No reason to believe

New York's collapse would be a blessing, but I have to consider the source

Like many another New York exile, I often dream of the old town. I mean that both literally and figuratively. The locales of my sleep-dreams are less often actual places I knew (many of which, a decade on, are probably not there anymore) and more often wholly invented hives, warrens, and hallways, bare-bulb-lit, plaster-smelling, expressionistic sets with muffled crowd and traffic sounds and elevated trains and swarming shadows that I know immediately upon awakening are the city as my mind reinvented it from shards of memory and desire.

To a large extent I am resigned to never going back. The missus is not into it. Recently I mentioned to her some old friends from East Village days had decamped from the Hudson Valley and moved back to the city. Look, honey, I told her, they’re only paying 25% more rent than we are for our townhouse to live in 800 square feet in the South Bronx! She responded as if I had proposed we relocate to a shipping container outside a coalyard. She always says she’ll consider it if I find something sensible; she doesn't understand that there is never anything sensible about going to New York.

Conservatives have a habit of saying from time to time and year to year that New York is actually dying and everyone is leaving; my usual response is to joke that I’ll believe it when I can afford to move back again. (A good joke, as they go, because though conservatives claim to believe in the free market they never seem to think the high cost of living in New York means it’s a desirable place to live.)

One routine they like to pull is, oh, we spoke to a moving van company and they said everyone’s leaving New York and all the other blue cities. From Alicublog, Jan. 4, 2013:

Some guy at Ace of Spades is excited about Atlas Van Lines’ map of what states have more mover-outers and what states have more mover-inners...

Similarly, Some Other Guy at RedState headlines his story about another mover’s poll (United Van Lines’), “Unchanged: Americans Are Still Fleeing High-Tax, Forced-Unionism States With Good Reason,” followed by lots of hurp-durp about lousy blue states boy won’t they be sorry.

Well, it’s always instructive to do what rightblogger readers are unlikely to do, and click the links. At the United Van Lines site:

[Chart showing “Washington DC led the country in net inward migration for the 7th-consecutive year.”]

...Don't worry -- it looks like there'll be plenty of room in DickCheneyland for them all to Go Galt in.

And another from September 7, 2019:

[From a Bloomberg News story:]

Scores of people are leaving the New York City area behind every day.

New York leads all U.S. metro areas as the largest net loser with 277 people moving every day — more than double the exodus of 132 just one year ago. Los Angeles and Chicago were next with triple digit daily losses of 201 and 161 residents, respectively.

Further down this Bloomberg article:

The migration figures exclude the natural increase in population, which is the difference between the number of live births and the number of deaths.

In 10 of the top 100 metros, deaths exceed births. Thus, without migration these cities would be shrinking...

Ha ha. There’s a link to the Bloomberg pay site — tricky! — where you can find out which of these cities are among the 90% who are gaining despite the outflow. But come on. New York, a city of 8.6 million people, ain’t hemorrhaging even if minus 277/day were the whole story.

But of course this factoid is useful provender for the anti-blue-city crowd... I see someone named Jack Kelly at Forbes (“I am a CEO, founder, and executive recruiter at one of the oldest and largest global search firms in my area of expertise,” he informs us) has some of whatcha call your analysis!

New Yorkers Are Leaving The City In Droves: Here's Why They're Moving And Where They're Going

First Kelly hits us with another impressive factoid:

United Van Lines, the large moving truck company, keeps statistics on the flow of people...

You can imagine how it goes from there. (Spoiler: CEO Kelly is full of shit.)

But for the past — wow, hard to believe it’s been almost six months, eh? — the pandemic has actual shaken up some values. A friend in New York tells me that he sees Manhattan rents actually going down because, in his analysis, the folks in the “newly built” luxury rentals who fled coronavirus to whatever rich-person habitats were safer aren’t coming back, leaving some genuine excess capacity; the Brooklyn rich, he surmises, just went upstate and will return.

Something inside me yearns to believe. Not right now, of course, it’s still too soon — I used to have a bit of mordant fun at the Voice with the real estate “deals” available during the Great Recession. But I can’t help but wonder: As the cataclysm plays out, might there be a place for us — not just on the cheap terms I would accept, but a real home for me and mine in the old town?

One thing draws me back to earth, though — the fact that conservatives are currently still playing the same bullshit game as ever.

You see them all over the internet like disappointed suitors, going AHA NOW you’ll believe me, everything is terrible and everyone is fleeing! Melissa Klein at the New York Post:

New Yorkers keep moving out of the city to suburbs, other states

The move is on — to leave New York City.

The exodus that began at the start of the coronavirus outbreak, with many New Yorkers departing to their beach and country homes, has continued unabated as more leave for good, according to city moving companies overwhelmed by the avalanche of would-be expats.

“People are fleeing the city in droves,” says Moon Salahie, owner of Elite Moving & Storing in Yonkers, who has been working nonstop since the city began Phase 1 of its reopening in June.

Another moving company! There’s nothing like the classics. I can see Klein’s editor telling her, eh, it’s been a while, why don’t you go find some movers to tell you business is good.

Salahie said 90 percent of the moves are to the suburbs and mostly families with kids worried about the school year. He’s packed people out of neighborhoods all over Manhattan.

Ha ha ha oh I can see the rubes out in Bumfuck exulting over that. “Ah know’d them city slickers would move away from th’ nigras an’ out to the huh-wite places soon’s they got worried fo’ they young’uns!” I wonder if they know that “all over Manhattan” probably still means Elite’s average outbound customer makes six figures at least. Here’s a good example:

Noah Simon, 35, left his one-bedroom in Hell’s Kitchen on March 13 and went to stay with his mom in Hastings-on-Hudson. He moved out for good in May, just before his lease was up, and decided to buy a home in Westchester.

“To me, it was kind of a no-brainer,” said Simon, a private wealth adviser for UBS. “I love the city. I also recognize that living there right now doesn’t have a whole lot to offer me.” [Emphasis added]

Suck my aching asshole, Noah.

And of course there are also all the usual rightwing bottom feeders who’ve been selling Sodom on the Hudson to their rubes for years and, now that the virus has scared some rich people away, are telling them it’s all liberal misgovernance — like Fox News’ “New Yorkers are fleeing de Blasio’s policies, homeless crisis in ‘droves,’” which claims the real problem is not a disease that swooped in and terrorized the city but bums and crime caused by liberal policies: “You can see over the last three or four years where the stores are closing and boarded up,” claims Charles Payne, trying to convince readers that the troubles of the past six months really started with De Blasio’s inauguration — and they’ll probably believe him, because it’s not locals Fox aims at, but outlanders who want to feel better about the red-state hellholes they’ve been forced by fate and their own stupid voting habits to live in. Cletus may comfort himself that, though his trailer is downwind of the chicken rendering plant, San Francisco is a-covered in bumshit, and that’s got to be worse.

Maybe it’s a Catholic thing: I was always told to be careful about my most fervent wishes and pleasant fantasies, because the Father of Lies might find them a good opportunity to snare me. Fox News et alia are a pretty good stand-in for Satan. So I won’t get my hopes up. I knew New York in the late 70s, when people were scared to live there and that’s how I could afford to; a drop in luxury rentals and a few bullshit Post stories don’t mean we’re back in business yet. But if it all goes to hell, please, my friends on the scene, save me a spot by the flaming trashcan.