There's no going back to ‘normal’
Happy Fourth, as NYC is still waiting for the absentee ballots to get counted to find out what happened in last month's election. In the meantime, I spoke earlier this week with Ben Smith for his New York Times column about how the media treated Scott Stringer and joined CBS Eye on the World With John Batchelor for a look at NYC's endless election count.
On FAQ NYC, Christina and I spoke with Laura Nahmias about the election, and I wrote my column for the Daily News about what's wrong with the idea of "going back to normal" after the pandemic:
“New York Is Back. It Now Has a Second Chance,” the New York Times declared not long ago in a windy “Recovery Summer” feature about the city “returning to normal” after our plague year, now that masks are coming off and traffic is back and trains are getting crowded again and some people are eating inside and attending live shows, and then musing about repairing the decades-old inequities the pandemic further exposed and building a city that does more to live up its promise.
I’ve been writing since last summer about my hopes for a fairer, better New York at the end of…all this. But the “normal” conceit is arrogant, and dangerous.
It’s the arrogance of the aging, with their emotional insistence that things were once in some supposedly natural state and the MNYGA-tinged idea we can pick up from there. There’s no going back to the way things once were any more than there’s getting younger.
And using the old “normal” as a baseline is dangerous because it’s a way of avoiding the present facts. New York City has lost a half-million jobs — more and a larger share than any other American city — and has an unemployment rate of 10%, nearly twice the national average. Midtown is a ghost town, and there’s no sign that its office workers, or the service workers who catered to them for a living, are returning any time soon. Tourism has collapsed, wiping out 89,000 jobs and $60 billion in economic activity. Gun violence is through the roof, subway ridership is half of what it was, and public school enrollment has plunged from nearly 1.1 million to under 900,000 according to one count.
The city is approaching a precipice papered over by billions in pandemic aid from Washington that the mayor and other local pols counted on for months as tax revenue collapsed but that only made it here because loser Donald Trump cost his party two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia runoffs, and that won’t be available in the years that follow 2022′s $99 billion “recovery budget” that the mayor and City Council just agreed on. Notably, that budget includes a $200 million bump for the NYPD after last year’s defund debacle.
While gun violence has exploded in cities nationwide since the start of 2020, New York is one of the leaders in that trend, as exposed in a chart the mayor’s spokesperson put out while declaring that “COIVD led to a horrible shooting spike in cities across the country.” The graphic was intended to show that the shooting rate here remains lower than in other cities, but it also showed that the rate of increase here since 2019 has been much steeper than in most of those cities. The idea that this is all the pandemic — even though violent crime hasn’t gone up at all in many other nations, and the rise here doesn’t quite match up with that timeline — and shootings will just go down to “normal” levels on their own seems dangerously optimistic.
The same goes for the idea that the economy will just revive. New York City got off magnificently easy in 2008, after Wall Street nearly collapsed the world economy, thanks to a Fed-driven recovery that kept interest rates low and global capital flowing here even as the rest of the nation struggled to recover for years. This time, we could be in for a long, hard climb out, as the density that makes New York City New York City works against us in a world of Zoom meetings where not as many office dwellers have to pay a steep premium on shelter and taxes and most everything else to be here.
It’s not hard to see a decline spiral setting in while politicians here and in Albany tilt against a gentrification windmill whose blades are coming to a halt along with the wind.
A fight about sharing the wealth looks very different if there are fewer wealthy people here, or less of the world’s wealth seeks shelter in our real estate and markets.
A fight about discrimination within the public school system and who gets into the elite public schools looks very different if more families with options exit the system altogether.
A fight about criminal justice reform and closing jails looks very different if crime is shooting up, even if whoever finally wins the primary fully commits to the borough jails that are an essential part of the ongoing plan to close Rikers that our 110th mayor will inherit.
It’s always a mug’s game to bet against New Yorkers, but there are fundamental challenges ahead that need to be addressed if there’s any hope of a second chance for a fairer city than the old normal.
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