Gonna talk for just a few seconds about how wrong all of this is. https://twitter.com/jaltucher/status/1294036016517599232

First of all, the most obvious: New York is a city, not a brand or a corporation. The city is still here. It doesn’t need to “bounce back” in order not to die because there are literally millions of people here.

What he’s talking about is a particular version of New York.

His version of New York is the one built by Giuliani and Bloomberg and de Blasio where people who work for companies like Google and Etsy and Amazon feel safe walking the streets but also feel cool walking around Bushwick or going to see a concert at Terminal 5.

That New York started, famously, with the “cleanup” of Times Square and then radiated outward, which it still hasn’t finished doing. What’s he’s really talking about is a regression: the forces of gentrification have weakened and can’t keep the Upper West Side “clean” anymore.

The outer boroughs have largely been invisible in this process except when gentrification arrives at their door. For people like him, living on the UWS and hobnobbing with Jerry Seinfeld, those parts of the city don’t even exist.

The parts of the city that have been outside the gentrification radius don’t see it as a crisis if the bulwark is gentrification collapses on the Upper West Side. They’re not experiencing this collapse as an encroachment, just as a disaster.

His evidence for the death of “business” in the city is empty towers in midtown. But towers in midtown were empty and emptying long before the coronavirus hit. Nobody wants to be in midtown anymore, not even the suits.

Amazon going to build their headquarters in Queens. Google set up in Chelsea. None of the big companies moving into the city are setting up in midtown.

What they are doing, though, is buying up whole neighborhoods, including residential buildings, as Google has done.

The irony of this elegy is that New York will soon become even more hospitable to people like him and the Google employees, because they’ll basically have little colonies where the city has ceded security and utilities.

Here’s what I think will happen in New York. I have a decent track record for predictions, so it twitter still exists in a few years we can check back.

In the short run, the economy is already collapsing. There will be a lot of evictions, a lot more unhoused people, a lot of empty storefronts. A lot of smaller businesses have already closed, many more will never reopen. A lot of people will leave New York.

In the short term there might be a drop in rents across the city bc smaller landlords will want any tenant over no tenant. But I think a lot of smaller landlords will also go bankrupt or be bought out.

The thing is, the wealthy have already recovered from the spring crash. Only the rest of us are still suffering. Which means that the super rich are poised to snap up a LOT of buildings and properties very cheap.

In the long run this is an opportunity for many companies, including big developers, to buy up whole chunks of the city. When a single company owns and develops a big enough area, everything from green space to security to utilities can be privatized.

I think in the longer run we’re gonna see a lot of “campuses” in the city. People who work for big corporations will have amazing company-owned apartments near work. There will be company gyms and company parks which might hypothetically be open to the public, sometimes.

Those are the neighborhoods that will have reliable garbage collection; those are the neighborhoods where power doesn’t go out in a tropical storm because they have their own generators.

If you want to see what I’m talking about, take a look at Columbia’s uptown campus. There’s the official campus, which is walled and gated. But then there’s all the buildings around, most of them owned by the university.

People who visit Columbia’s campus are usually unaware that the university owns 90% of the buildings around them, and that those buildings are full of giant prewar apartments leased by the university to its professors (NYU is exactly the same btw).

Because the university owns so much of the neighborhood, Columbia Security surveil and police areas that are technically not under their jurisdiction. I’m sure that if the area around the campus got worse their mandate to police or use force would escalate proportionally.

As small landlords and businesses collapse it will be easier and easier to transform vast pieces of the city into city-in-city Hudson Yards-style complexes. Between those enclaves a vast and impoverished service class will live on filthy streets in tenement conditions.

New York is going to be here for a long time. But like many cities, it will be two cities: filthy rich or dirt poor. The rich will wait in the Hamptons as long as they need to, then come back to sanitized and scrubbed neighborhoods while the rest of the city keeps deteriorating.