The Sorry State of New York City

How about a little cognitive dissonance for today? At least, some cognitive dissonance about New York City. Nothing is quite as self-contradictory as the Big Apple.

On the one side we have the residential real estate market. In New York City, while office buildings are languishing at around 40% occupancy, it is nearly impossible to find an apartment to rent. People line up in the street to take a quick look at a pathetically small apartment, and then they get into bidding wars over it. 

In the meantime, people are not going to work in their offices, leaving a massive amount of space unoccupied. Somewhere something is going to  have to give. Why does it happen that so many people are so avid to move to the city while they are refusing to go into work? Dare we mention, as we already have, that many stores and restaurants have shut down, for lack of business. Who would have been frequenting these places? Why, the people who work in the big buildings in midtown.

For the record, JP Morgan Chase has started laying off mortgage bankers-- around a thousand, at last report. True enough, it is going to reassign half of them, but the coming collapse of the real estate market will surely affect hiring practices in the big banks and the large financial institutions that occupy so much New York real estate.

And let’s not forget the bear market in stocks. Surely, that will hurt the rest of the financial services industry. And, the loss of value in the stocks of tech giants-- the NASDAQ bear market-- might well impact their plans to gobble up massive quantities of city real estate.

So, New York has a new mayor. He seems to be doing the right thing, but cleaning up the mess left by Comrade Bill de Blasio is not an overnight job. It’s more like Hercules confronting the Augean stables. And he cannot even do what Hercules did, because it would be environmentally unfriendly.

So, Mayor Adams admits that before becoming mayor he did not grasp how bad, how dysfunctional the city had become. The New York Post reports an interview it did with Adams while he was riding the subways at night last week:

Mayor Eric Adams had no idea how rotten the Big Apple was at its core before taking office — telling The Post he was “shocked” to learn just “how bad this place is.”

During an exclusive interview conducted as Adams rode the subways overnight for more than three hours last week, the former NYPD transit cop said he was astounded by the botched “deployment of resources” that has New Yorkers on edge amid a nearly 40 percent surge in major crimes this year.

“Let me tell you something: When I started looking into this, I was shocked at how bad this place is,” he said of the city.

It is an honest assessment:

Adams — who campaigned on a promise to restore order to an increasingly lawless Gotham — said the scales fell from his eyes when he began reviewing internal city operations following his swearing in moments after midnight on New Year’s Day.

“It was probably, the third — third or fourth week in January. I spent a lot of time in the office,” he said.

Under Comrade de Blasio New York City had seen a spike in crime. For the record the same Comrade is now running to be a Congressperson:

In 2021, the final year of de Blasio’s tenure, the city saw nearly every category of major crime increase to levels that hadn’t been seen in years, with felony assaults exceeding 22,000 for the first time since 2001.

The number of murders also reached 486, the most since the 515 committed in 2011.

Of course, for those who do not read the Post or follow the stories as they usually make their way to the Daily Mail, here are some incidents. You might say that these criminals are all mentally ill, but that seems to be a dodge. One should not use mental illness as an excuse. Someone gave these people the idea that they could get away with random acts of horrific violence. 

Last year’s headline-grabbing incidents included a shocking, unprovoked hatchet attack inside an ATM lobby in Manhattan’s Financial District, a series of shootings in Times Square and the trampling of a 10-year-old girl and her five-year-old brother when a masked gunman opened fire on a Bronx sidewalk.

There has been some improvement in shootings and homicide, but robbery, burglary and grand larceny are up substantially:

This year, shooting incidents have declined nearly 12% compared to the same period last year and murders are down 13%.

But grand larcenies and auto thefts have skyrocketed 50% and 48%, respectively, while robberies are up nearly 40%.

And as the city struggles to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, crimes in the transit system are up a staggering 54%.

The story does not say so, but another major problem is the new district attorney, one Alvin Bragg, who fancies himself a pro-criminal DA. He has been doing everything in his power to stop prosecuting criminals, by keeping them out of jail and on the streets. 

Here again, the Post has the story:

The number of prosecutors fleeing the city’s district attorneys offices has spiraled in the wake of criminal justice reforms that have created what one ex-top prosecutor called “insanity.”

Sixty five assistant district attorneys, or about 12 percent of the staff, have resigned so far this year from Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office, up from about 44 through the end of March. During all of 2021, 97 ADAs quit.

The situation is nearly the same in the office of Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez, where 67 of some 500 prosecutors, or about 13 percent, have also called it quits as of June 17. Another three resigned on Thursday, according to a source. That is compared to 84 who left in all of 2020 and 94 last year.

In the Bronx, 59 prosecutors have walked from January through May. Reps from the Queens and Staten Island DA offices did not respond to requests for data.

When Bragg took the helm of the Manhattan office in January, at least nine lawyers quit in the first two weeks, The Post revealed.

Some were spurred to leave, sources said, by Bragg’s soft-on-crime approach which he outlined in a “Day One” memo directing ADAs to not seek prison sentences for many criminals and to downgrade some felonies to misdemeanors.

And then, state mandated criminal justice reform has turned prosecutors into clerks. The new discovery requirements oblige them to provide defense attorneys more information in a shorter period of time, to the point where they no longer have any time to prosecute. 

Protecting the rights of criminals, whether through bail reform, through refusing to prosecute felonies, through discovery reform, has produced chaos on the streets.

And yet, residential real estate is still going strong. How long can this dissonance last before it resolves itself one way or another.