Cities will have waves of young people not move there on top of not staying for: many jobs offering remote & cheaper rent/salary propositions for firms, colleges (which will also take a huge foreign student tuition hit), and clubs/concerts will get TSA-ified/numerically limited. https://twitter.com/Indian_Bronson/status/1244642854024159233

Not only have many ICs just gotten a taste of no-commute remote working, with tech that's LONG been in place, many managers and execs have just been forced to learn how to lead remotely, possible for next quarter too, so the comfort level will ramp up on jobs. Same for schooling!

YTD and in the last month, crimes have *increased* in NYC - partly bc of bail reform, but partly bc of corona clearing jails. Ask anyone who's lived here how they feel out on the streets now. They're lifeless, and lots of miscreants are roaming around now. Why renew your lease?

Many city leases expiring now thru summer, expecting vacancies and mass demand from yuppies/transplants won't be renewed. Much smaller landlord wealth will be wiped out too. Some ppl will wait for lower prices, some will habituate to living with parents and working remote.

A cellphone tracking map revealed many fled NYC to places within commuting distance or short transit. Weekend "nice to visit, couldn't live there" trips. How much will no-rent & closeness family matter for indebted young people now noticing their aging parents up close?
A LOT.

Large landlords will consolidate ownership of real estate, but lots of small businesses will be replaced with nothing. NYC's Duane Readification already saw many vacant storefronts where another DR or Starbucks couldn't go. Rent potential motivated landlords to just stay empty.

Now many of those single building/storefront landlords will be wiped out, property snapped up by big ones, and many city's charming little shops will never return. They'll be the new SMB proprietors in small towns across America. Intelligentsia beans and NYC style coffee houses!

NYC will be without cute little stores or robust non-national, city only brands and experiences, both high end luxe ones that relied on mass transit of tourists/rich foreigners, and indy stores that relied on the sheer volume of people who wanted niche stuff. The charm will die.

And the draw of living in NYC for a young person; other young people, big concerts, clubs, places to go, amazing restaurants (which relied on lots of those cheap young actors in waiting and yuppies who flunked, etc. for labor), the college experience there; it will have died too.

The yuppie class/(very White btw)comes from a section of American Boomers that will bankroll the youth of 17-19 year olds to move to NYC, but not pay their rent forever and can't afford massive expenses. But who will still be working in NYC for the very wealthy with roots there?

You know, for those delivery and and cleaning, and other labor jobs done in-person? Which might not be hit by lots of screening/expenses dooming white yuppie things bc they aren't that? Minorities and immigrants, often illegal. Uh oh! Scary subject alert, scary subject alert!

What do we observe Liberal White Upper Middle Class say about minorities (and now masses of vacant storefronts and no vibrant restaurants) and where they choose to live in relation to them? Yeah.

A little 'Grand Replacement', a 'White Rapture' for the cities will happen.

Cities as you know them will cease to exist. Their value propositions were always dependent on a cohort of young white people either spending Mom & Dad's money freshman and sophomore year and populating the clubs and tuition bursar's offices, or as a yuppie tax/consumer base.

^ "white" there as in "Stuff White People Like"- White People.

Many of them are *going away* and you need a critical mass of them congregating to have a hip "nabe" or a cool place for others to want to go. Some smaller cities & towns will become truly hipster. But it's not 1:1.

The new cultural forms arising from this will look like a retreat into the 90s and early 2000s suburbanite culture and an appropriation of "rural" living - all of it send ups & remashes of this base, both nostalgic & familiar as a "deep culture" that is truly 'of' White America.

Bc absent the big cities evangelized by TV shows from Sex and the City to Gilmore Girls to subtle hints you need to live there to be a *real* person by Netflix special comedians, and various LGBTQ Hajjis promising a wonderland, they WILL need a new way to explain life, a culture.

The age of the Millenial cohort at all income levels trying to run from the shopping mall/homecoming game/Fox News playing in the den, for the wonders of Brooklyn, weekends flying to instagram vacays, to sharing small apartments with too many people for too much money, is OVER.

What are Bumble and Tinder going to do? What are StreetEasy and Zumper going to do? What are Instagram and Pinterest going to do? Grubhub? *Uber*?

The world is never going to be the same, bc the most precious thing in it was always people and their chosen territories.