Posted on 05/27/2011 3:16:11 PM PDT by neverdem
For more than 15 years, New York State has led the country in domestic outmigration: for every American who comes to New York, roughly two depart for other states. This outmigration slowed briefly following the onset of the Great Recession. But a new Marist poll released last week suggests that the rate is likely to increase: 36 percent of New Yorkers under 30 are planning to leave over the next five years. Why are all these people fleeing?
For one thing, according to a recent survey in Chief Executive, New York State has the second-worst business climate in the country. (Only California ranks lower.) People go where the jobs are, so when a state repels businesses, it repels residents, too. It’s also telling that in the Marist poll, 62 percent of New Yorkers planning to leave cited economic factors—including cost of living (30 percent), taxes (19 percent), and the job environment (10 percent)—as the primary reason.
In upstate New York, a big part of the problem is extraordinarily high property taxes. New York has the 15 highest-taxed counties in the country, including Nassau and Westchester, which rank first and second nationwide. Most of the property tax goes toward paying the state’s Medicaid bill—which is unlikely to diminish, since the state’s most powerful lobby, the political cartel created by the alliance of the hospital workers’ union and hospital management, has gone unchallenged by new governor Andrew Cuomo.
New York City doesn’t suffer from outmigration to the extent that the state does; in fact, the city grew slightly over the past decade, thanks to immigration. And there’s more work in Gotham than in the state as a whole. The problem is that the kind of work available shows that the city accommodates new immigrants much better than it supports middle-class aspirations. A recent report from the Drum Major Institute helps make sense of the Marist numbers: “The two fastest-growing industries in New York are also the lowest paid. More than half of the city’s employment growth over the past year has been in retail, hospitality, and food services, all of which pay their workers less than half of the city’s average wage.” Worse yet, more than 80 percent of the new jobs are in the city’s five lowest-paying sectors. Parts of the country are seeing a revival of manufacturing—traditionally a source of upward mobility for immigrants—but not New York City, whose manufacturing continues to decline. The culprits here include the city’s zoning policies, business taxes, and declining physical infrastructure.
Then there’s the cost of living in New York City. A 2009 report by the Center for an Urban Future found that “a New Yorker would have to make $123,322 a year to have the same standard of living as someone making $50,000 in Houston. In Manhattan, a $60,000 salary is equivalent to someone making $26,092 in Atlanta.” Even Queens, the report found, was the fifth most expensive urban area in the country.
The implications of Gotham’s hourglass economy—with all the action on the top and bottom, and not much in the middle—are daunting. The Drum Major report, which noted that 31 percent of the adults employed in New York work at low-wage labor, came with a political agenda. The institute wants the city to subsidize new categories of work by expanding the scope of “living-wage” laws, which require higher pay than minimum-wage laws do, to all businesses that receive city funds or contracts. But that would mean higher taxes for the middle class and a further narrowing of the hourglass’s midsection.
Governor Cuomo is calling for a property-tax cap, but without “mandate relief” for localities—for example, relaxing state laws that require localities to pay out exorbitant pension benefits. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has pledged not to increase local taxes, but even at their current level, city taxes and regulations will keep serving as an exit sign for aspiring twentysomething workers. In short, we can expect New York to lead the country in outmigration for the near future.
Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.
I wish those creeps would stop coming to Florida and speeding in the right lane.
I just wish they would stop voting for Democrats after they leave.
I left Long Island NY for Pennsylvania in 2004. I miss the fishing, sea air and food but nothing else.
“Outmigration” ????
Has this buffoon never heard the word emigration?
intr.v. em·i·grat·ed, em·i·grat·ing, em·i·grates
To leave one country or region to settle in another.
Extended smoke break?
Well, liberals... with the hastened exit of producers, this will speed the formation of your socialist utopia at long last.
Everyone remaining in NY can live happily and peacefully under the yoke of marxism.
One thing for sure, they won’t be going to Kalifornia.
(New York) State put freeze on hiring, then added 51,464 people
Be sure to check out the price tag....
We have now reached the point where people want to take from the government than are able to pay in. Borrowing cannot sustain it, so eventually the government will seize all property, including all money, and there will be no incentive to work at all. Then what?
screw new york and california why conservatives would spend a dime on campaigning there is beyond me hell with those people
I have a job interview in Arizona right now
Good Bye NY - you stupid f#$’s
I’ve seen the lights go out on Broadway-
I saw the Empire State laid low.
And life went on beyond the Palisades,
They all bought Cadillacs-
And left there long ago.
We held a concert out in Brooklyn-
To watch the Island bridges blow.
They turned our power down,
And drove us underground-
But we went right on with the show...
I’ve seen the lights go out on Broadway-
I saw the ruins at my feet,
You know we almost didn’t notice it-
We’d see it all the time on Forty-Second Street.
They burned the churches up in Harlem-
Like in that Spanish Civil War-
The flames were everywhere,
But no one really cared-
It always burned up there before...
I’ve seen the lights go down on Broadway-
I watched the mighty skyline fall.
The boats were waiting at the Battery,
The union went on strike-
They never sailed at all.
They sent a carrier out from Norfolk-
And picked the Yankees up for free.
They said that Queens could stay,
They blew the Bronx away-
And sank Manhattan out at sea....
You know those lights were bright on Broadway-
But that was so many years ago...
Before we all lived here in Florida-
Before the Mafia took over Mexico.
There are not many who remember-
They say a handful still survive...
To tell the world about...
The way the lights went out,
And keep the memory alive....
—Billy Joel, “Miami 2017 (Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway”
I left Long Island in 1985 and have never regretted it . In fact , I left the country .
I knew that would eventually show up on this thread.
NYC and surrounding areas are becoming 3rd world.
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