Chill out, for now, my fellow New Yorkers: our metropolis gained’t flip into what’s left of San Francisco any time quickly.
Nor will it possible replicate Chicago’s murder-crazed lawlessness or Los Angeles’ widespread and intractable homeless squalor.
However don’t chill out an excessive amount of – or for too lengthy. Though the Massive Apple is in a lot better form than these locations, that is no time for us to be complacent, not even a bit.
Because the Wall Avenue Journal painfully reported, once-magnificent San Francisco, house of cable vehicles and digital-world wizardry, is on the ropes from rampant lawlessness, the mass exodus of tech-industry workers, and squalid homeless camps far more quite a few and widespread than any right here.
A outstanding workplace constructing there’s on sale for one fifth of its 2019 worth.
New York Metropolis would appear proof against a San Francisco-scale disaster – however solely to a level.
Our {industry} base is way extra various with nice firms in finance, media, and each inventive area.
Our cultural assets stay unparalleled.
The nice wave of gentrification and civic enchancment underneath former mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, which lifted neighborhoods from the north Bronx to the Coney Island boardwalk, is in no imminent peril of disappearing.
Work-from-home doesn’t but condemn our fashionable workplace towers to a money-hemorrhaging future that may solely be arrested by miraculous mass conversion into “inexpensive” flats.
The obsolescence of older, much less environment friendly buildings has some homeowners in a pickle, nevertheless it doesn’t spell the entire market collapse for which left-wing, landlord-hating pundits fervently root.
The town has proven stirring resilience for the reason that worst of the pandemic.
New funding for the MTA, introduced this week, ended at a stroke three years of dooming and glooming over the supposed inevitability of fewer subway trains and repair cuts. (In actual fact, the MTA simply introduced elevated subway service).
Murders by means of this yr’s first 4 months totaled 125.
At that tempo, 2023 would finish with 375 murders, down from 433 in 2022.
Ah, however there have been solely 318 in 2019!
Sure, however a extra telling perspective is that we had 649 homicides in 2001 — the eighth yr of Giuliani’s famously tough-on-crime mayoralty.
Phenomena as unrelated because the openings of the American Museum of Pure Historical past’s spectacular Richard Gilder Heart, new condo buildings and a lodge rising alongside Coney Island’s Surf Avenue, and record-low unemployment within the Bronx testify to the town’s unparalleled capability to regenerate itself after an unspeakable disaster.
Even so, heed “to a level.” Whether or not or not New York can maintain its march again from the brink relies on an infinite “if” — particularly, whether or not our leaders have the braveness to tame our ever-increasing sense that our streets and sidewalks are uncontrolled.
“Sense” falls between notion and actuality — however nearer to actuality.
The sense, as an example, that omnipresent “minor” crimes, poisonous nuisances, and aggressive intrusion on private area disrupt our safety – and sanity.
That is one thing new in our city expertise: a crucial density of incidents, sights, and smells that will fall in need of true hazard however are nonetheless alarming.
They make for wine-lubricated, I-can-top-that dinner-party banter – “the bare man in my bodega had a machete” — however they break our days, make us worry for our kids, and encourage notions of shifting to Florida.
Begin with our streets. Dashing and drunk motorists, wrong-way cyclists and unlawful filth bikes, and ATVS have free rein to wreak havoc regardless of repeated “crackdown” claims from Metropolis Corridor.
The town has the most important police power on earth however you wouldn’t understand it when cops decline to get entangled.
Final yr’s 255 traffic-related fatalities have been horrible sufficient.
However no knowledge tracks the near-misses that pedestrians expertise en masse each day when cyclists, e-bike-riders, and motorcyclists come inside inches of crippling them – and provides a motive to not step outdoors.
Psychotic vagrants scare the daylights out of everybody whether or not they imply hurt or not.
The town’s and state’s huge mental-health amenities and assets aren’t price a dime with no dedication to take the maniacs off the road and lock them up as humanely as potential.
Unlicensed (i.e., unlawful) marijuana retailers make total blocks reek just like the Woodstock Music Competition.
The mayor and governor say they’re outraged, but in addition say they’re powerless to close them down.
Like Johnny Fontaine in “The Godfather,” they throw their fingers up in defeat and whine, “What can I do?”
Regardless of all of it, we’ve thankfully suffered no mass exodus of companies – up to now.
Residences are promoting for report costs – up to now.
Regardless of having too many Elmos and fast-food joints, Occasions Sq. has not reverted to its scary “unhealthy previous days” – up to now.
However the breakdown in civic self-discipline can’t go on eternally earlier than it turns to the tipping level of outright anarchy.
Mayor Adams, Governor Hochul, and business-world cheerleaders who say “We’re again!” ought to take note of San Francisco and Chicago – and tremble.
scuozzo@nypost.com
