Coronavirus conversation continued: the present and future of life in cities
Since our last conversation, New York City continues to be locked down. Some cities and states around the country are starting to open up. And as NYC and its surrounding areas show some signs of turning the corner, with decreasing daily cases, hospitalizations and deaths, cities and counties around the country are starting to see upticks. Nation wide, the number of deaths is nearing 120,000, a truly unimaginable number.
For our latest conversation, we will talk about what it has been like to be in New York City during this pandemic, what we expect for the near, medium and long-term future for life in a city like this. As ever, we are not experts by any definition. We are trying to figure out our lives and the life of the city we’ve lived in for years as this crisis continues.
We had this conversation in late May, before the city saw multiple weeks of protests, a turning around of our Coronavirus outbreak and a slow re-opening. We’ll take on some of these topics in subsequent conversations.
Samarth: I moved to New York City in 2013, for a new job, a chance to start my career with a big advantage. NYC was arguably the best, most ambitious place for me as a young 20-something to start my life on a strong footing. I was also excited by the culture, restaurants, museums, music, fashion, and all sorts of other things that I had either experienced on short visits or gotten to know through pop-culture basically since I was a kid. New York loomed large in my imagination and the experience of living here has been rewarding, challenging, and deeply meaningful in all sorts of ways. I’ve met some of my best friends here, had great professional experiences, and met my partner here.
But now, as I look around New York, I see a shell of the place I have lived in for the better part of a decade. If I can do my job remotely, why stay? If restaurants, museums, concerts, and so on won’t be back for months or years, what makes living in a small apartment, paying high rent, attractive? Sometimes these thoughts are fleeting and can be dismissed easily. Other times, I seriously consider what my life and the life of New York City will look like not only for the next couple of years but for the foreseeable future beyond that. Some recent reporting in the Washington Post and the New York Times suggests I’m not the only one. Have you been thinking along these lines Jay?
Jay: I’ve often thought of New York City as a community whose common or unifying aspect was a commitment to living in small, old, dirty circumstances and making it work. But a lot of that inspiring discomfort is now optional, since we don’t need to go into crowded spaces and we don’t need to live in close quarters in a densely populated city — we order food for delivery and we work remotely. A NYC that isn’t crowded and uncomfortable isn’t the NYC I know. And I’m increasingly uncomfortable paying a premium to live the same life remote workers are living elsewhere in the country.
Samarth: Honestly, as I’ve been having these thoughts, and discussing them with my partner, I’ve also had a twin pang of guilt and sadness. Not only for New York that I loved being put on pause or fundamentally changing forever. But also because if I leave, and if lots of people like me leave, who is left picking up bills for NYC? And if I and lots of people like me leave, what do we lose from the dynamism and prosperity cities like NYC have created for generations through all the benefits that accrue from lots of different kinds of people mixing and mingling together? Retreating away to a smaller city or a less dense place might be easy for me. But it will not be for all New Yorkers. And is it really fair for me to come here, take advantage of everything NYC had to offer while it suited me, and when the going gets hard, just bail?
Jay: Right. There’s a lot of potential for disruption and catastrophe. If people, or even just white collar workers, can start choosing where they live independently of employment concerns, they will make choices on a very different and probably recreational basis. Which means less big cities and more beaches and mountains (is my guess). But it also suggests that the fate of big cities, including New York, could be dark — anyone who can work remotely or who can easily move to a lower-cost area might leave, and anyone who can’t will remain to face life in a city that is vastly less wealthy, and which probably has financial commitments that it made in a richer or more optimistic time and which is now the responsibility of the poor and immobile population that couldn’t leave. It suggests a Detroit-like future for this city and many others.
Samarth: Although I’ve only lived here for 7 years, and have tried, in some more successful ways than others, to become a part of the community, it hasn’t been a seamless transition. There are all sorts of funny ways to measure whether you’re a true New Yorker, but at the end of the day, if I leave, I will suffer few penalties (and might even end up having a better life). But I also feel a sense that I’m abdicating my responsibility to this city, which adopted me and helped me flourish in a formative part of my life.
Jay: And let’s be honest, we are both already refugees from a badly governed state that gave away public resources to well-connected insiders at the expense of a flourishing middle class. I left the state of my birth, where I lived my first twenty-three years, because the state did not offer me a promising future. New York has been better, but I’m not staying anywhere just to pay off the retirement benefits of overcompensated public employees.
I don’t share your sense of abdication, in other words.
Samarth: I share a lot of your frustrations about living in a place like NYC (and, similarly, before this, Chicago). But I also can’t help but feel like if I pack up and leave, I’m letting down the people who depend on my tax revenue for public housing or transportation, or on the fact that the company that employs me, runs a big office in which they can also find work. Or that if I were to have kids and raise them here, they’d attend a public school with neighbors whom I’d get to know and raise our families together. I know I had little to do with the fact that NYC is upside down. But the NYC residents who will suffer if people like me leave are not the wealthy or the members of the government.
Jay: I think this might provide a beneficial pressure on state expenditures. When people have more choices about where to live, the taxes are more voluntary, and if the state expects people to pay them, it will be under additional pressure to show that they are necessary, and even more to show that they add value to public life.
For example, New York City obtains huge revenues from its public transportation ridership. And the city has made a choice to devote most of that revenue to paying people to drive those trains, even though self-driving trains have existed for more than thirty years (the first opened in France in 1983ish). Under pre-coronavirus conditions, there was not really a reason to reevaluate that choice in favor of infrastructure or lower fees. If people start moving away from the city because they don’t see a reason to pay high taxes in return for a dysfunctional, dirty, and unreliable public transportation system, there is a lot more riding on the city’s decision making. They may have to re-conceive of the public good in a broader sense that is more appealing to middle class people.
Samarth: The MTA, jeez, what a mess. And we know it’s a mess for a number of reasons, including, as you say, poor choices by state and city officials, like using MTA funds to bail out all sorts of other liabilities for the city and state.
It’s a tough thing to say, and every time I say it, I balk, but, personally, I am having a hard time imagining good reasons to stay in NYC. It’s not the exit I imagined but then again, none of this was imagined by anyone. Not to mention all sorts of personal and family reasons to move away and be closer to people who need me elsewhere.
But when I think about the shape of the country that will emerge from this crisis, and all the work we will have to do to recover a sense of normalcy, I have a hard time imagining contributing to that recovery anywhere else but a city. Maybe not New York City, but a city somewhere. Cities are engines of prosperity, they are dynamic, they create and accrue benefits from scale, efficiency, serendipity. They also, in my mind, represent the kind of society that I want to live in. One with a shared sense of community, where I see people when I walk outside, where I could meet someone very different from me, and learn about living a different life from my own. Our cities may have been mismanaged for many years, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can build cities that aren’t marked by segregation, a lack of investment in infrastructure, housing and education; cities that aren’t just playgrounds for the rich.
And ultimately the choice of where to live, what community to contribute to and participate in, is a personal choice but also a political one. My decision to come and pursue a life in NYC in 2013 was made when I needed something from the city. Now, the city may need something from me.
I think a related element of this conversation, and one that I’ve been picking up on in conversations with friends recently, is that it feels disappointing to be forced into decisions like this, that feel so out of your control. Modern life, especially for people like us in America, has given us a sense that we should be able to control things like where we live, and what kinds of lives we lead. This crisis has thrown a lot of that control out, immediately and without warning. That’s tough to deal with for a class of people who have felt in control their whole lives.
Jay: We’re lucky to have been able to more or less establish our personal and professional lives prior to this crisis. This isn’t upending my expectations for my own life too dramatically. But I wonder about the younger people who, if nothing else, are seeing that their expectations for a traditional four-year college experience have been basically destroyed. Anyone 15 to 23 years old is probably experiencing the most intense reversal of expectations. For all we know, most colleges might not even exist in a couple years.
Samarth: Not only 15–23 year olds, but I have some friends who have invested almost 10 years into their PhDs, were poised to hit the job market this fall, and now have had the floor pulled out from under them. And these were some of the best credentialed people in their cohorts. I can’t even imagine what life is like for the thousands of other philosophers, historians, sociologists, political scientists and so on who are their peers. Now, a whole generation of academically trained researchers and teachers have to find employment elsewhere. Top-level universities with big endowments, wealthy alumni and other resources may survive. But the mid-level college or small university is in for the fight of its life.
Jay: Those disappointed PhDs are probably a microcosm of broader developments. There are so many established institutions that have mediated life for everyone for a long time, on the basis of physical human congregation, which are going to have a diminished influence. Those institutions gave people control over their lives and oriented them toward peaceable and productive adult lives.
A college isn’t only a source of potential employment for a college professor — it’s also the means by which a young person with scholastic and pedagogical interests comes to understand that she desires to be a “college professor,” while the heretofore stable existence of institutions of higher education sustain that goal, and other supporting institutions, like public high schools, act as infrastructure that can serve as a bridge from ambitious young person to employed college professor. So PhDs have had their expectations upended, but younger people will have trouble even forming comparable expectations. Like remote workers choosing where to live, they will be faced with an unprecedented and radical freedom. But without the structure, or the constructive narrowing of choices, that had been provided by countless American institutions, they won’t feel empowered to act on that radical freedom and it will feel like a loss of control.
While it’s probably not a good short-term development for lots of people to feel out of control, I’m hopeful that we will quickly develop new pathways to power in a more free and dispersed society. And it’s good to remember that we are probably freer than we think: no one will be “forced to leave” New York — leaving will just seem more attractive in the absence of the necessities that had conditioned us to living with the bad parts of the city. That could be a good thing.
