I can’t say I was surprised when I found out that over 300,000 people have fled New York over the past eight months – I’m amazed that it isn’t more. In mid-May, I left New York after two months of “lockdown” that got worse and worse every day. The lockdown in a place like New York City was soul-crushing. Every day felt like a week. I started to get the sense that “15 days to slow the spread” would extend into weeks and months of uncertainty. And I was right.
Authoritarian leftist leaders love lockdowns because it gives them a sense of control over the population, and these lockdowns will permanently damage a city like New York. New York is nothing without Broadway, restaurants, concerts, theatre, and the culture that made it a destination for tourists and young people that moved there to “make it” every year. Young people like myself when I moved there 12 years ago. But alas, NYC is no more and may take a LONG time to recover.
According to the NYC convention and visitor’s bureau, it may take until THE END OF 2024 for NYC tourism to recover fully. As for the people who have fled NYC like myself – I don’t know if we’ll ever return. Leaving NYC and moving to Florida, my quality of life is increased exponentially. No more riding on dirty subways, no more being harassed by homeless people, no more paying absurd amounts of money for substandard meals.
For the 300,000 who have left NYC, some of us may just never come back. At first, my attitude to NYC was “see you later,” but the more I fall in love with Florida, it’s becoming “see you never.”
