The deterioration of America's major cities has been going on for a while now, and it's not only the infamous West Coast cities of San Francisco, known as the city of poop maps, or Los Angeles, the home of Bidenville homeless encampments and industrial-scale shoplifting rings. New York City is experiencing similar problems, and now a survey of New Yorkers reveals how many New Yorkers are looking to get the H out.
Just half of all New Yorkers plan to stay in the city over the next five years, and anger over quality of life has skyrocketed since the pandemic — with just 30% saying they’re happy here, according to a damning poll from the The Citizens Budget Commission.
The non-profit think tank’s first such post-pandemic survey, released Tuesday, also found that only 37% of New Yorkers thought public safety in their neighborhood was excellent or good, down from 50% six years ago.
When asked if they planned to stay in the Big Apple until 2028, only 50% of those surveyed said yes, down from 58% in 2017, according to the CBC.
That's a big number. I've been advising friends and family for a few years now to get out of the cities if it's at all possible, and it sure looks as though a lot of New Yorkers — in fact, half of them — are thinking the same things. The Big Apple's deterioration is the main driver of this.
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The dissatisfaction of New Yorkers runs the gamut, from crime to filth, to education, to traffic.
“People are fed up with the quality of life. There’s a general sense of lawlessness. You go into the CVS and there’s shoplifting. People’s cars get vandalized,” Queens Councilman Robert Holden told The Post.
Half of the 6,600 households polled also said they felt unsafe riding the subway during the day, a drastic reduction from the more than four out of five New Yorkers who said so in 2017.
The survey also showed steep slides in happiness with the quality of public education, government services and cleanliness in the city.
New Yorkers were also increasingly dissatisfied with traffic, bike and pedestrian safety and subway service.
The great tragedy in all this is that as recently as the Giuliani-Bloomberg years, New York was a much more comfortable place. The streets were cleaner, the subways were... usable, there were booming restaurants and stores, and crime was kept in check. But then Mayor de Blasio came in, now Mayor Adams, and suddenly, people in the Big Apple are feeling nostalgic, if not for Rudy Giuliani, then perhaps for Fiorello La Guardia.
On the survey, one prominent New Yorker had this to say:
“The survey is a sobering, but hugely valuable assessment of what things matter the most for New Yorkers right now,” said Jonathan Bowles, Executive Director, Center for an Urban Future.
“Policymakers should take notice and grasp that there’s still a lot of work to do to make the city more livable and affordable
If that's not the understatement of the month, it will do until a better one comes along.
Might it even get to the point where New Yorkers look at their voting patterns and say, "Hey, wait just a minute..."? That seems unlikely, the previous election of Republican mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg notwithstanding, and here's why. Republican voters, what there are of them, in urban areas tend to be the productive: business owners, entrepreneurs, people in the financial sectors. Those, it bears pointing out, are the people who are most able to leave the deteriorating cities; the ones that are left include those whose wealth shields them from the consequences of bad policy and the poor, who are attuned to the siren song of Free Stuff. The result? A self-reinforcing cycle in which the politics of places like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago keep drifting farther and farther to the left.
Our major cities are in trouble. This survey is just one more data point out of many supporting that assertion.
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