The Chicago Loop Alliance: The Recession of 12th Avenue Toward Fifth Avenue During the Pandemic Era, Revealed by Mr. Edwards
Despite its ranking as one of the most expensive parts of residential real estate on the planet, 12th Street towards Fifth Avenue still felt redolent with neglect, despite it being one of the busiest streets in the city. Garbage, rats ambling around with their characteristic sense of ownership, the stench of New York in a heat wave — all there to remind you how much people will sacrifice to live in what was once the world’s singular cultural and financial nexus. No one ever moved to New York because it was tidy but for a while now it has seemed as if the city has become untenably filthier.
There are a lot of track fires in the subway system, most of them caused by debris thrown from train platforms. There was a 12 percent increase in fires in the previous year but a 40 percent increase in the year before that. The pandemic era may have brought increased caution in some areas, but it also encouraged disinhibition in many others. Eight months ago, a Queens-bound E train was emptied at a stop in Midtown when someone threw a microwave onto the tracks.
There are also simply more of us. The city’s population grew by roughly half a million people over the past decade as the delivery economy, with all of its accompanying packaging, swelled in tandem.
Today the city generates more garbage than it did five years ago, by an additional 375 tons a day and diverts less of its total output toward recycling, despite an initiative developed during the de Blasio administration to entirely eliminate landfill waste by 2030. Money for the curbside pickup of organic materials was cut during the first months of the Pandemic but was not fully restored in the city’s budget.
The manager of the Chicago loop alliance has been watching the slow return to downtown offices. In 2020 he biked down the street past boarded up buildings and empty skyscrapers and came back to his office. When he took the train, he noticed the silence, the absence of all the suited-up businesspeople who used to commute alongside him.
Mr. Edwards is very excited about the plan that the city has decided to develop with office conversions in order to create 1,000 housing units along a major Business thoroughfare, as 30 percent of them are affordable. If more people lived downtown, it would make it easier to commute to downtown jobs.
The number of people in the downtown loop has risen from just over 11,000 a decade ago to roughly 40,000. Apartments in the Loop are renting at higher rates than they were prepandemic, indicating that people are interested in living in that downtown bustle.
“You’re in the middle of everything,” said Mr. Edwards, who used to live in the Loop. It takes 10 minutes to go to work, so you end up having two hours of commute time back.
New York City is a Doom Cycle: What Happens When the Public Works Forces Fail in the Presence of a Pandemic?
Rudin said that some of the buildings are going to become ghost buildings. “The marketplace is telling all of us we need to do something else that’s imaginative, out of the box, but has been proven to be successful.”
The numbers show that there is a doom cycle. On an average weekday, nearly half of New York City’s workers stay away from the office; on Mondays and Fridays, the share is even higher. Subway and bus ridership are down by one-third from prepandemic levels. Major crimes rose more than 20 percent last year, and more than 300,000 people left the city in the first year of the pandemic, taking a total income of more than $21 billion. The revenue from property taxes will go down if office values decrease in proportion with usage.
“What happens to New York City from here on out depends on the actions we take and the policy decisions that are made,” he said. It is not inevitable. It can be a lot to how bad this can get. If we make the right policy decisions, there is a chance it is not as bad as feared. There’s lots of other scenarios where we don’t.”
His introduction to New York shows some insight into the current situation and the city’s response. After completing his doctorate at Stanford, he moved to New York in 2003, when Lower Manhattan was still recovering from the shock and exodus following Sept. 11. Fear of terrorism was predicted to cause people to leave the city, eventually creating a void in Midtown.
There were subsidized construction of new housing and the conversion of commercial buildings into apartments. Instead of spiraling downward, Lower Manhattan thrived. He said that similar measures would greatly ease the damage from remote work.