What hath COVID wrought? And what will it wreak? Hard to say. If all goes well, we could be back to “normal”, pretty much, this summer. But if things go sideways, with wily new strains that our current miracle vaccines can’t counter, well, unpleasant to think about, especially for us urban liberals, who have been on a 30-year run of good fortune, as urban living has become ever more fun, ever more fashionable, and, if you were lucky enough to buy at the right time, ever more affordable. But all that may be changing.
A lot of people are saying that there’s a new normal waiting, no matter what shakes from the sieve. Back in September, 2020, Bloomberg reported that Manhattan Rental Supply Soars, Pushing Vacancies to a Record, but then updated that to tell us that New York’s Plunging Rents Are Luring Bargain Hunters to Their Dream City. New York is back, baby! Well, who knows?
Recently, Henry Grabar, writing in Slate, asked the question If Rush Hour Dies, Does Mass Transit Die With It?, a near follow-up to another excellent piece, this time by Tanya Snyder in Politico, The pandemic could devastate mass transit in the U.S. — and not for the reason you think, both arguing that, regardless of how much you hate Zoom, hasn’t your life gotten a lot simpler since the COVID came? Yeah, no fancy office (if you even had one), no fancy lunches (if you could afford them), but no commuting hassles, no getting up an hour early to wash your hair!
Yes, working from home saves a lot of time and money, speaking of which, wouldn’t you like to cut your housing costs in half, while doubling your living space? How being able to see a designer kitchen, not by turning on the TV but by walking into the next room? And how about this? How about living in a Never-Never Land where parking is free! I know you can’t believe me, but, trust me, it’s true. There are such things.
For the past 30 years, America’s big cities—the coastal ones, at least—having been living off a never-ending—in fact, ever-increasing—gusher of tax revenues as both the number and the wealth of the affluent seemed to increase without limit. Big cities glistened as they hadn’t since the fifties. But now that glistening has faded as the COVID has shut the big cities down.
There’s more bad news, of course. COVID-19 has helped destabilize American society, leading to the biggest round of riots since the 1960s, and a painful increase in the murder rate. The sixties riots scarred American cities from the assassination of Martin Luthor King, Jr. in 1968 until the early 1990s. How bad is it going to be this time around?
And liberals are making it worse. For decades, the liberal media “covered” education issues by reprinting teachers’ union press releases. Now that’s changing. Unions don’t understand how they’re turned themselves into the bad guys, have encouraged many parents to consider home schooling or private schools, and have very likely recharged the charter school movement. Of course, the “woke’ obsession with eliminating systemic racism, aka recognition of achievement, simply adds gasoline to a raging fire, encouraging many parents to consider moving into cheaper, more suburban, less woke jurisdictions. And the union leaders, clinging to their sacred contracts, are too blind to see it.
The same may be said, as I’ve already said—see An Embarrassment of Liberals—of liberal governors and mayors across the country, overpromising and underperforming, who leave their constituents wondering why their extravagant, “progressive” initiatives inevitably turn into bloated bureaucracies that never seem to benefit anyone but the slow-moving, early retiring bureaucrats who run them.
It was only two years ago that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran Jeff Bezos and Amazon out of town, a “big win” that AOC may someday wish she could have back. At the time I wrote “Yet the unique attractions of New York . . . are likely to keep the Big Apple on top for the foreseeable future.” Well, if you define “foreseeable” as “about one year,” I was right on the money.
Afterwords
If big cities do take a big hit, and DC is one of them, both developers and local governments are going to take a huge one, because of the continuing expansion of possible albatross “Metro” and the enormous amount of development continuing around DC-area Metro stations. There’s a whole new city going up at the McLean station near “Tysons”, Virginia, presumably in anticipation of the completion of the Metro Silver Line to Dulles Airport, and there is similar development within DC running north along the Red Line stops for Union Station, Gallaudet, and Rhode Island Avenue. In Maryland, a 21-station “Purple” line is under construction, linking the existing Maryland Metro Stations and providing new intermediate stops. Developers haven’t just been finishing existing projects, they’re breaking ground for new ones. I guess they think they know something. For the sake of DC—I like Metro!—I hope they’re right.
