tax and
no-income-tax states, those that have a friendlier attitude toward money
making and that presumably aren’t going hard-left. Florida has gotten so
cheeky that this month its chief financial officer sent a letter
inviting the New York Stock Exchange to relocate to Miami.
Everyone in public life “knows” these things. But so far in New York’s
mayoral debates no one is bluntly addressing these central challenges,
no one is stressing them. The candidates seem like very nice people but
not one that I saw in two Zoom debates radiated an appropriate sense of
alarm or urgency.
“The pandemic has changed everything.” It has. Never have we needed
visionaries more than now—people in politics, and out, who have an
outsize creativity and a deep knowledge of human beings, who can come up
with reasons people want to be here, have to be here, would be happy
nowhere else.
That’s the long-term project. In the short term, New York needs to hold
on to the wealthy—the top 5% percent in New York pay 62% of state income
taxes—and force down crime. If you tax the rich a little higher, most
will stay: There’s a lot of loyalty to New York, a lot of psychic and
financial investment in it. But if you tax them higher for the privilege
of being attacked on the street by a homeless man in a psychotic
episode, they will leave. Because, you know, they’re human.
No one can stay fixed in the old world, in the Before Times. We’re in
the After Times, and every stakeholder, as they say, is going to have to
be generous, patient and farsighted in a way they’ve never been before.
That’s the kind of bargain people who know how to survive make. We’re in
a battle for our survival, and should start absorbing this.
WSJ Opinion: The Great Cuomo Covid Scandal
WSJ Opinion: The Great Cuomo Covid Scandal
A New York governor's fall from liberal grace. Photo: Associated Press
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
_______________________________________________
Hangout mailing list
Hangout-at-nylxs.com
http://lists.mrbrklyn.com/mailman/listinfo/hangout
|
|
