The Big City Problem That Won't Go Away
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Money, and what it buys
by ROSS BARKAN
It is not hard to be wrong. Write enough, think enough, and you’ll find that the future you imagined a few years back never arrived. So much of writing, in the public eye at least, is guessing at what’s to come; I’d prefer it weren’t that way, but inevitably you are peering into the fog of the future and trying to make sense of it. In 2020, in a column for the Guardian, I posited that the ravages of the pandemic offered at least one upside for New York City: cheaper housing that could allow for a working-class renaissance.
Here’s what I wrote almost three years ago:
True enough. In 2023, New York City is still a very lively place with a strong tax base. Midtown isn’t what it used to be, but the outer borough bars and restaurants are packed. The museums swarm with visitors. Literary magazine parties can draw a thousand people. An actual day in the city doesn’t look very different than it did in 2019. Most of the fearmongering around the city’s decline comes from the suburbs or, quite frankly, people who don’t get out enough.
Here’s some more from that Guardian column:
And later on I added this:
Not quite. The 1970s fiscal crisis was far worse, financially, for New York City. Crime was much higher, the tax base evaporated, and some of the poorest neighborhoods emptied out. The pandemic, which hit the city hardest in 2020, killed far more people than any 70s crime wave and will permanently reorder the commercial corridors of Manhattan. What it did not do was kill real estate speculation. In retrospect, I was naive. Rents bottomed out in 2020 and rocketed up afterwards to levels never before seen. The median asking rent in Manhattan has surpassed $4,000 and the average asking rent is $1,000 more than that. Brooklyn and Queens rents aren’t far behind. The cause, in the most basic sense, is demand outstripping supply, and this is now true in most large American cities. (The lack of available subsidized and public housing is glaring.) Los Angeles and Phoenix are both home to enormous and squalid homeless encampments. We have not seen a housing crisis like this in at least a half century. Rents are distressingly high and viable policy solutions are in short supply.