>Why should we sympathize with a minority of rent-seekers?
I don't really think this is about sympathizing with rent-seekers.
Cities invest in infrastructure to cover anticipated service delivery well before it's due, and the financing for doing so is a multi-decade affair. Before you complain, this includes things like providing running water, roads that are paved, etc. Really core essential pieces of making a city work.
If your tax base moves to suburbs or just plain leaves the city, the city is still on the hook for those payments, so it results in dramatically cut services or increased taxes on residents.
The flight of some of the tax base incentivizes the flight of many, resulting in further cuts to maintenance contracts, preventative work, and the general crumbling of infrastructure. Sometimes this can be gracefully managed by planned downsizing and renegotiating deals with vendors and financiers. In other cases, this doesn't occur and the city simply... dies. While the US is very young and doesn't have many large examples of this, Flint and Detroit come to mind.
Kinda. The decay of communities is one thing, but the death spiral associated with municipal infrastructure projects and tax bases is another. A small town might invest in a bioreactor to reclaim solids for resale from their wastewater service at a cost of 5 million dollars, but that'll pale in comparison with the construction of multiple new subway extensions at a price in the billions.
Sure, but their current industrial era infrastructure isn’t thousand of years old. Most of it is no older than the infrastructure in the US. Compare the size of London now with 200 years ago.
The article was ambiguous about what the $34B was a measure of (income of the departing residents or the tax income generated by the income of the departing residents).
But the underlying paper makes it clear that it's the former. So it's not accurate to say "US citizens saved $34B...". That was their aggregate income, which is still subject to the same federal taxes no matter where in the US they moved. They would have saved on state and local taxes, depending on the rates of their new home jurisdictions.
The average New Yorker has a mere one-third of the carbon emissions as the average American. This is really bad for the climate overall. Dense city living is very efficient; living in the suburbs and driving everywhere is not. NYC is the densest city we have.
And yet you add up lots of small numbers and they end up turning into a big number that destroys the planet, so the small numbers do matter too. It's the total annual carbon emission that determines the fate of our planet, and this kind of pattern of people switching to higher-carbon lifestyles is bad, especially since the pattern isn't exclusively happening to NYC but broadly to lots of cities. Add up all the cities it's happening to and it absolutely does impact the carbon emissions of the planet.
We don't have to sympathize with rent-seekers necessarily, but I would wonder if the rest of the city can move as adaptively to wherever opportunity beckons, and whether NY can downscale their city services accordingly.
I don't really think this is about sympathizing with rent-seekers.
Cities invest in infrastructure to cover anticipated service delivery well before it's due, and the financing for doing so is a multi-decade affair. Before you complain, this includes things like providing running water, roads that are paved, etc. Really core essential pieces of making a city work.
If your tax base moves to suburbs or just plain leaves the city, the city is still on the hook for those payments, so it results in dramatically cut services or increased taxes on residents.
The flight of some of the tax base incentivizes the flight of many, resulting in further cuts to maintenance contracts, preventative work, and the general crumbling of infrastructure. Sometimes this can be gracefully managed by planned downsizing and renegotiating deals with vendors and financiers. In other cases, this doesn't occur and the city simply... dies. While the US is very young and doesn't have many large examples of this, Flint and Detroit come to mind.