By Arnold Roquerre
It is time to let New York City fade and join other once-great American cities now reduced to caricatures of their former selves. Efforts to reduce or freeze rents and close income gaps will fail. The city will grow poorer, with tattered neighborhoods normalized.
New York has moved on from manufacturing, garment production, shipping, and other occupations that once provided average New Yorkers a good life. Labor unions, regulations, and an ever-bloated city government make a return to those days impossible.
The good-life economy now consists of one-third of New Yorkers in professional services supporting finance, banking, AI, tech, and information sectors. The other two-thirds see their incomes drifting further away. As more poor, undereducated, and uneducated people arrive hoping to recapture old New York, their economic struggles will worsen. The city’s ability to maintain services and infrastructure will continue declining. Crime, poverty, and social unrest will grow.
Politicians and civil servants, failing to grasp the city’s financial realities, will blame and increasingly lower the bar on who will be taxed and continually rsise the amount This will drive away those who can leave, worsening the decline.
In short, those who could help build a better future are being demonized and driven out, while the numbers of those unable to contribute—and who are accelerating the city’s economic fall—continue to grow. None will accept that no city has ever taxed itself into prosperity, grown economically or culturally, promoted mediocracy, and punished success.