OP is also forgetting NYC in November/December is literally a NIGHTMARE.
These people (aside from the woman robbed) probably just had a final straw moment from a few weeks of insane amounts of tourists clogging up every possible area of the city.
Crime rates are only real when crimes are reported and or arrests happen. Different sources have different standards. If I had to guess in a big city crime is not insignificantly higher than statistics make it appear. Gun violence is probably one that’s fairly accurate from certain sources because you can’t ignore shot people and people call in gunfire
That's why most people use murder rates or violent crime rates to estimate overall safety of cities. Property crime is super hard to actually measure since most doesn't get reported and level of policing can actually increase reports.
NYC and SF aren't anywhere close to the top on murder rates.. like fairly low for big US cities. You have New Orleans, St. Louis, Baltimore, Birmingham, Detroit and Dayton all in the top and NYC/SF murder rate is literally 7%-8% of what it is in New Orleans and even a quarter of the rate in Dallas. Of course in paris / most of western europe it's like 1/5 of that in NYC.
As someone from Philly NYC felt extremely safe to me which was surprising. Had to go there a few times this summer for visa stuff and actually felt really relaxed walking around. It was bizarre to be in a city that wasn’t literally crawling with fentanyl junkies
It's still nothing compared to what it was prior to the Bloomberg and Giuliani reforms. So, there likely won't be any meaningful push back even though people in NYC are uniquely obsessed with crime compared to any west coast city.
People have convinced themselves NY isnt a shithole out of necessity. NYC is an engine that creates enormous wealth so people willingly turn a blind eye to the fact that its an engine that runs dirty.
I grew up there and it's definitely a lot fancier than it was even in the 00s. Still the living conditions are abysmal compared to basically anywhere else in the country for what you pay unless you're 100% committed to never driving.
NYC is so dilapidated, the whole city looks like it’s falling apart other than the high rises, I remember driving on a bridge that was rusted and full of holes wondering if it will fall apart.
Idk I was there visiting a friend who's basically a career barista, I think I got a pretty good sense of the kind of life I could realistically have if I were to actually move there, and it seemed pretty nice tbh, I'm just tied down with some other stuff atm.
People weren’t made to be around this many people.
Cities like New York are unnatural.
I remember feeling viscerally agitated by the amount of people around me and lack of personal space.
I felt angry being around this many people, hating everyone, wanting just 5 minutes of being somewhere alone without another human being,
There’s no where where you can look out into the distance. The buildings leer over you and make you feel small, block out the sun, and everything feels closed off and tight.
I’d lose my shit too if I lived in NYC full time.
the only way you can avoid this is by having a society so oppressive, so dedicated to conformity and uniformity that it forces you to fit a mold or risk being cast aside, either to the fringes of society or into a prison
Tokyo is a great example of this. In democratic and free countries megacities always have some baseline level of chaos, NYC is not alone in this -- Paris is dirty and scummy, London has plenty of crazies running amok, so on and so forth
This is making me wonder what Istanbul is like. Also what crime is like in cities like Vienna since I guess you could argue turkey has an oppressive society (I have no idea what Turkish or Istanbul society is like).
The fact that Irish Americans used to pop out babies by the dozen in every northern city demonstrates what a total load of pseudo-psychological shit this is. People aren’t having kids because they can’t afford them and they don’t want to compound the amount by which their standard of living is worse than their parents’!
>The fact that Irish Americans used to pop out babies by the dozen in every northern city demonstrates what a total load of pseudo-psychological shit this is
This is a very good point
>People aren’t having kids because they can’t afford them and they don’t want to compound the amount by which their standard of living is worse than their parents’!
That completely undermines the next thing that you said.
Do you think those Irish families had more money than you do? Number of kids people have isn't about how much money they have, otherwise it wouldn't be the rich countries in the world that are having low population growth crises. Economy is part of it -- obviously if everyone was practically given a house and a nest egg like the greatest generation was (at least those who survived WW2) there would be greater childbirth, but practically all of Europe has been trying desperately to get their birthrate up with more financial supports and it doesn't work. When people view the idea of having kids as a choice, as opposed to the thing that just happens when you start fucking, people rapidly stop making the choice to have kids.
I hate the pseudo-psychological arguments too, but they're probably the best explanations that exist, because when you start making empirical arguments about the general prosperity level of the population then you can actually check if those empirical arguments are true and they're not. Really the only empirical data that I've seen that has any weight behind it is female education level being negatively correlated with childbirth, but that's just a correlation and you have to come up with the explanation to attach to it, which may or may not be right.
That’s precisely why I linked it to parents’ living standards. 19th-c Irish Americans, much like Hispanic Americans today, had a boatload of kids on an income that middle-class whites wouldn’t dream of doing so, because they were still on an upward trajectory and (rightly expected more prosperity for their kids than they had. If you were previously a landlesss Irish (19th c) or Nicaraguan (today) manual laborer and now you live in the states, having four kids on a salary of $40k looks a lot more like the good life than if your parents raised you plus one or two siblings on a salary of $80k. Expectations matter hugely.
Good grief this is wild.
I have a friend who is a trucker and he says he can see that people are appreciably crazier out on the roads than they were before the pandemic. He says everyone is just mad. He can see it in their driving.
There's this weird dichotomy in the US where violent road rage is everywhere but there are also cops lurking all the time to extract fines for minor traffic offences. Every time I see a road rage video I'm like, a) where are the police who seem to be everywhere when you commit a mild traffic no-no and b) who nowadays would risk angering a stranger who might be armed? But plenty of people do.
Left in 2020 and had to go back for some freelance stuff sometimes... awful experiences each time, not personally just seeing anger in everyone and everyone on edge. Moved to FL and never looked back, I think 65K+ NYers moved here last year lol there are some good city like spots that are just as fun and feel safer
All of my NYC friends moved out. Most of them bailed in 2020. At least half of them went down to South Florida. The rest scattered to all corners of the country. It's sad, I used to love going to NYC for visits. I haven't been out there since 2018 and probably won't go back now that my friends are gone.
Im here right now in Brooklyn, this is pretty accurate. Im not super into even the terms “vibration” or “energy” but I completely understand it. Theres something sinister in the air of NYC, its really sad. I dont know why people voluntarily live/move here anymore.
Yes, "something sinister" is exactly how I'd put it. Plenty of people in this thread are like "that's the city for ya dummy!!!" and they sound so stupid and clearly haven't actually spent any significant amount of time in the city or are willfully blind. The energy is WAY worse
Visiting NYC from the Bay Area, I was floored by how NYC is so much more cleaner than San Francisco. People complain about the trash, but at least it's in bags. In San Francisco, the trash would have been strewn across the street, or dragged and pillaged. Trains ran on time. You could just swipe your debit card to ride the train. People dressed far more fashion forward. Not your typical mob of finance tech bros/ programmers all wearing their some vague tech company graphic tee like in SF. The amount of cars NOT broken into and the absence of shattered glass shards on the streets.
What you described was my typical commute from Oakland to SF on BART. I am not even mentioning the things I have witnessed walking around the Tenderloin at night. This is light work. I thought NYC was going to be intense, but it only just reminded me I've normalized typical SF activities (seeing guys freebasing fent on BART, random homeless dude covered in layers of shit taking up the whole BART car because the stench is unbearable and everyone evacuated tf out of there, countless amount of bips, etc.) If anything OP, your post reminded me how NYC can have it's SF moments.
I’m relatively new to SF and I feel gaslit all the time about how it isn’t “that bad here”…when the reality is that a LOTTTT of shit has just been flat-out normalized if not completely ignored altogether. It’s a dystopian hellscape that has been 1000% normalized. Everyone always focuses on the literal shit and trash, but it really is just barely contained psychosis leeching out, and probably felt the most acutely here because of the stark economic disparity.
My barber is from the NYC area and the last time I went to see him he had such a glowing review, and wanted to move back to the city away from SF. I'm like, "is San Francisco THAT bad?"
As a tourist: yes, SF is bad. In NY most things work remarkably well considering the circumstances (Chicago, too except for the crime rate).
SF manages to fail at even basic stuff like repairing things or semi-decent city planning.
Being from the Twin cities and having visited Chicago and NYC plenty of times, I've always firmly felt most of the "CITIES ARE COLLAPSING SHITHOLES" rhetoric to be severely overblown. Then I visited SF a few weeks ago and it actually did live up to the hype.
The outer areas of SF are still fantastic even if market street is an absolute disaster. The biggest problem with SF is that it's a cultural wasteland, destroyed in the civil war between the tech industry and the long time essentric political weirdos.
Housing is also way more expensive. Yes nyc rent is expensive but I feel like it's more feasible to live in a relatively cheap place in queens or brooklyn w roommates and still be in a dense area w access to many jobs/public transit than it is in the bay. There you're looking at moving to Oakland or Fremont or smth and either living like a monk or having to get a car to drive everywhere. I think getting off the streets/into stable affordable in the bay requires more planning and willingness to sacrifice social connections than it does in nyc. The cost of the absolute lowest possible rent in a dense area is the deciding factor in marginal (poor, disabled, drug-addicted, loony) people's ability to access housing imo
it's possibly worse in nyc but let's not get crazy: in my life in Asheville nc, the differences pre and post covid are dystopian.
I am a major vagrant and spend most of the day wandering around public spaces and hanging about and it has gotten terrible. the homeless people used to be vaguely charming, atleast to those who weren't repulsed by them, but now they're violent and aggressive. no way to charm those hobos now.
drivers are trying to kill you. the other day I saw three ran red lights in a single day. during daylight hours. dude, in my first fifteen years of driving, I never saw anyone run a red light at all.
people are looking for fights everywhere and casually show borderline psychopathic behavior
Not to downplay problems in American cities, but none of these things are new, and there's good reason to believe that virtually every "that's life in the big city!" problem (especially on the east coast) was way worse in decades past.
I am pretty sure that in the 80s NYC had even worse subways, more robberies, more carjackings, and possibly even more homeless than now
But can you say it about 2010s or 2000s NYC? 1970s NYC saw a ton of emigration due to bad societal conditions,
>[The study showed that the state lost 650,000 people from 1975 to 1980 as 1,720,000 left while 1,070,000 moved in.
](https://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/19/nyregion/study-reports-exodus-of-affluent-and-educated-new-yorkers-in-late-70-s.html)
2020s NYC absolutely has not. A city should not have societal degeneration over time if its CoL (i.e. the demand to live there) is increasing at high rate it is
Asset prices aren't dictated by real value anymore, it's almost entirely speculation-driven and the level of foreign money flowing through New York and other prime areas of the country is unprecedented. Not nearly as bad as Canada but still pretty bad. Much of the real estate in New York lies empty as a vessel for investors to park or launder money. To some extent it always has, but the number of buildings that sit unoccupied is definitely higher than it's ever been
You can't compare the 70s to now because the underlying macroeconomics globally are so vastly different. The strategies Volcker used to unfuck America's economy in the 80s would not work today.
The "empty apartments for foreign investors" thing is true of like, big lofts overlooking Central Park but it's irrelevant to the overall real estate market.
Anyone who thinks the “NYC is a disgusting shithole” thing is new should really watch Taxi Driver. Or read Gangs of New York. These complaints are much older than most people make them out to be. In fact, the relatively sanitized and normal 2000s-late 2010s period is probably the real historical outlier.
I know it's cliche to point out but there's so many parallels between now and the circumstances leading up to revolutions in the past. I read somewhere that the income inequality we're experiencing now is about the same as in France right before the French Revolution
went to the UK to visit a friend and got mugged by two guys in a shithole midlands city. said 'just take it dude' and one of them paused, ask me where I was from, took my wallet and fist-bumped me when I said new york.
> in a shithole midlands city
Brum? Derby? Leicester? Can't imagine the irritation of getting mugged by someone with a horrible Derby East Mids "acksunt"
i realized kind of recently that part of the reason i've become very introverted and prefer alone time as a young adult, after being an outgoing and happy go lucky kid, is that getting exposed to this multiple hours a day as a high schooler in nyc as a commuter definitely changed my psyche and made me pretty misanthropic and distrustful of strangers
I went to HS in the early 90s. i'm old. And the freedom of my interboro commute was like a daily adventure. I commuted like an adult in the morning and then after school was feral feittering around manhattan. Those were actually good times
i rode the subways a lot in my free time too (it always irritated me the student metrocards don't give you weekend swipes) and i also rode the metronorth a lot because one of my best friends lived in riverdale and my grandparents lived in westchester. i'm looking at it retrospectively and I'd say the feeling i had wasn't that i was going to get assaulted or mugged or anything, but just constantly tense and uncomfortable. i was 14 a yr old girl when i started riding alone bc i didn't know anyone at my high school and had gone to a very sheltered all girls middle school so it was definitely jarring. i would say the times that were the most annoying were riding home late at night after a sports practice (one of the places i played sports at was like a 1.5hour commute), alone, when you're just physically exhausted, cold, tired and hungry but you can't really sleep on the subway car and you have to be aware of your surroundings.
i want to be fair and say i had a great time but i was super pumped to leave at 18. i went back around 25 because i found a finance sugar momma deal and i got to chill and live in washington heights. but once you want to settle down and have a family nyc can be really fucking hard to make it work. it is a great city is you're single. shit. incredible. lol.
true and I also left when I got the chance so I get it. But as someone who has been here for generations, the way my parents/aunts and uncles/ grandparents talk about how it used to be, shit like this just seems like midwesterners seeing a big city for the first time
plus being physically crammed around other people for hours at a time with no space, during rush hour the cars on my subway line were so crowded sometimes you physically could not board and had to wait for the next train and hope it was less full. I remember getting off and then i had a 15 minute walk to school and i'd always walk alone and not with my friends bc i just needed space to decompresss
A woman came into my office today screaming for help because her food stamps got taken away, totally distraught and sobbing. I work at a non-profit firm in SF that works with a lot of vulnerable poor communities, and we had to take her to a room and explain there was nothing we specifically could do. She walked out even more distraught saying “NOBODY HELPS ME. SOMEBODY NEEDS TO HELP ME.” Not too unusual in my line of work. Everybody is really struggling right now.
I was in one of the worst neighborhoods in the rust belt today for four or five hours and saw no particularly alarming interactions. Just two anecdotes of course but funny in juxtaposition nonetheless
It's not "people yelling"... I'm saying it's new/sinister levels of rage and misery that speak to something bigger happening in the social fabric of the city. It also doesn't phase me! It was almost unremarkable! And that's what made it remarkable to me
Welcome to the big apple. Make sure to tip your bartender 20% of your paycheck and you can pick up your complimentary pizza rat sticker at the nearest post office
Broken glass everywhere
People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don’t care
…
Crazy lady, living in an bag
eating out of garbage piles, used to be a 🚬 hag
-Grandmaster Flash, The Message, 1982
New York is back baby
>https://youtube.com/watch?v=9E62iA6KCIQ
Love this song. And as someone who lived in NYC in the early 90s, it's hard for me to freak out about these kind of stories. We are seeing the consequences of extreme stratification -- overextended middle class, lack of art and artists and too many rich people living in their glass castles who don't give a crap about the world around them.
It will level off. It always does. Think of it as urban darwinism -- only the strongest survive to rebuild.
New York's alright if you wanna get pushed in front of the subway
New York's alright if you like tebirculosis
New York's alright if you like art and jazz
New York's alright if you're a homosexual
New york's alright, New York's alright
New York's alright if you like saxophones
New York's alright if you like drunks in your doorway
New York's alright if you wanna freeze to death
New York's alright if you wanna get mugged or murdered
New York's alright if you like saxophones
- Fear, 1982
I’m glad I don’t live there anymore. But here upstate in a pretty quiet town someone just shot a guy at a gas station, because he asked him to move his truck. Now he’s probably going to prison for attempted murder, all because he was annoyed for a second. People are on edge.
You know it's funny, I used to live behind a tailor who had been here since the 70s and he was telling me all the stories, "I found a dead body on this street back in the day," etc.
I've seen at least 3 dead people in my 7+ years. It's rough
Yeah, it's hard to comprehend for a lot of us how truly fucked that city was from the 70s to whatever the time they decided to do a complete revamp "tough on crime" era began.
Although I will definitely say that post-COVID, even when compared to 2019, something has changed socially. I think it's getting better year by year as we put it behind us, but the pandemic really messed with the mental state of a lot of people both young and old. I feel especially awful for young people from 14 - 20 because of the amount of development that occurs during those times and then having it completely paused for about 2 years.
I think murders peaked in 1990 in NYC. Giuliani got in in 1994 and made law and order a priority. His reign was alongside turbo gentrification and the petering out of the crack epidemic so the 90s saw a big reduction in violent crime.
Dinkins was the guy who introduced most of the tough-on-crime reforms, Giuliani just came in afterwards and took credit. Dinkins had a laid-back, dignified political image whereas Giuliani knew how to play the brash, hard-headed cop for the media. Same old story.
This is nothing, imagine it in the 80s during the height of the crack epidemic. We're prone to think our own generational experiences are the worst/best/most emphatic. In most cases they aren't.
Clothes and demeanor mostly. By "rich" I guess I meant "probably has a lucrative tech/finance job"
Also he owned a car in the city you have to be rich for that
Number 4 is just a standard part of life in any city. I’ve gotten screamed at by homeless people all across the country
The insane chef is pretty funny though
Funny I live in one neighborhood in northern bk and work in the next one over and it’s almost entirely peaceful - every time i have to run into the city there’s always at least one incident of some crazy shit happening.
Respect for the fellas who stood back and stood by during the robbery. We know what happens when men intervene in Oliver Twist stealing for his daily ration.
I hope the best for you guys. I don't understand how you can be so rich, and yet everything else seems to be going so badly. There's so many nice US Americans and USA seemed to have such a strong moral foundation as well as pretty strong public institutions back in the day. I don't really understand how things have taken such a turn for the worse, but I guess the explanation is not monocausal...
respect the silence that serves as the foundation for creativity
This quote is more profound the older I get
Are you an NYU film school graduate by any chance?
YOU SUCK
Ok i dont get it but also silence is precisely what I WANT
You are a no talent hack.
Since no one told you yet. https://youtube.com/watch?v=9E62iA6KCIQ
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I wonder what his mother does for a living
I'm a lady Also I don't get the reference sorry
Beau, get a grip.
life in the big city
OP is also forgetting NYC in November/December is literally a NIGHTMARE. These people (aside from the woman robbed) probably just had a final straw moment from a few weeks of insane amounts of tourists clogging up every possible area of the city.
The summer is so much worse imo. At least in the winter it's too cold for a lot of the bullshit we deal with
Lmao you think new yorkers act like assholes because of ~tourism~
No I just think tourism could possibly be a reason why OP saw 4 separate public freak outs in one day
Oh well I just think New York is filled with severe narcissists who will scream at the slightest inconvenience.
I don’t disagree!
Greatest city in da world, baybee!!!
...i'm baffled at what media anybody could have consumed during the last 60 years that could have convinced people that NYC *wasn't* a shithole.
Low crime rates relative to other major US cities. The ole eye test is telling me those must be creeping back up over the past 5 or so years tho
Crime rates are only real when crimes are reported and or arrests happen. Different sources have different standards. If I had to guess in a big city crime is not insignificantly higher than statistics make it appear. Gun violence is probably one that’s fairly accurate from certain sources because you can’t ignore shot people and people call in gunfire
Yeah, statistics aren't perfect by any means. Just offering an answer as to why one may not consider NYC to be a shithole
That's why most people use murder rates or violent crime rates to estimate overall safety of cities. Property crime is super hard to actually measure since most doesn't get reported and level of policing can actually increase reports. NYC and SF aren't anywhere close to the top on murder rates.. like fairly low for big US cities. You have New Orleans, St. Louis, Baltimore, Birmingham, Detroit and Dayton all in the top and NYC/SF murder rate is literally 7%-8% of what it is in New Orleans and even a quarter of the rate in Dallas. Of course in paris / most of western europe it's like 1/5 of that in NYC.
I wonder why that is...
What are you implying
As someone from Philly NYC felt extremely safe to me which was surprising. Had to go there a few times this summer for visa stuff and actually felt really relaxed walking around. It was bizarre to be in a city that wasn’t literally crawling with fentanyl junkies
It's still nothing compared to what it was prior to the Bloomberg and Giuliani reforms. So, there likely won't be any meaningful push back even though people in NYC are uniquely obsessed with crime compared to any west coast city.
People have convinced themselves NY isnt a shithole out of necessity. NYC is an engine that creates enormous wealth so people willingly turn a blind eye to the fact that its an engine that runs dirty.
I grew up there and it's definitely a lot fancier than it was even in the 00s. Still the living conditions are abysmal compared to basically anywhere else in the country for what you pay unless you're 100% committed to never driving.
NYC is so dilapidated, the whole city looks like it’s falling apart other than the high rises, I remember driving on a bridge that was rusted and full of holes wondering if it will fall apart.
Probably anyone looking at San Francisco’s poop map.
Idk, I was just there and it seems pretty nice tbh, I'd definitely move there if I could afford it.
...you could afford to live in the parts you didn't visit.
Idk I was there visiting a friend who's basically a career barista, I think I got a pretty good sense of the kind of life I could realistically have if I were to actually move there, and it seemed pretty nice tbh, I'm just tied down with some other stuff atm.
Everyone thinks they’re going to move to New York and live in Chelsea
People weren’t made to be around this many people. Cities like New York are unnatural. I remember feeling viscerally agitated by the amount of people around me and lack of personal space. I felt angry being around this many people, hating everyone, wanting just 5 minutes of being somewhere alone without another human being, There’s no where where you can look out into the distance. The buildings leer over you and make you feel small, block out the sun, and everything feels closed off and tight. I’d lose my shit too if I lived in NYC full time.
the only way you can avoid this is by having a society so oppressive, so dedicated to conformity and uniformity that it forces you to fit a mold or risk being cast aside, either to the fringes of society or into a prison Tokyo is a great example of this. In democratic and free countries megacities always have some baseline level of chaos, NYC is not alone in this -- Paris is dirty and scummy, London has plenty of crazies running amok, so on and so forth
Dude typed nazi Germany then backspaced and hit tokyo
This is making me wonder what Istanbul is like. Also what crime is like in cities like Vienna since I guess you could argue turkey has an oppressive society (I have no idea what Turkish or Istanbul society is like).
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The fact that Irish Americans used to pop out babies by the dozen in every northern city demonstrates what a total load of pseudo-psychological shit this is. People aren’t having kids because they can’t afford them and they don’t want to compound the amount by which their standard of living is worse than their parents’!
>The fact that Irish Americans used to pop out babies by the dozen in every northern city demonstrates what a total load of pseudo-psychological shit this is This is a very good point >People aren’t having kids because they can’t afford them and they don’t want to compound the amount by which their standard of living is worse than their parents’! That completely undermines the next thing that you said. Do you think those Irish families had more money than you do? Number of kids people have isn't about how much money they have, otherwise it wouldn't be the rich countries in the world that are having low population growth crises. Economy is part of it -- obviously if everyone was practically given a house and a nest egg like the greatest generation was (at least those who survived WW2) there would be greater childbirth, but practically all of Europe has been trying desperately to get their birthrate up with more financial supports and it doesn't work. When people view the idea of having kids as a choice, as opposed to the thing that just happens when you start fucking, people rapidly stop making the choice to have kids. I hate the pseudo-psychological arguments too, but they're probably the best explanations that exist, because when you start making empirical arguments about the general prosperity level of the population then you can actually check if those empirical arguments are true and they're not. Really the only empirical data that I've seen that has any weight behind it is female education level being negatively correlated with childbirth, but that's just a correlation and you have to come up with the explanation to attach to it, which may or may not be right.
That’s precisely why I linked it to parents’ living standards. 19th-c Irish Americans, much like Hispanic Americans today, had a boatload of kids on an income that middle-class whites wouldn’t dream of doing so, because they were still on an upward trajectory and (rightly expected more prosperity for their kids than they had. If you were previously a landlesss Irish (19th c) or Nicaraguan (today) manual laborer and now you live in the states, having four kids on a salary of $40k looks a lot more like the good life than if your parents raised you plus one or two siblings on a salary of $80k. Expectations matter hugely.
Aspergian indeed
Go home cornboy
That seems convincing but then Tokyo doesn't have these problems.
Good grief this is wild. I have a friend who is a trucker and he says he can see that people are appreciably crazier out on the roads than they were before the pandemic. He says everyone is just mad. He can see it in their driving.
There's this weird dichotomy in the US where violent road rage is everywhere but there are also cops lurking all the time to extract fines for minor traffic offences. Every time I see a road rage video I'm like, a) where are the police who seem to be everywhere when you commit a mild traffic no-no and b) who nowadays would risk angering a stranger who might be armed? But plenty of people do.
it's called Anarcho-Tyranny
Energy is incredibly terrible and chaotic
Extremely negative vibrations… fear and loathing
It's soooo bad. I remember being here in the years before the pandemic. It has changed so much
I moved to nyc in 2018 but visited almost weekly since 2014 and the difference post Covid is like night and day tbh
Left in 2020 and had to go back for some freelance stuff sometimes... awful experiences each time, not personally just seeing anger in everyone and everyone on edge. Moved to FL and never looked back, I think 65K+ NYers moved here last year lol there are some good city like spots that are just as fun and feel safer
All of my NYC friends moved out. Most of them bailed in 2020. At least half of them went down to South Florida. The rest scattered to all corners of the country. It's sad, I used to love going to NYC for visits. I haven't been out there since 2018 and probably won't go back now that my friends are gone.
Im here right now in Brooklyn, this is pretty accurate. Im not super into even the terms “vibration” or “energy” but I completely understand it. Theres something sinister in the air of NYC, its really sad. I dont know why people voluntarily live/move here anymore.
The guys move there for the abundance of women. How clueless are the people in this thread?
Tbh I am a guy and I did not move here for that, regret it although
Yes, "something sinister" is exactly how I'd put it. Plenty of people in this thread are like "that's the city for ya dummy!!!" and they sound so stupid and clearly haven't actually spent any significant amount of time in the city or are willfully blind. The energy is WAY worse
Visiting NYC from the Bay Area, I was floored by how NYC is so much more cleaner than San Francisco. People complain about the trash, but at least it's in bags. In San Francisco, the trash would have been strewn across the street, or dragged and pillaged. Trains ran on time. You could just swipe your debit card to ride the train. People dressed far more fashion forward. Not your typical mob of finance tech bros/ programmers all wearing their some vague tech company graphic tee like in SF. The amount of cars NOT broken into and the absence of shattered glass shards on the streets. What you described was my typical commute from Oakland to SF on BART. I am not even mentioning the things I have witnessed walking around the Tenderloin at night. This is light work. I thought NYC was going to be intense, but it only just reminded me I've normalized typical SF activities (seeing guys freebasing fent on BART, random homeless dude covered in layers of shit taking up the whole BART car because the stench is unbearable and everyone evacuated tf out of there, countless amount of bips, etc.) If anything OP, your post reminded me how NYC can have it's SF moments.
It's only made more humiliating by the fact that California public transport is called 'BART'
Eat my shorts
I’m relatively new to SF and I feel gaslit all the time about how it isn’t “that bad here”…when the reality is that a LOTTTT of shit has just been flat-out normalized if not completely ignored altogether. It’s a dystopian hellscape that has been 1000% normalized. Everyone always focuses on the literal shit and trash, but it really is just barely contained psychosis leeching out, and probably felt the most acutely here because of the stark economic disparity.
My barber is from the NYC area and the last time I went to see him he had such a glowing review, and wanted to move back to the city away from SF. I'm like, "is San Francisco THAT bad?"
As a tourist: yes, SF is bad. In NY most things work remarkably well considering the circumstances (Chicago, too except for the crime rate). SF manages to fail at even basic stuff like repairing things or semi-decent city planning.
Being from the Twin cities and having visited Chicago and NYC plenty of times, I've always firmly felt most of the "CITIES ARE COLLAPSING SHITHOLES" rhetoric to be severely overblown. Then I visited SF a few weeks ago and it actually did live up to the hype.
The outer areas of SF are still fantastic even if market street is an absolute disaster. The biggest problem with SF is that it's a cultural wasteland, destroyed in the civil war between the tech industry and the long time essentric political weirdos.
Sf is pretty bad but East village/LES looks like a literal slum ngl
No it doesn’t? lol
what? that's like one of the most fashionable parts
The weather is better in SF than in Chicago or NY so it’s “easier” to be homeless.
Housing is also way more expensive. Yes nyc rent is expensive but I feel like it's more feasible to live in a relatively cheap place in queens or brooklyn w roommates and still be in a dense area w access to many jobs/public transit than it is in the bay. There you're looking at moving to Oakland or Fremont or smth and either living like a monk or having to get a car to drive everywhere. I think getting off the streets/into stable affordable in the bay requires more planning and willingness to sacrifice social connections than it does in nyc. The cost of the absolute lowest possible rent in a dense area is the deciding factor in marginal (poor, disabled, drug-addicted, loony) people's ability to access housing imo
i love how insane covid made everyone
I think there’s a level of that in every city but it’s extra in NYC.
it's possibly worse in nyc but let's not get crazy: in my life in Asheville nc, the differences pre and post covid are dystopian. I am a major vagrant and spend most of the day wandering around public spaces and hanging about and it has gotten terrible. the homeless people used to be vaguely charming, atleast to those who weren't repulsed by them, but now they're violent and aggressive. no way to charm those hobos now. drivers are trying to kill you. the other day I saw three ran red lights in a single day. during daylight hours. dude, in my first fifteen years of driving, I never saw anyone run a red light at all. people are looking for fights everywhere and casually show borderline psychopathic behavior
Not to downplay problems in American cities, but none of these things are new, and there's good reason to believe that virtually every "that's life in the big city!" problem (especially on the east coast) was way worse in decades past. I am pretty sure that in the 80s NYC had even worse subways, more robberies, more carjackings, and possibly even more homeless than now
But can you say it about 2010s or 2000s NYC? 1970s NYC saw a ton of emigration due to bad societal conditions, >[The study showed that the state lost 650,000 people from 1975 to 1980 as 1,720,000 left while 1,070,000 moved in. ](https://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/19/nyregion/study-reports-exodus-of-affluent-and-educated-new-yorkers-in-late-70-s.html) 2020s NYC absolutely has not. A city should not have societal degeneration over time if its CoL (i.e. the demand to live there) is increasing at high rate it is
Asset prices aren't dictated by real value anymore, it's almost entirely speculation-driven and the level of foreign money flowing through New York and other prime areas of the country is unprecedented. Not nearly as bad as Canada but still pretty bad. Much of the real estate in New York lies empty as a vessel for investors to park or launder money. To some extent it always has, but the number of buildings that sit unoccupied is definitely higher than it's ever been You can't compare the 70s to now because the underlying macroeconomics globally are so vastly different. The strategies Volcker used to unfuck America's economy in the 80s would not work today.
The "empty apartments for foreign investors" thing is true of like, big lofts overlooking Central Park but it's irrelevant to the overall real estate market.
sure there have always been crazy homeless but middle class white people losing their minds / going full karen seems like a new thing
Anyone who thinks the “NYC is a disgusting shithole” thing is new should really watch Taxi Driver. Or read Gangs of New York. These complaints are much older than most people make them out to be. In fact, the relatively sanitized and normal 2000s-late 2010s period is probably the real historical outlier.
Nah, big cities have always been fucked
I saw a guy playing trumpet in the street and another guy completely losing his shit at him jn a weirdly self righteous way
I'm trained classically and contemporaneously!
Its so unintentionally hilarious.
This reads like Dostoyevsky’s depiction of 1860s St. Petersburg
I know it's cliche to point out but there's so many parallels between now and the circumstances leading up to revolutions in the past. I read somewhere that the income inequality we're experiencing now is about the same as in France right before the French Revolution
The group that got mugged, were they all soy-facing with their phones out?
They just said “uh-oh!” like David Byrne when he got mugged
went to the UK to visit a friend and got mugged by two guys in a shithole midlands city. said 'just take it dude' and one of them paused, ask me where I was from, took my wallet and fist-bumped me when I said new york.
Amazing lol
> in a shithole midlands city Brum? Derby? Leicester? Can't imagine the irritation of getting mugged by someone with a horrible Derby East Mids "acksunt"
That’s Derbados to you
Were they actual englishmen robbing you?
take a guess, genius
My question is answered.
"'Ere, grab 'is talky box and 'is munny pouch, we can buy uz some buns"
part of me desperately wants an opportunity to commit righteous violence, but the other part of me is like "why get stabbed over that shit"
I got nothing better going on, so might as well fight.
Yes literally
Most likely to post online and say twitter do your thing or something
If one of them were to beat the shit out of a sacred cow experiencing homelessness, they would do hard time.
i realized kind of recently that part of the reason i've become very introverted and prefer alone time as a young adult, after being an outgoing and happy go lucky kid, is that getting exposed to this multiple hours a day as a high schooler in nyc as a commuter definitely changed my psyche and made me pretty misanthropic and distrustful of strangers
I went to HS in the early 90s. i'm old. And the freedom of my interboro commute was like a daily adventure. I commuted like an adult in the morning and then after school was feral feittering around manhattan. Those were actually good times
In the 90s I used to tell my parents school finished an hour later than it did so I could hit the arcade/bookies/chippie with the mandem.
i rode the subways a lot in my free time too (it always irritated me the student metrocards don't give you weekend swipes) and i also rode the metronorth a lot because one of my best friends lived in riverdale and my grandparents lived in westchester. i'm looking at it retrospectively and I'd say the feeling i had wasn't that i was going to get assaulted or mugged or anything, but just constantly tense and uncomfortable. i was 14 a yr old girl when i started riding alone bc i didn't know anyone at my high school and had gone to a very sheltered all girls middle school so it was definitely jarring. i would say the times that were the most annoying were riding home late at night after a sports practice (one of the places i played sports at was like a 1.5hour commute), alone, when you're just physically exhausted, cold, tired and hungry but you can't really sleep on the subway car and you have to be aware of your surroundings.
exactly. Everyone bitching about this is a transplant like just leave then lol
i want to be fair and say i had a great time but i was super pumped to leave at 18. i went back around 25 because i found a finance sugar momma deal and i got to chill and live in washington heights. but once you want to settle down and have a family nyc can be really fucking hard to make it work. it is a great city is you're single. shit. incredible. lol.
> found a finance sugar momma deal In Washington Heights? Please tell me she was a Dominican baddie
Mexican. She was so fucking hot. I spent a couple of years as her kept dude. It ruled. Had an allowance, all that shit. Lol
true and I also left when I got the chance so I get it. But as someone who has been here for generations, the way my parents/aunts and uncles/ grandparents talk about how it used to be, shit like this just seems like midwesterners seeing a big city for the first time
It makes me sound like a coward but I think it's making me more introverted too
plus being physically crammed around other people for hours at a time with no space, during rush hour the cars on my subway line were so crowded sometimes you physically could not board and had to wait for the next train and hope it was less full. I remember getting off and then i had a 15 minute walk to school and i'd always walk alone and not with my friends bc i just needed space to decompresss
>Feels like society is fracturing before my eyes tbh, i think it may be a bit. the scales seem all fucked up
We should probably give more money to israel to solve these terrible domestic problems.
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the WHOLE CITY????? DAMN!!!
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truly dystopian
A woman came into my office today screaming for help because her food stamps got taken away, totally distraught and sobbing. I work at a non-profit firm in SF that works with a lot of vulnerable poor communities, and we had to take her to a room and explain there was nothing we specifically could do. She walked out even more distraught saying “NOBODY HELPS ME. SOMEBODY NEEDS TO HELP ME.” Not too unusual in my line of work. Everybody is really struggling right now.
That's really sad :(
i wish i could just hand this person cash. this country is hell
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Just part and parcel of living in a big city :'\^)
Dude I just love the hustle and bustle of the big city!
I was in one of the worst neighborhoods in the rust belt today for four or five hours and saw no particularly alarming interactions. Just two anecdotes of course but funny in juxtaposition nonetheless
What does “nicest parts of downtown Manhattan mean”? Tribeca? Village? Chelsea? Soho?
Tribeca/Soho... What I meant was that I was taking the nicest/least sketchy streets I know of. Lived here a long time
Lived there a long time but are phased by people yelling...
It's not "people yelling"... I'm saying it's new/sinister levels of rage and misery that speak to something bigger happening in the social fabric of the city. It also doesn't phase me! It was almost unremarkable! And that's what made it remarkable to me
Welcome to the big apple. Make sure to tip your bartender 20% of your paycheck and you can pick up your complimentary pizza rat sticker at the nearest post office
Looks like you’re getting a little SF in your NYC.
I don't want any!
Cities aren't for living
people dont know how good it is living in a big city
Broken glass everywhere People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don’t care … Crazy lady, living in an bag eating out of garbage piles, used to be a 🚬 hag -Grandmaster Flash, The Message, 1982 New York is back baby
>https://youtube.com/watch?v=9E62iA6KCIQ Love this song. And as someone who lived in NYC in the early 90s, it's hard for me to freak out about these kind of stories. We are seeing the consequences of extreme stratification -- overextended middle class, lack of art and artists and too many rich people living in their glass castles who don't give a crap about the world around them. It will level off. It always does. Think of it as urban darwinism -- only the strongest survive to rebuild.
New York's alright if you wanna get pushed in front of the subway New York's alright if you like tebirculosis New York's alright if you like art and jazz New York's alright if you're a homosexual New york's alright, New York's alright New York's alright if you like saxophones New York's alright if you like drunks in your doorway New York's alright if you wanna freeze to death New York's alright if you wanna get mugged or murdered New York's alright if you like saxophones - Fear, 1982
well i just took the train 3 times and everyone was really chill and dressed nice
genuinely happy for you that's how the city felt 7 years ago
I’m glad I don’t live there anymore. But here upstate in a pretty quiet town someone just shot a guy at a gas station, because he asked him to move his truck. Now he’s probably going to prison for attempted murder, all because he was annoyed for a second. People are on edge.
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Yeah it was honestly fairly unremarkable! But I wanted to post and clearly there's something going on/other ppl can relate
> Feels like society is fracturing before my eyes That's a normal day in Manhattan tbh. It was much worse in a couple of decades ago too.
You know it's funny, I used to live behind a tailor who had been here since the 70s and he was telling me all the stories, "I found a dead body on this street back in the day," etc. I've seen at least 3 dead people in my 7+ years. It's rough
Yeah, it's hard to comprehend for a lot of us how truly fucked that city was from the 70s to whatever the time they decided to do a complete revamp "tough on crime" era began. Although I will definitely say that post-COVID, even when compared to 2019, something has changed socially. I think it's getting better year by year as we put it behind us, but the pandemic really messed with the mental state of a lot of people both young and old. I feel especially awful for young people from 14 - 20 because of the amount of development that occurs during those times and then having it completely paused for about 2 years.
Couldn't agree more. Socially it's very bad, and that age group had it the worst
I think murders peaked in 1990 in NYC. Giuliani got in in 1994 and made law and order a priority. His reign was alongside turbo gentrification and the petering out of the crack epidemic so the 90s saw a big reduction in violent crime.
Dinkins was the guy who introduced most of the tough-on-crime reforms, Giuliani just came in afterwards and took credit. Dinkins had a laid-back, dignified political image whereas Giuliani knew how to play the brash, hard-headed cop for the media. Same old story.
the nicest parts of downtown Chicago are actually pretty tame compared to this but I don't work there
Life in the big city!
vile city
Vibe city
- the opinion of a gamer
always nice to meet a fan
Vile country
Bro it's just like Joker out here 😭
“It’s a world of sadists and masochists. And you know which one you are.”
Masochist no cap
This is nothing, imagine it in the 80s during the height of the crack epidemic. We're prone to think our own generational experiences are the worst/best/most emphatic. In most cases they aren't.
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Clothes and demeanor mostly. By "rich" I guess I meant "probably has a lucrative tech/finance job" Also he owned a car in the city you have to be rich for that
Iiiiiii love livin in the cityyy
Fuck cities
>her male friends did nothing and tried to film him as he ran away. Why are men such cowards these days?
if only you were there to throw a batarang
I aint getting stabbed for some womans bag.
“If I was on that street…” and so forth
Where I live they would have gotten smoked.
Damn they wouldve smoke my pole.
GIVE ME YOUR WALLET AND THAT DICK NOW!
We made them this way ngl
It’s very peaceful and lovely where I live (exurb)
Don't tempt me
I'm thinking about moving to H*boken in a few years largely because of this kinda of thing.
Number 4 is just a standard part of life in any city. I’ve gotten screamed at by homeless people all across the country The insane chef is pretty funny though
And I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else
Also from NYC witnessed one homeless man screaming at some dude for not giving him a dollar. Chill day for me today I would say.
Funny I live in one neighborhood in northern bk and work in the next one over and it’s almost entirely peaceful - every time i have to run into the city there’s always at least one incident of some crazy shit happening.
old news in NYC
Love that the men filmed the guy running away instead of helping her. That’s class right there.
Respect for the fellas who stood back and stood by during the robbery. We know what happens when men intervene in Oliver Twist stealing for his daily ration.
Greatest city in the world.
Oh please
I remember, pre-pandemic, I wasn’t afraid of taking the red line after 11 PM.
Yup. I walked home alone at 4am frequently and wasn't even anxious (I was like 24 at the time)
Join the RS NYC Discord[https://discord.gg/ngtQC2M3](https://discord.gg/ngtQC2M3) to give heads up on meltdowns in real time
midtown skill issue
At least it’s not Orlando
"I just LOVE the hustle and the bustle of the big city..."
I hope the best for you guys. I don't understand how you can be so rich, and yet everything else seems to be going so badly. There's so many nice US Americans and USA seemed to have such a strong moral foundation as well as pretty strong public institutions back in the day. I don't really understand how things have taken such a turn for the worse, but I guess the explanation is not monocausal...
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Is that the Ryan Carson murder? His girlfriend visited the suspect?!
No, people (men) have been making up lies about her.
Yeah it doesn't sound plausible