Could the Coronavirus Be a ‘Turning Point’ For New Yorkers To Leave En Masse?

By: Miriam Hall
Appearing in: Biznow

At first, Campbell Will and his wife, Claire, were planning to stay in New York as the coronavirus pandemic raged through the city. But within days, the Manhattan café where he was working shut down. His nascent corporate wellness business, needing yoga studios and gyms and live customers, could go nowhere.

Although they had a sublet room in the city until the end of April, they decided to decamp to Claire’s parents’ house in Philadelphia, where the entire family has now converged. There are nine of them living together now, including two children under age 2.

Campbell specializes in teaching breath work, and while rents are markedly cheaper in Philadelphia, 2020 was the year they were planning to give pricey, competitive New York City a crack.

“We had always considered [living in] Philly, but New York has so much alternative wellness, a boutique-y vibe,” Will said. “There are so many more opportunities for my work in New York, the general vibe of [it] is much more accommodating to that sort of thing. But now it’s all so unknown, all our plans are thrown out.”

In the last two weeks, New York has become the worldwide epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis, with more than 4,750 deaths recorded across the state as of Monday. Government officials have called for healthcare workers to volunteer their services amid mounting fears of understaffed hospitals and a shortage of ventilators.

More than a quarter of the country’s economy has reportedly gone dark as a result of widespread shutdowns, and untold numbers of jobs have been wiped from the city. And as the situation has become more and more dire, many New Yorkers have fled their city dwellings — mirroring a similar trend around the country.

Many of those who have left describe it as a temporary move to sit out the virus, but they don’t know yet if the jobs that have been erased will actually return. Then there is the question of whether people, scarred by having to make a dash for it or living through quarantine in a tiny apartment, will want to come back at all.

“This could be a real turning point [for New York] and could accelerate what has already been happening,” said Joel Kotkin, the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in California.

New York City was experiencing a soaring cost of living and a housing affordability crisis, and it was losing population, well before the last month. Kotkin said people will be anxious about future pandemics well after this immediate threat has passed.

“The kind of city that we in the West like, the sort of jostling city where everybody is packed together and we carouse late at night … like London, Paris, Sydney and San Francisco, are all far more vulnerable,” he said. “The cities are going to have to reinvent themselves, and places like New York in particular. These pandemics are going to keep happening.”

Read the rest of the piece at Biznow.