Comment by eduction | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eduction | Hacker News Reader

The comments here are funny. You have a bunch of people saying folks are fleeing NYC due to crime. Then other people saying folks are fleeing due to housing shortage and rents going up. It's like the old restaurant line, "no one goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

Keep in mind, crime has risen for each of three years through 2022, and while that trend is worrisome, the actual number of crimes is only back up to 2006 levels. https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/crime-statistics/histori... That's not a year known as "the bad old days" or particularly dangerous, though you can certainly write the alarming headline, "highest crime in 16 years." (FWIW indications are the trend reversed this year https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-06/nyc-crime...)

The population decline coincides with the pandemic and remote work, and from my own personal experience here that's a much bigger driver of people leaving. Many people fled to their vacation homes and never came back, other people bought new places upstate and moved.

Like all cities, but probably more than most, NYC is at an inflection point where it's figuring out what its future looks like as work habits change. The offices won't all fill back up but aren't easily converted to housing. And frankly NYC's industries, though dynamic and high end, continue to face tech disruption, and Silicon Valley only has more economic strength every year.

So there could be even more population loss. Rents seem to be softening. There could absolutely be a down period here, economically and otherwise. But if you look back at the history of the city, these have been the most fertile times culturally. Crime in the 70s and 80s went hand in hand with punk rock in LES, art scene in SoHo, independent film wave, birth of hip hop. There were some actual businesses that came out of all that. I don't want NYC to become that bad again, it's not good for the people who live here, but if there is a lull as the city figures out what it is, there will be a silver lining.

Yeah I mean, covid was a good inflection point where it made people re-evaluate their lives and broke their decision inertia.

NYC is a ton of fun, but it is also, to sum it up in one word - hard.

People who have lived there 10/20/etc years and not lived elsewhere underestimate how much easier life outside the 5 boroughs can be.

Some scoff at NYC people owning a weekend/vacation home, but the funny thing is due to costs... it's not just the 1%.

I have had plenty of friends who rented in city while owning their weekend home. I have friends that did the math and realized a car + vacation home 2x the size of their apartment was cheaper than selling their 2bed & buying a 3bed, etc.

The crux of the problem is that there isn't a ton of housing and you are competing with the global 1%. In my previous building there used to be a guy upstairs who talked about the Ferraris he kept at his home in London. My current building has a number of trust fund kids including an under-25 year old child of petrostate president/PM living in the biggest, best units upstairs.

I basically make good FAANG money, but these people are another dimension, and they are everywhere in NYC. This effect goes down every level of the economic ladder where you are competing for housing with people who you would not normally be competing elsewhere.

COVID made a lot of people re-evaluate things--at least at the margin. I'm pretty sure I know a disproportionate number of people who ended up retiring at least a few years early.

Reported crimes.

Keep in mind NYPD had its budget cut by billions of dollars and lost record numbers of officers over the same period. Part of accurate crime statistics is actually finding an officer to report a crime to and then them giving you the time of day. And that's if you haven't given up on the city already and aren't "mindin' yo own business".

I lived in NYC from 1984 through 2021 and I can tell you unequivocally that in 2021 it seemed more like 1988 than 2006.

If anything, the mid-2000s felt like the safest period of time that I lived in the city -- at the height of where a good party would be held in the same kind of places dead bodies would be dumped a decade or two earlier.

Yea, the way big cities seem to want to resolve the crime problem is to simply stop responding to crime calls, if no one can report a crime the crime never happened right???

SanFran seems to have this policy when it comes to shoplifting, never mind your eyes, or the video, since the police dept has a policy to never respond to retail theft, retail theft crimes are dropping... it is like magic.

Well, in SanFran, the retail businesses just closed up and left.

...which is also starting to happen in NYC.

Can't shoplift from stores if they don't exist.

There is an easy way to get around the "reported crimes" issue.

Look at murders. Dead bodies will not be hidden.

And murders are also showing returns close to historic lows.

Also, the cities people are moving to have much higher per capita crime than NYC (nearly every mid to major US city has much higher per capita crime than NYC because NYC is incredibly safe for a US city).

Here are the numbers (from July...this is what a quick DDG returned, but I'm sure more recent numbers will be similar).

https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00088/nypd-citywide-crim...

Homicides were down 35% since July 2022. Homicides almost certainly do not have the "reported" crime issue at least in the US.

No you can not just look at murders and declare that over all crime is down because murder is down.

Looking at cities that do not have the same reporting problem that these large cities with a certain political bent you can see that murder does not track with non-violent crime aka property crime and only has a loose correlation to other violent crimes.

it is entirely possible for Theft, robbery, Rape, etc to be increase while murder is decreasing.

Further according to U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics issued in March 2023, between 34% and 58% of violent crimes were reported to police. For property crimes, the percentage reported to police was between 28% and 44%.[1] It may seem add on only 34% of violent crime would be reported, but we have seen many reports in recent years of police treating victims like criminals in the first place so many people will just move on and never involve the police even with violent crime.

Then there is the reported 90,000+ package thefts [2] that occur that NYPD does not put on their comstat figures they release as these are considered minior offenses, but have a real impact on daily life (aka broken windows)

[1] https://www.westsiderag.com/2023/07/09/column-how-many-uws-c...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/nyregion/package-theft-ea...

In 2008, I was run over from behind by an MTA bus driver going south on 21st st in Astoria while on my bicycle. Broad daylight, normal conditions, I had totally un-missable neon reflective gear on.

This was a block and a half past a bus stop where the driver had previously been stopped. As I was stuck, run over, with myself and my bike stuck in the front right wheelwell, the driver opened the door and spent all of his time kicking me until I could pull the bike free, rather than help. Then he closed the door and drove away.

I sat on the sidewalk and calmly collected myself and my busted bike and called the non-emergency line for the 114th Precinct. Here's what the cop answering the phone told me:

"Hey jackass, do you actually think we're going to file a report against a city employee? click"

That's why I don't talk to the NYPD.

> Keep in mind NYPD had its budget cut by billions of dollar

Where do you see that? Looking at their spending, that does not seem to be the case:

https://ibo.nyc.ny.us/RevenueSpending/nypd.html

Anyway, wasn't the election of former police officer Eric Adams supposed to be a turning point for the city? Did the tough-on-crime mayor not have a measurable impact on crime? I noticed in San Francisco they elected a moderate Mayor (London Breed) and tossed out their reformist DA in a recall but it does appear the crime problem seems intractable even for hardline moderates.

> Where do you see that?

OP is incorrect. The NYPD has had its budget consistently increased each year.

There is one asterisk, in 2020, where the then-speaker attempted to hide the increases to the police budget by allocating the funding for police embedded in schools to the Department of Education, but this was caught pretty quickly. So the actual total amount budgeted for police up-front did not decrease, and of course the amount actually paid was much higher (because the police have gone over their budget every year consistently for a very long time).

There wasn't much support among elected officials for actually decreasing police funding. The mayor at the time made a pretty mild criticism of police violence and then the police union threatened to assault his daughter, so he reversed course and that didn't leave much room for even lip service to reducing police funding from the top.

Eh, I've lived here since 98, the biggest thing I've seen is the rise in shoplifting, that's definitely a dynamic that's different than it was in previous years, and that is no doubt driven by the ability to sell these goods easily on facebook and other places (it wasn't worth your time to shoplift hairbrushes because where would you sell them and for how much, but there's a guy who steals hairbrushes from my local DR every day that there isn't a cop car parked outside).

But in terms of actual violent crime, its going back down and is nowhere near what it was like even back in 2000 in the same neighborhood I live in now. In terms of budget, the NYPDs spending dropped in 2021 by $500m, and in 2022 was only down $100m from 2020, so it's bouncing back. There's only ~1500 officers fewer than target, which means there's still 33500 police officers. The NYPD's budget is still over $5b, which is more than the entire military budget of Peru, New Zealand, Romania, and Finland (plus a bunch of other countries).

They just cancelled the next five police academies. That's another 2500 less cops over 2 years.

> The NYPD's budget is still over $5b, which is more than the entire military budget of Peru, New Zealand, Romania, and Finland (plus a bunch of other countries).

Thanks. Now I have an irresistible urge to MacGyver some crazy geopolitical circumstances where the NYPD invades Finland. That will be my life's work.

> violent crime, its going back down and is nowhere near what it was like even back in 2000 in the same neighborhood I live in now

Curious though if you actually lived in that neighborhood your whole 25? years in NYC?

I think personally my experience is that while city-wide crime might be similar to when I moved here nearly 20 years ago, I do not live in the same area. For example I had 2 mentors that started a decade before me. The "up and coming" areas they lived in their 20s were BK Heights & East Village (not alphabet city). The equivalent "up and coming" 20 something who I mentor is probably in Bushwick.

Bushwick 2023 is certainly grittier than Brooklyn Heights was in 2000.

Not exactly, but almost. Five years in and around midtown east, then 7 years in astoria, now 13 years in midtown east. Not the same apartment, obviously, but same enough that I pass by the same places that I was passing by back in 1998.

In my experience, the places that were sketchy back then in Manhattan are still sketchy today, but the radius of sketch is much smaller and the demarcation line much brighter.

To use your examples, I agree that bushwick today is grittier than BH in 2000, but my impression is that it compares similarly to, say, avenue C in 2000, where there were hipster bars and restaurants popping up, but it was still considered less safe than the area around washington square park. I don't live in bushwick, though, so I'm sure its an imperfect comparison.

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