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That is a silly article. Whoever wrote it must have been making it up as they went along.
If you travel around the country a bit, as I did this summer,you will quickly realize that NY seems far less effected by the economic problems than most places. I get no feelings whatsoever like the "despair" described and I live in The Bronx.
Sounds like someone's wishful thinking rather than fact.
That is a silly article. Whoever wrote it must have been making it up as they went along.
If you travel around the country a bit, as I did this summer,you will quickly realize that NY seems far less effected by the economic problems than most places. I get no feelings whatsoever like the "despair" described and I live in The Bronx.
Sounds like someone's wishful thinking rather than fact.
The people who suffer from the economic problems the most are often the ones with jobs in those fields, some of them no longer able to have a job in those fields.. so if you don't know those people then you probably won't notice a dramatic difference... but yea, that article is definitely highly exaggerated.
That article is WAY over dramatized.... I do not really sense "despair" as this article notes and I live/ work in Manhattan.
with that said, I personally do think that there are leaner times ahead for NYC. Just my opinion and I am no expert, but I think there will be a real estate drop (that has yet to really be felt in NYC compared to some other parts of the country).
I can see the concern about returning to some of the problems of the 1970s, but I think it is very exaggerated. I don't think I've even seen Detroit described this way. And while Wall Street is a major industry and has had an impact, again to use Detroit, it does not dominate to the degree that auto manufacturing dominates that city.
yes, its correct, not to the degree that is being shown but the city is in a crisis. It hasn't really come to a boiling point so that the public eye focuses on it, but we're pretty messed up. Rather, that article would be more factual a year from now, when I predict we'll be seeing tons of ghost towers, specifically in "up and coming" neighborhoods like LIC, Williamsburg, Downtown Brooklyn (maybe Dumbo, depending on the amount of people who back out of their contracts) Sheepshead Bay, Harlem, and maybe the South Bronx. And ofcourse this only gets worse when your include retail and office rentals in the city.
I think however saying that its related directly to the credit crisis is a bit of a stretch. NYC's ghost towers is a consequence of the credit crisis, however much of the reason why these places are going to remain empty for some time to come (until the banks foreclose and drop prices, or the city steps in and turns them into affordable housing) are because the housing costs in this city outstripped what most residents could afford, in fact, many New Yorkers are spending 50% of their gross income on rent. Until we see these prices go down to the national average of 33%, then the city is going to bleed real estate blood. This is bad for the local government because you can't collect taxes on abandoned property, worsening an already economically stressed City and State governments, each with billion dollar deficits.
Now on the issue of jobs. Yes I think that the city will loose jobs, again, because the cost of business is too high, not necessarily because of the credit crisis, just like how its been loosing jobs for the past year, and I'd expect this trend to continue up into 2011, maybe 2012 depending on how mute the city and state governments are in attracting businesses.
That article is WAY over dramatized.... I do not really sense "despair" as this article notes and I live/ work in Manhattan.
with that said, I personally do think that there are leaner times ahead for NYC. Just my opinion and I am no expert, but I think there will be a real estate drop (that has yet to really be felt in NYC compared to some other parts of the country).
This article is NOT over dramatized at all. In fact, quite the opposite - it has captured only bits and pieces of the NY economy. Ever since Lehman collapsed last year, none of us financial industry professionals have been able to get jobs (some of us lost jobs even before Lehman collapsed). I personally am lucky to have sold my co-op without foreclosing and I am getting out of NYC.
There is another huge crisis in the banking and finance industry forthcoming in 2010 due to the collapse of the commercial real estate market. As this article points out - there are early warnings of this all over NY - you just have to look deeper. The housing market is still horribly overpriced - but I for once am glad since that got me a price for my co-op without a huge loss.
I am generally an optimistic person but you can really see the writing on the wall here - we have to hunker down for the forthcoming further job losses and commercial real estate collapse over the next year or two...
But, if there is a silver lining then at least NY will finally be a more affordable place to live and perhaps the middle class can once again return to Manhattan.
While it's not exactly ignorant tripe, I feel that the author didn't really do any research. It feels like an article based on anecdotes (think a poorly written Vanity Fair article). I think that it's really hard to judge the fate of 8.3 million people based on a few interviewees based out of Manhattan. The part that really bothered me was lines like this one : "Another incendiary issue is that black men, an above-average proportion of whom are poorly or under-educated, are far more likely to lose their job than any other socioeconomic group". What the h*(& does that mean, the return of " The Warriors"?
But this quotation was so good that I want to use it for my sig: ""Immigrants will lead this country out of the crisis because immigrants don't assume they have a right to a better life. They fight for it." I feel that he captured a very narrow segment of the population, and didn't even bother to leave Manhattan. There are some truths to the article, but much of it felt sensationalist.
New York probably won't go the way of the 1970's, since many of the factors that were in play then aren't now, such as crappy subways, and rampant indifference to a crumbling city infrastructure, along with intense racial tension in many of the disadvantaged neighborhoods. And while I think that Wall Street did have a big part to do with the current crisis, so did California (they had the lion's share of the mortgage lenders) and Arizona, and so did DC with loose regulation. But everyone is taking a beating, not just NYC.
I completely agree with ddhboy: the main that there will be a drop in real estate demand is the fact that much of it is completely unaffordable. When there was an illusion that you could own something that was WAY out of your price range, as long as you made the numbers work, then people were biting. But now, the music has stopped, and people are losing their jobs left and right. It makes no sense that a residence could now be a half-million dollars when it was at least half that 10 years ago, and nothing in the neighborhood has changed to warrant the increase.
There are going to be leaner times everywhere, but right now, I'd be more worried about a place like LA than NYC.
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