‘Dead’ NYC Shows Signs Of Life Despite Coronavirus Crisis

NEW YORK CITY — New York City is dead. It is no more a better place to live than Tulsa. It has ceased to be a haven for the very wealthy, they’re joining the Hamptons choir. It’s an anarchist jurisdiction, a ghost town bereft of life.

Or so the naysayers squawk.

The coronavirus crisis has indeed caused untold misery and hardship in the city from which it could takes years to recover. Vacancies are rampant, a third of small businesses could shutter forever, bars and restaurants face an extinction-level event, 1.4 million New Yorkers are drawing unemployment, murder and violence hit a yearslong high and long-standing social inequities remain.

But some rays of light are peeking out behind the storm clouds.

COVID-19’s Downward Trend

Gov. Andrew Cuomo was right: COVID-19 was a holiday Grinch.

Over the 37-day holiday period, New York’s coronavirus levels ticked up to increasingly worrisome levels.

The statewide positivity rate hit 7.9 percent Jan. 4, along with corresponding spikes in hospitalizations across the state.

But since then, numbers dropped back down; as of Friday, the positivity rate stood at 4.65 percent, Cuomo said. He said experts believes it will continue to drop.

“That’s what the expert models are showing,” he said.

New York City’s positivity rate stood at 5.27 percent by the state’s measurement. The caveat here is that city officials use a different methods of calculating the COVID-19 rate that consistently yield higher results.

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Friday said the city’s measurement put the rate at 8.63 percent.

“To say the least, we’ve got to keep doing better, we’ve got to keep our guard up,” he said.

City data shows the rate has been stable over the past four weeks, while confirmed cases have steadily decreased.

Wealthy New Yorkers Are Returning

You can eat the rich if they’re not in New York City, comrade.

Joking aside, behind the hand-wringing over the wealthy’s exodus from the city was a fear that tax revenues could drop and sap valuable revenue on which the local government could build a recovery.

Property tax revenues did fall — by $2.5 billion — but Blasio’s proposed budget manages to avoid deep cuts in services and jobs. (Or so he says it does.)

And a recent report by Curbed shows clear signs people are returning to Manhattan’s expensive rental market.

Manhattan’s vacancy rate dropped for the first time since the pandemic began, Curbed reported, going from 6.14 percent in November to 5.52 percent in December. Leases also went up 36 percent in December and 93.6 percent from the same point in 2019, the report states.

So yes, lots of fair-weather New Yorkers did leave the city during the pandemic. But they appear to be coming back, even if covertly pro-New York billboards posted in their Los Angeles and Miami hideaways proclaim: “New York is Dead. Don't come back.”

Snowy Owl Returns To NYC For First Time In 130 Years

Come on, who can’t be excited about literal wildlife returning to New York City?

What’s also exciting is that about 132,000 New Yorkers have received both COVID-19 vaccine doses and 611,000 got their first shot.

And assuming de Blasio isn’t being unrealistically optimistic, the city has the capacity to dole out 500,000 shots a week. All it needs is more supply.