Wait Just a New York Minute Before Predicting Its Doom
Reports of fleeing residents are overblown, but it is a wake-up call for the city to fix its flaws.
It’s up to you, New York.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a concrete jungle of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. Sign up here.
One of the more fascinating ramifications of the coronavirus pandemic may be what it does to domestic migration. As Covid-19 cases exploded early on in New York, the knee-jerk reaction was that people would flee the city in pursuit of more spacious and affordable suburban homes. Perhaps that thinking was partly out of fear that crowded city life was conducive to outbreaks. But far more likely it had to do with how the crisis made working from home more widely accepted, so that employees aren’t schlepping themselves to an office building every day. Although some New Yorkers are indeed leaving for one reason or another, the shift away from urban centers is nowhere near as dramatic as it might seem, Justin Fox writes. Americans aren’t a very mobile bunch to begin with: