A+ for this intro line:
“Start spreadin’ the news, they’re leavin’ today!
However, the people packing their bags are not coming to New York City — they’re fleeing it for good.
Due to increasingly squalid conditions on the Upper West Side, including two new homeless shelters packed with junkies and registered sex offenders, longtime dwellers are departing the Big Apple with no plans to ever return.
One of the Escape from New Yorkers is Elizabeth Carr, one of the area’s most vocal leaders in combating mounting crime in the well-heeled ‘hood. She was an administrator of the Facebook group NYC Moms for Safer Streets, and the face of a public-safety movement that has attracted thousands to demand better policing and city services.
“In the best of times, NYC is a hard place to live,” said Carr. “Now you have all this other stuff. It’s a question for families … to have to see a guy masturbating on the corner or explain to my kids while I’m buying diapers at Duane Reade why this guy wearing no shoes is collapsed on the floor and they’re doing CPR on him.”
Yeesh.
“She said she started planning to move before the COVID crisis and recent neighborhood developments, but officially put down stakes Sunday in North Carolina with her finance husband and three kids under 7.”
Hopefully she realizes why New York City got so bad (its far-left mayor Bill de Blasio) and votes accordingly. I hope these fleeing New Yorkers learn their lesson and stop voting for radical Democrats, otherwise they will destroy their new home-states in no time. Then they’ll wonder why things got so bad, and eventually leave that place for one of the dwindling number of untainted red states, destined to wreck that state just like they did their previous state.
You can’t flee New York because of disastrous Democrat policies, then turn around and vote for more disastrous Democrat policies in the red state you fled to.
“New York got so bad we had to leave, so that’s why were here’ in (Florida/North Carolina/Tennessee, etc.). It’s nice, but it’s so conservative. We gotta get some Democrats in office down here!”
Hopefully they put 2 and 2 together.
More choice quotes about how bad parts of NYC have gotten:
“There was no reason to leave before,” said a born-and-bred Upper West Side mom, who asked for anonymity. “Now, I’m done. I can leave tomorrow and never look back. If I never came back to this block, that would be fine.”
“I have definitely seen more crime, drugs and harassment in one week than in my whole experience growing up here,” she said. “I don’t want to see a child get hurt or raped, before they realize maybe it was a mistake to put [hundreds of] drug addicts and sex offenders near schools in the most dense residential population in the city.”
And here’s the real problem:
“Safety, as well as the state of schools, are common reasons given by nervous moms who are vamoosing. Jennifer, an UWS mother of two boys, ages 5 and 8, is concerned about the financial fate of PS 166, as more well-to-do families leave.
“The funding comes from family donations,” said Jennifer, 46, who declined to give her last name for privacy reasons. “If people move out of the city, there goes the funding for the school.” She plans to temporarily relocate to the Hamptons.”
It’s not just the schools, though; it’s the whole city. These wealthy families are the city’s tax base. Gov. Andrew Cuomo even said the top 1% of New Yorkers pay 50% of the city’s tax revenue. When they go, the city goes into a death spiral: families leaving because the city is so bad, then things get even worse because the city is flat-broke, which causes more people to leave, which puts further strain on the budget. . . you get it.
I would say it sounds like New York City is turning into San Francisco, but in fact San Francisco is not an example of the end-result of urban decline in America.
Detroit is.
San Francisco is simply a few steps ahead of New York City on the path to becoming another Detroit. San Francisco still has a ways to go before they hit rock bottom. Same with NYC. Those cities are nowhere near as bad as they’re going to be in the future.
No one under the age of 40 realizes it but NYC used to be bad in the 1970s and 80s. If you’ve ever seen movies like “The French Connection” or “Taxi Driver” or “The Warriors,” those all depict a very different New York City from the one we know today. This was all within the lifetimes of people who are not especially old today.
Crime was out of control for two full decades:
And people fled the city in droves as crime rose. Its population fell from 8 million in 1966 to 7 million in 1980.
Don’t think it can’t happen again. NYC’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed over the past 150 years. There’s no magical force protecting the city from descending into misery and chaos. If the leftwing politicians in charge keep up the soft-on-crime, virtue-signaling policies, then before long the inmates will be running the asylum and it’ll be like the NYC of “Taxi Driver” all over again.
The lesson should be: the worse it gets, the more the people who can leave, will leave. And left behind will be the people who can’t leave–them and the criminals.