New York Metropolis rental residences, which account for 68% of all Huge Apple houses, have by no means been in higher demand. Actual property builders are hungry to construct tall new towers — whilst workplace towers wrestle to win again staff.
Not like in shooting-gallery Chicago and vagrant-colonized San Francisco — the place retailers are getting out of Dodge as quickly as they will load the vans — shops are opening up throughout city. Lengthy-closed Century 21 returned to Church Avenue, Wegman’s is launching in Astor Sq., Barnes & Noble has reopened to the Higher East Aspect and Dealer Joe’s is coming to a hundred and twenty fifth Avenue.
How then would possibly we reconcile their confidence with the “Metropolis in Disaster” narrative of upper crime, rampant homelessness and a migrant invasion past our authorities’s energy to comprise?
Effectively, the town is in disaster — however the disaster isn’t uniformly distributed. With regards to avenue crime — the problem that the majority impacts every day routines and selections about whether or not to maneuver right here, keep or flee — severe mayhem like murders and shootings stay scarce within the components of city the place probably the most cash is made and spent.
That is true regardless of “progressive” travesties which have set the town spiraling: “bail reform,” prosecution-averse district attorneys, “increase the age” laws that gave children below 18 license to kill and the ascendency to criminal-coddling judges.
A buddy who’s opening a small Italian restaurant within the West 30s — which have greater than their share of pharmacy thefts and three a.m. membership shootings — advised me he thinks about crime however, “I’m right here to earn a dwelling and make clients completely happy.”
Translation: crime is a fear for him, however he gained’t let it chase him out of city — a minimum of not but.
It isn’t breaking information that modifications meant to advertise “fairness” have been most iniquitous to those that can least afford unsafe streets: residents of principally minority, low-income neighborhoods who’re victimized by a handful of gun- and knife-toting criminals past the regulation’s attain.
However the essential flip facet of the story is basically neglected: particularly, the extent to which most of Midtown and secure residential neighborhoods have been spared the bloodletting.
Main crimes are nonetheless up citywide over pre-pandemic 2019, regarded by many because the final “good yr.” However the comparability is negatively skewed by a single class — auto theft, which afflicts primarily poorer, outer-borough areas.
Some 7,600 automobile heists had been recorded as of July 6, in contrast with 5,403 in all of 2019. In Brooklyn’s perpetually troubled East New York, the seventy fifth Precinct, for instance, there have been 296 auto thefts for all of 2019, however there have already been 303 up to now in 2023. And the remainder of the yr isn’t wanting nice.
For exhausting information and figures, neglect anecdotes and examine as a substitute the NYPD’s weekly COMPSTAT information, which gives detailed evaluation of city-wide crime. A comparability of present developments with each 2019 and mid-July in 2021 reveals how a lot the crime spikes principally spared all however a couple of of the town’s 77 police precincts.
This yr has seen three murders (two of them home instances) within the nineteenth Precinct — the Higher East Aspect. There have been none in 2019, however two every in 2021 and 2022, in a neighborhood of practically 200,000 inhabitants. Main felony crimes within the nineteenth complete 1,373 up to now — on observe to be just a few greater than 2,273 in 2019.
The sixth Precinct in Greenwich Village noticed no murders in 2019 and just one thus far this yr — which resulted from a combat between two homeless males.
Equally, a single homicide was recorded thus far within the twentieth Precinct on the Higher West Aspect — the identical as in 2019. In different phrases, thus far, so good.
Within the huge 109th Precinct, which covers Flushing, School Level, Malba and different components of principally middle-class northern Queens, no murders in any respect have been recorded up to now. There have been three in 2019.
There have been no murders within the woke wonderland of Brooklyn’s Park Slope, the 78th Precinct, in 2019. This yr has seen all of 1 — a stabbing that grew out of a petty dispute at a smoke store.
Midtown North, the so-called “Plaza District,” suffered only one homicide thus far this yr. That’s up from one amongst of 2019 however down from three in 2021.
So the place have main crimes truly jumped since 2019?
The Put up reported in February that 27% of all current shootings occurred in six Bronx and Brooklyn precincts, amongst them the principally lower-income Mott Haven, Brownsville and East New York.
The wild card is Midtown South, the 14th Precinct which incorporates Penn Station, Grand Central Terminal and Bryant Park — however can also be house to hordes of fentanyl addicts and predatory homeless. Just one homicide has occurred there this yr in contrast with two in all of 2019.
Cases of assault, rape and shoplifting are significantly larger. However they’ve slowly however steadily fallen month-to-month, and Midtown South may once more quickly be as protected as the town’s different nice neighborhoods.
Three years into New York’s newest crime “disaster” the headlines — together with from this paper — should recommend a metropolis spiraling uncontrolled. However there are numerous “cities” in New York Metropolis and most of them are as protected as they’ve ever been. We nonetheless have an extended method to go to make all of New York actually safe. However within the meantime, there’s no want to show the skyline lights off simply but.
scuozzo@nypost.com
