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

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.

Yes, one, this one, wondered that immediately when I heard the speech remained coherent.

It reminds one of the major medical interference that was being run for Hillary four years ago.

We’ll see if they have to fling Joe into a van like a sack of potatoes at some point, the way they did Hillary. At least he doesn’t have a nurse and a big dude with a strange, unexplained device in his hand next to him at all times.

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

From Understanding Media:

"The wide appeal of the games of recent times –the popular sports of baseball and football and ice hockey– seen as outer models of inner psychological life, become understandable. As models, they are collective rather than private dramatizations of inner life. Like our vernacular tongues, all games are media of interpersonal communication, and they could have neither existence nor meaning except as extensions of our immediate inner lives. If we take a tennis racket in hand, or thirteen playing cards, we consent to being a part of a dynamic mechanism in an artificially contrived situation. Is this not the reason we enjoy those games most that mimic other situations in our work and social lives? Do not our favorite games provide a release from the monopolistic tyranny of the social machine? In a word, does not Aristotle’s idea of drama as a mimetic reenactment and relief from our besetting pressures apply perfectly to all kinds of games and dance and fun? For fun or games to be welcome, they must convey an echo of workaday life. On the other hand, a man or society without games is one sunk in the zombie trance of the automation. Art and games enable us to stand aside from the material pressures of routine and convention, observing and questioning. Games as popular art forms offer to all an immediate means of participation in the full life of a society, such as no single role or job can offer to any man. Hence the contradiction in “professional” sport. When the games door opening into the free life leads into a merely specialist job, everybody senses an incongruity.

[ . . . ]

"It is the inclusive mesh of the TV image, in particular, that spells for a while, at least, the doom of baseball. For baseball is a game of one-thing-at-a-time, fixed positions and visibly delegated specialist jobs such as belonged to the now passing mechanical age, with is fragmented tasks and its staff and line in management organization. TV, as the very image of the new corporate and participant ways of electric living, fosters habits of unified awareness and social interdependence that alienate us from the peculiar style of baseball, with its specialist and positional stress. When cultures change, so do games. Baseball, that had become the elegant abstract image of an industrial society living by split-second timing, has in the new TV decade lost its psychic and social relevance for our new way of life. The ball game has been dislodged from the social center and and been conveyed to the periphery of American life.

In contrast, American football is nonpositional, and any or all of the players can switch to any role during play. It is, therefore, a game that at the present is supplanting baseball in general acceptance."

So, in a word . . . YES.

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.

I feel you on that one. We live in central Alabama -- Property tax on our 2000 Sq Ft home is $597 a year -- and the school system here reflects that.

We have LOW taxes but pay $8500 a year for our grand-daughter to attend private school.

As long as the employer maintains an office presence in NYC, there is a commuter tax provision that makes the employer upgrades ages subject to New York state income rax. Once the employer explodes or relocates that office out of the state does the tekecommuter tax revert to normal? That’s when the financial meltdown starts for NYC.

As all of this starts to flow through the system, expect Congress to start coming up.with economic relief measures to complicate the corona virus kegislation.

I work in NYC and I'm beginning to see the sea change already. Even if the pandemic disappeared tomorrow, I think the genie is out of the bottle now that corporations realize they can save a bundle of cash having their employees work remotely.

We have 10x the Internet bandwidth we had just a few years ago. Since March 13 (my last regular day in the city), I've spent most of my time working out of my home. My internet here is even faster than what I had in the office and the Zoom meeting technology brings clients and co-workers right into my home with high quality video and audio.

Ten years ago, trying to work like this would have been a very clunky affair.

So looks like the Dem mayors and governors shot themselves in the foot. They were quick to shut the cities down, in order to hurt Trump's re-election chances. Now they are going to find out that many of the employers - that pay most of their taxes - are never coming back.

Will be very interesting to see where this goes.

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