Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dangus 76 days ago
It's important to discuss the reasons for the population dropping in the 1980s and subsequently recovering.

It didn't experience population drops because NYC scared away the businesses and billionaires/millionaires with left-leaning policy. That population loss happened because of macroeconomic trends that were already in motion, as well as local factors that really had very little to do with who was mayor at the time.

Detroit didn't have a population collapse because of who was mayor or what the tax rate on the local businesses was.
1 comments
mc32 76 days ago
It had to do with the economy. The city was going broke and the city was levying more taxes while the city failed to make the environment attractive to companies and individuals. Koch was corrupt, Dinkins inept and it took tough DAs and mayor to clean up crime and make it more livable. They cleaned up most of the mob, some of the graffiti, went after hooligans, made train surfing less attractive and voila, people saw opportunity.

Anyway many fortune 500s left the city from the late 70s to late 80s. NYC sucked.

link
dangus 76 days ago
- Crime cleaned itself up alongside the rest of the country. NYC’s inner city crime woes were a national issue. It just happened to be a lot more urban than other areas. Computerization aided police departments greatly nationwide and especially in NYPD. The end of lead gasoline, overall national economic recovery, and many other factors led to crime declining across the country contemporaneously.

- Koch balanced the city’s budget by 1981 so we can’t really say the city being broke was a root cause for the next 10-15 years

- Taxes can’t really explain this at all. New Jersey to this day still has almost double the corporate tax rate of NYC, just as an example. Why was NYC able to recover and thrive while still maintaining one of the highest overall tax rates in the country? There’s no data correlation.

- NYC wasn’t the only city to have a declining urban core population in the same time period by a long shot. Again, nationwide macroeconomics of the 1980s.

link