Do you desire to imagine that New York is within the “urban cycle of doom”?
It is simple when you just ignore the hard facts.
Take “serious crimes,” the NYPD’s index, which is skewed upward by a surge in auto theft, whilst the crimes we fear most – murder, shooting and rape – proceed to fall from last 12 months’s totals.
Surprise! Murders are on the right track to be 40% less this 12 months than in Rudy Giuliani’s last two years as mayor, after they were 673 and 649 respectively.
In mid-2023, we had 193 murders, a complete of about 400 – down from 488 in 2021 and 438 in 2022.
Ah, but there have been only 319 murders in 2019!
True, but nobody predicted the tip of the world in 2010, when the variety of murders rose to 536 from 471 in 2009, despite the fact that then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s arrest and search operation was in full effect.
Because the late great Yankee captain Casey Stengel often said, you possibly can test it out.
![According to reports, the number of murders this year appears to be lower than in Rudy Giuliani's last two years as mayor.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000012275995.jpg?w=1024)
Crime down, fear up
But there may be a rational basis for the misperception of crime: ever-increasing street chaos that will not kill you, but threatens us in other ways – lawless cyclists, outdoor drug use, uncontrolled shoplifting, and rampaging maniacs who may or may not come. us with knives.
The sensation that the town has grown and totters, beyond the federal government’s will or ability to contain it, creates a mood where actual violent crime could seem more prevalent than it’s.
However the supposed inevitability of cities’ decline resulting from distant working – one other article of religion amongst New York City’s dark prophets – has no apparent basis beyond dubious “computer models”.
![NYPD officers were seen investigating a crime scene in the Bronx after the shooting.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013476087.jpg?w=1024)
It doesn’t matter that the sidewalks are crowded, the variety of passengers on the subway is growing, and apartments are more popular than ever – we’re doomed!
A recently endlessly cited article titled “Working from home and the true estate office apocalypse” by three scholars – Arpit Gupta of NYU and Vrinda Mittal and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh of Columbia University – concluded that fewer office employees herald the decline of ownership. values, which in turn heralds the collapse of the town’s treasury – and, consequently, the tip of life on earth as we realize it.
The depiction of a city in agony throws a destructive shock absorber on the Big Apple because it continues its uneasy rebuilding following the COVID pandemic.
![Michael Bloomberg.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013297562.jpg?w=752)
Dystopian claims tackle an aura of unquestionable truth for many who are impressed by mathematical equations incomprehensible to anyone with no PhD.
Who could argue with them?
Well, possibly anyone who has ever gotten a sunburn after a pc model warned them of a downpour.
Real estate evaluation bed
The authors are great with numbers, but they’re out of touch with the truth of real estate in Manhattan.
For starters, they depend on security services provider Kastle Systems to estimate today’s supposedly poor physical presence in offices – just 50%, says Kastle.
However the Kastle survey has been widely debunked resulting from an inadequate, worst-case attempt.
It mainly includes second-tier office buildings, but not higher-tier buildings owned by the town’s top 10 owners, equivalent to S. L. Green, Vornado Realty Trust and related firms.
These so-called A- and A-plus properties are the guts of Manhattan’s half-billion-square-foot office stock.
They’re greater than half full because they’re rented to the businesses that require probably the most office employees – financial institutions and law firms.
The Real Estate Board of New York and the Partnership for New York City report significantly higher occupancy rates than Kastle’s – as much as 90% in some prime locations.
But they undercut “Apocalypse” right on the starting gate.
![New York is still trying to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013161991.jpg?w=1024)
Sure, industrial property owners are under pressure.
Some older buildings are facing bankruptcy.
But even when the general value of New York office locations falls by 43.9% by 2029 – a prediction of an “apocalypse” that no other evaluation shares – would it not be the tip of the world for your entire city?
Perhaps it will have been if there weren’t people involved – equivalent to elected officials, property owners, other business leaders, and people who find themselves simply sick of working remotely – to stem the decline.
![Owners of some older buildings could face bankruptcy, according to a report by the Real Estate Board of New York and the Partnership for New York City.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/iStock-1388862541.jpg?w=1024)
Just as Tom Hanks as Captain Chesley Sullenberger thwarted investigators’ attempt guilty him for a failure that computers showed might have been avoided – “Be serious – you didn’t take the human factor into consideration” – so too Apocalypse falls apart the moment you add this what’s now called the human “agency”.
Perhaps more employees will return to their offices – a trend that’s gaining momentum when bosses read the riot act to them.
Owners may find they need the identical amount of space as before, even when employees only are available in three or 4 days per week.
Perhaps owners will find ways to convert more office buildings into other uses than currently thought possible.
Perhaps one other Wall Street boom will encourage more firms to expand, as private equity firm Clayton Dubilier & Rice has just done by doubling its space in its move to 550 Madison Ave.
Inside the conventional range
The belief of reduced tax revenues relies on the belief that buildings will lose value resulting from distant work.
But will they?
SL Green has just sold a 49% stake in 245 Park Ave. to Japan’s Mori Trust in a deal that values the nearly 60-year-old property at $2 billion.
That is not a catastrophic drop from the tower’s last sale price of $2.2 billion in 2017, when the market was at its peak.
Comptroller Brad Lander reported with some surprise last week that the worth of office buildings actually rose to 97% of pre-pandemic levels between 2021 and 2022.
He wrote that even when the worth of offices fell by 40%, it will cost the town not more than $1.1 billion in annual property tax revenue through 2027 “to the extent that tax revenues can normally fluctuate.”
![Comptroller Brad Lander said the value of office buildings actually rose to 97% of pre-pandemic levels between 2021 and 2022.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000011793232.jpg?w=1024)
For all its intimidating graphs and equations, Apocalypse operates in the identical sensational street as alarming, attention-grabbing predictions by established “experts” which have turned out to be false.
There was no “population bomb” that caused global famine as predicted by Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne Howland Ehrlich in 1968; not the “Great Depression of 1990” as predicted by best-selling economist Ravi Batra in 1987; and no World War III with Japan as predicted by geopolitical analysts George Friedman and Meredith LeBard
There will even be no apocalypse on the true estate market.
Hold the taps on New York, psychos and all.
After all, nothing is for certain about our future.
But in the future we’ll look back at Doom Loop and be surprised that so lots of us panicked.