Entrepreneur: New York City is Dead and It’s Not Coming Back

Summit News ^ | 8/21/20

[Altura Ct.]

Streets are deserted thanks to COVID and people fleeing due to crime & riots.

Former hedge fund manager and entrepreneur James Altucher says New York City is dead and it’s not coming back.

Born and bred in New York, Altucher took his family and fled to Florida after the Black Lives Matter riots in June when someone tried to break into his apartment.

Since then, the city has continued to suffer a huge surge in shootings and violent crime as well as an anemic financial recovery from the coronavirus lockdown.

Appearing on Fox News Business, Altucher referred to images that were broadcast during the interview showing 6th avenue to be virtually empty.

“We have something like 30 to 50 per cent of the restaurants in New York City are probably already out of business and they’re not coming back,” he pointed out.

Altucher said that despite offices in midtown being allowed to be open, they’re still largely empty because companies like Citigroup, JP Morgan, Google, Twitter and Facebook are encouraging their employees to work remotely from home “for years or maybe permanently.”

“This completely damages not only the economic eco-system of New York City…but what happens to your tax base when all of your workers can now live anywhere they want to in the country?” asked the entrepreneur, noting that many were fleeing to places that are cheaper to live like Nashville, Austin, Miami and Denver.

Warning that the situation was “only going to get worse,” Altucher said that the old New York was not coming back and that creative and business opportunities would now be dispersed throughout the entire country.

“What makes this different now is bandwidth is ten times faster than it was in 2008 so people can work remotely now and have an increase in productivity,” he added.

As we document in the video below, the blame for all this lies firmly at the feet of two people, Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio.

[Liz]

These two have city money pouring in......faster than they can find places to hide it.

DeBlob put his wife in charge of four (4) govt-funded agencies that have the most potential for looting

(A) <><> mental health reform (she "forgot" where she put $800 million tax dollars)

(B) <><> coronavirus racial equity agency.....

(C) <><> heads the tax-funded Mayor’s Task Force on Racial Inclusion

(D) <><> Upon taking office, he gave her "The Mayor's Fund for NYC" which receives non-stop tax dollars to
"do-good" for the city (and to finance their political ambitions).

THERE IS NO OVERSIGHT----they can loot and pillage tax dollars at will.

==================================

Despite a Massive NYC Budget Crisis, Mayor de Blasio's Wife Maintains a Staff That Comes With a Shocking Price Tag
PJ Media ^ | 08/20/2020 | Rick Moran / FR Posted on 8/20/2020, 10:39:50 AM by SeekAndFind New York City is in the midst of a massive budget crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The city is facing layoffs of 22,000 city workers, the trash isn’t getting picked up, the parks aren’t being maintained.

But Mayor Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, maintains a staff of 14 and has a budget of $2 million. McCray is a professional activist, meaning she’s a pro at squeezing money out of politicians. She got her soulmate Bill to give her $1.25 billion for a mental health initiative she called ThriveNYC. That was five years ago. So how’s that program working? No one really knows because McCray apparently can’t keep track of the money. New York Post: First lady Chirlane McCray’s ThriveNYC unveiled a splashy new website Monday purporting to show the $1.25 billion plan has “dramatically improved the landscape of mental health services in New York City over the last five years.”

But a closer look at geocoded maps and colorful bar graphs in the “Data Dashboard” reveals missing metrics for over two-thirds of the programs, no advancements for about half of the initiatives and a major decrease in services badly needed during the COVID-19 pandemic. And there’s only six months worth of data for the nearly five-year-old program. You mean she has to keep track of the money? I guess no one told her.

Her staff has doubled in size since 2018, including the addition of a videographer. Fox News: They include the $70,000 videographer McCray brought on in February. The shooter, who is listed as a Department of Health employee in city records, filmed the first lady making ginger snaps on April 2 during the coronavirus lockdown. (Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com …

=========================

Other members of McRay's shadow staff who participated in a “Team Lunch” in The Bronx in January 2019, according to McCray’s public schedule, are a $143,000-a-year public relations director, also from the Department of Health, and a special assistant from the mayor’s office who makes $115,000. Then there’s the $130,000 “executive program specialist” from the Dept. of Social Services and $65,000 “associate director of advance” to the first lady.

Sources at the Mayor's Office said the mayor's wife also has at least another six staff who are not named
on the official public roster. Her total workforce numbers 14 with a hefty price tag of $2 million.

McRay's pricey team includes $150,000-a-year senior adviser Dabash Negash (pictured) recruited in April
- at the height of the pandemic, just one week after de Blasio announced a hiring freeze to help close a $7.4 billion budget deficit.

[aomagrat]

Diseased rats are fleeing the diseased city, bringing the disease with them to infect wherever they end up with the disease they are fleeing. Liberalism.

[cuban leaf]

I said, “a bit of a...”.

What I mean by that is simply that it is not the panacea that so many think it is. It worked for my parents. It worked for me for a time.

In 1997 My then wife of 20 years decided she didn’t want to be married any more, so she kicked me out. We had owned the home for about 18 years. I rented.

Then I met the woman of my dreams just two months later at my 25 year class reunion. We rented in the Seattle area until we moved to a small hobby farm we purchased in rural KY in 2011.

In that time We lived in several houses that ranged in rental price from $1400 to $1600 a month. And the smallest was a very nice three bedroom home on Mercer Island just a couple of blocks from Paul Allen on “the scar”. The last one was a five bedroom with three full bathrooms just east of Renton on a 1/4 acre professionally landscaped lot. That one was $1600.

But here’s the deal. Had we tried to purchase that one at the time we left, it would have cost us almost $4000 a month including taxes. And as we all know, real estate collapsed. Now, it is now worth more than it was at its bottom, but the market is in a bubble yet again, so all bets are off.

Meanwhile, we not only saved tens of thousands by renting, but we were able to simply leave, without the headache of trying to sell a house. It was painless.

OTOH, if you plan on spending the rest of your life in your home, as my parents did, owning is a good idea.

[ConservativeDude]

I think - to your point - we are going to have to start unloading on those type of people. We tend to be polite and tolerant, and they aren’t. That’s going to have to change.

And I see signs that it is....slowly. But our people are getting fed up.

[Liz]

AND THIS The theme of the DNC convention was suppose to be about chaos under Trump.

But Trump was onto them.....

When Trump’s offer of help to city Democrats was refused, Trump outed that the blame was where it belonged.

In essence, Democrat mayors were encouraging violence by having city cops stand down so they could blame Trump.

[GOPJ]

Born and bred in New York, Altucher took his family and fled to Florida after the Black Lives Matter riots in June when someone tried to break into his apartment.

Welcome to Florida Altucher.... We had BLM attempt to start riots here too... BUT BECAUSE WE HAVE A REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR AND REPUBLICAN MAYORS THE LOOTING, RIOTS AND MAYHEM WERE STOPPED BEFORE THEY STARTED.

If you come here and vote democrat - please turn around and go back to New York. We don't need violence and looting here.

[Armando Guerra]

Trump and Limbaugh came to Florida as Republicans and stayed Republicans. The problem are the many who were Democrats in New York and remain Democrats in Florida even though they were fleeing the Democrat policies they voted for. Most have followed I-95 down and settled in Palm Beach and Broward County, rock solid Democrat areas.

[GOPJ]

Hannity’s talking about leaving New York too... nice young Catholic boy...

[MissEdie]

Yep, that’s why us folks in areas a lot of people “retire” to don’t want them.

[Alberta's Child]

I actually reached the same conclusion as Cuban Leaf some years ago. My rationale was this:

"Equity in real property" may be a great way to build wealth, but that really depends on how you define "real property." The easiest way to explain the diminished appeal of home ownership is to look at it like a real estate investment. If you were an astute investor, would you ever even consider buying an asset that met the following conditions?

1. It generates no income for you. In fact, it will have a recurring negative cash flow for the entire duration of time that you own it.

2. You will likely have to borrow 50% to 80% of the purchase price -- which only reinforces the "negative cash flow" problem described in Item #1.

3. It is highly illiquid. It might take you weeks, months or even years to sell it.

If you just look at those three facts laid out there objectively, you'd never even consider buying a home as an investment. You'd be far better off just renting a shack or trailer home and putting all your excess cash in a well-diversified set of securities and revenue-generating investments.

Having said that, I'd suggest the following:

A. It's fine to buy a home if you have no interest or intention of moving for a long time, and you have a lot of control over where you live and work. It's cheaper than renting in the long run, and you might even approach this with the mindset of someone who expects to have an asset worth $0 when you leave it behind.

B. A lot of the inherent flaws I laid out in Items #1 to #3 go away under one particular set of circumstances: if you live in your home and you can use the property to run a business that generates sufficient revenue to cover most or all of the expenses of owning it. In that case, the home truly IS an investment ... which is why farms and other small businesses tied to a particular piece of property make a lot of financial sense for their owners.

[cuban leaf]

I’ll just throw one more thing out:

My friend in a distant suburb of Seattle (Bonnie Lake) pays, for a house on a postage stamp lot, over $7,000 in property taxes annually.

For all intents and purposes, that is rent.

I pay just under $250. For a house and large barn on 32 acres with two streams and two separate lawns totaling nine acres. Sure, my zero turn mower cost $5,000, but that is less than one year’s taxes on my friend’s property.

He’s moving to a place in Idaho that is almost finished, BTW. :)

[Tennessee Conservative]

Rural Tennesseans have been raised to be polite to a fault. We have been raised that way for generations. To us, being loud in public is considered rude. But.....threaten us with violence and see how fast the guns come out. When it comes to out of state people right now it’s mostly countered with dirty looks but I see the day coming when we fight back. I don’t think antifa and blm wants a piece of rural Tennessee.

I’m sure other places in rural America are the same.

[Alberta's Child]

It's worth noting that $7,000/year in property taxes might be a great bargain if you have school-age kids an you're living in a good public school district. In there area where I live, people are willing to pay $15,000+ per year in property taxes in towns where they see the public schools as comparable to top private schools that would cost far more than that.

That's why the rent vs. own comparison always has to be done with a specific set of life circumstances in mind.

[cuban leaf]

I sent my kids to Christian school when I had school age kids. No, we were not rich, and it really cramped our lifestyle, but we considered it worth it.

Now, I’d just homeshcool. The internet and places like Khanacademy.org make it just too easy.

I see public schools as a 19th century paradigm that outlived its usefulness in the early 21st century. Its primary functions today are to provide employment for over-educated mediocre college graduates and day care for parents that have sold themselves into indentured slavery.

So we’re getting into a separate topic on which I also have a fairly strong opinion. ;)

[ConservativeMind]

So that they can get their rat cities out of hock on the backs of hard working people across the country.

[Buckeye McFrog]

so....the seats at Yankee Stadium will STAY empty?

[Wonder Warthog]

"I think urban and suburban home ownership is a bit of a scam."

Small town rural.............THE BEST!

[LouAvul]

and fled to Florida

I hate to hear that. More liberals fleeing to civilized states, ultimately destroying the politics of their new homes.

Terminal stupidity is repeating the same action over and over, all the while expecting a different result.

[RoosterRedux]

It's too early to tell if the City will somehow recover. But it is safe to say that due to the fact that employees can live anywhere and work for any company (with some exceptions, of course), the City, if it survives, will look nothing like it did in the past.

As an aside, one big issue that has not been discussed is what impact an NYC bankruptcy will have on the financial markets. Soon the City will default on its bonds and the bondholders will take over its management through the courts. With de Blasio out, who knows what will happen.

What we are looking at right now is still Act I. Act II is about to begin.

[dp0622]

And that makes a lot of sick fake Christians here very happy. It’s just disgusting over the months how you have shown your hatred. Put up a wall around New York City you said. when people were dying. But when Florida and Texas were hit you couldn’t find an article on here. You folks that take pleasure in this sicken me.

I take solace in knowing that God despises hateful thoughts and people will pay for them in one way or another in their life