In his latest newsletter, which, as I keep repeating, is in itself a refutation of Friedmanite “No Free Lunch” gospel, Paul Krugman takes us on a walking tour of the Big Apple, beginning with this paragraph:
Full disclosure: I’m one of those privileged New Yorkers who decamped to the suburbs during the worst of the pandemic. But I’ve been back in the city lately, and over the past few days I’ve been doing a lot of walking around.
In what follows, Paul explains that New York isn’t the crime-ridden hellhole of Big Donnie’s diatribes and bloviations, which I’m sure is pretty much true, but here’s the thing: Paul’s “full disclosure” doesn’t quite strike me as “full disclosure”. Paul says “I’ve been back in the city lately”. Well, that’s not quite the same thing as “I’ve moved back into the city”. And my question is, “why not?”
I’m not calling Paul a coward for leaving the city in April—presuming that’s when he left. COVID infections increased from zero in March 2020 to 6,000 a day in April, though falling to 3,000 a day in May, and Paul, though not the geezer I am, is definitely well into the “danger zone”. If all you had to do was jump in a car and drive for a couple of hours, who wouldn’t make the trip?
But blissfully reassuring us that everything is back to normal for America’s big cities is a bit glib. If you send your kids to New York City schools, you may be starting to rethink the whole urban scene. You may wonder why Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio, in the worst crisis New York has faced since 9/11—and one’s that far more prolonged—can’t think of anything better to do than imitate a pair of pushing and shoving five-year-olds on the playground—and grossly incompetent pushing and shoving five-year-olds at that. De Blasio in particular has set a record of self-indulgent incompetence that will surely stand for decades to come.
Over at Bloomberg, Justin Fox has a nice article, The Big-City Exodus Isn’t Very Big (Yet) Yes, the pandemic has caused some to flee New York and other cities. Whether the trend builds depends on the recovery, with a particular focus on the Big Apple. As the headline says, there’s an increase, but not a flood: “United Van Lines reports a doubling of the number of people looking to move out of the city [i.e., New York], and real estate appraiser Jonathan J. Miller estimates that transaction volumes in New York suburbs were up 51% in July over the year before.” On the other hand, this isn’t counting people like Paul, who can just “move” to their summer home, or winter home, or ski chalet, or yacht, or whatever. (Paul probably isn’t living on his yacht.) For this crowd, I’ve seen estimates running up to 500,000, already long gone.
So here’s the thing, that Paul—you know, that Krugman guy—might have mused about in his column. New York doesn’t really depend on “affluent” people—those shirt-sleeve folks whose incomes rarely reach 500k in a good year—but rather the mega-rich, the ones whom Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez loves to hate. If they decide that maybe New York isn’t the place to buy $50 and $100 million condos that get used three or four months a year and that a “virtual” Wall Street might be feasible, the gigantic pork barrel known as the city government of New York may run out of grease. (I’d link to articles about high-end real estate market declines in NYC but all the sites carrying them—like the Wall Street Journal and Business Insder—are too snooty to let you in for free.)
So here’s my suggestion, Paul. If you haven’t moved back into the city, do so. I know that reading A Journal of the Plague Year is more fun than writing it,1 but if you haven’t already, you really ought to give New York a chance.
And, Paul, if you have moved back into the city, well, never mind.
Afterwords
I stayed, and am staying in DC, no doubt in part because I don’t have a summer home, but, anyway, here I am, and so far, so good.
1. In fact, reading Daniel Defoe’s 1722 classic, about a plague he did not experience (not as an adult, anyhow), is not a lot of fun, at least if you’re as squeamish as I am. Those descriptions of the “buboes” that you break out with are pretty gross.
