The Times Magazine 15The majority of those who departed were
residents of means – New Yorkers with
second or third homes in other parts of
New York state, such as the Hamptons or
the Catskills, or other states such as Texas,
Florida and Wyoming.
The mass migration of the millionaires has
cost the city tens of billions of dollars in lost
revenue and taxes; a report by Bloomberg
revealed that the top 1 per cent of New
Yorkers, just 38,700 people, contributed
$4.9 billion in tax revenue in 2018.
In April 2021, New York politicians moved
to generate $4 billion in revenue to help the
ailing city, with a tax increase on wealthy
New Yorkers and corporations, taking the top
rate of personal income tax to 14.7 per cent,
the highest in the country. Solomon and
250 fellow chief executives signed a letter
arguing against the move. “Many members
of our workforce have resettled their families
in other locations, generally with far lower
taxes than New York, and the proposed tax
increases will make it harder to get them
to return,” they wrote.
If Kaupe’s social circle is anything to go
by, Solomon’s fears are not unfounded. She
estimates that 40 of her friends left the
city during the pandemic, and just five have
so far returned.
Even without recent tax rises, New York
was already a notoriously pricy place to live.
I moved back to London last year after a
decade in Brooklyn, where my 500sq ft one-
bedroom apartment was considered “a steal”
at $2,800 (£2,110) a month. And it was a steal,
when you consider that most of my friends
were paying more than $4,500 a month for
their similarly compact one-bed places. (By
comparison, I was renting out my one-bed
flat in London for £1,400.)
In Austin, says Kaupe, “We can afford to
have a house. I plant lettuces in the garden.
It’s hard to get the genie back in the bottle.”
For a brief spell in the summer of 2020,
when New York landlords were desperate
to fill their many empty apartments – new
leases in Manhattan plunged 62 per cent in
May of that year – the city was a renters’
market, with hefty discounts on otherwise
out-of-reach properties.
Some commentators speculated that there
could be a silver lining to the pandemic and
the exodus of the wealthy, and that perhaps
the city would become affordable once more
for those creatives and artists dislocated inrecent decades by wildly unaffordable rents.
However, as Bloomberg has reported,
by autumn 2021 landlords had increased prices
again, by 50, 60 and even 70 per cent, as the
market has rebounded with vigour.
And for many families, living in tiny
apartments with small children and no outside
space, the pandemic – and the prohibitive cost
of property in the city – was the tipping point.
Emma Patterson, a 40-year-old literary
agent, had bought a two-bedroom apartment
in Brooklyn with her husband, a creative
director in an advertising firm, where they
lived with their four-year-old daughter. Pre-
pandemic, they loved their modest home.
“It was the first real estate that my husband
and I had owned together, in a lovely prewar
building in a nice family neighbourhood,
with great neighbours,” she says. “When the
pandemic hit, our apartment suddenly felt
very claustrophobic very quickly. My daughter
was at home, my husband would be on Zoom
in the living room, and we started losing our
minds. I was completely worn down.” They
wanted a house or at least a patch of outside
space. “But in order to get that in Brooklyn
we’d have to spend well over $1 million, which
is money we don’t have.”
Instead they moved to Mamaroneck, a
small suburban town in Westchester, an area
popular with commuters 30 miles north of
New York on the edge of Long Island Sound.
“As soon as we got here, I felt my anxiety
reduce. It’s easier to work, easier to get places,
easier to manage life. My husband and I both
have an office now and we can’t hear each
other, which is marital bliss.”
She travels to her office in Midtown
Manhattan one or two days a week. “The
commute is 40 minutes, which is no more
than it was from Brooklyn.” But the city,
she says, “feels dirtier and more abandoned.
When you walk down the side streets of
Times Square, where there used to be little
locksmiths and shoeshine people and delis, a
lot of them have closed down. There are areas
where the whole block has ‘for sale’ signs up.”
That was something Kaupe noticed too
when she was back in the city in November.
“Walking around Tribeca, walking around
SoHo, I would say every third or fourth
shopfront is boarded up,” she says.
With an ongoing absence of office workers,
even behemoth chains including Starbucks
and Pret A Manger have closed numerous
outlets in the city, the former shutting almost
50 coffee shops since the start of the pandemic
and the latter having only reopened half of
its 60 stores. Considerably more than 1,
restaurants across the city have permanently
closed since March 2020.
Of course, the absence of New Yorkers
is not the whole picture. According to figures
from Bloomberg, spending by visitors to theMegan Eliot with her
husband, Alex, and
their children. They
moved to Connecticut
two months ago‘THE CITY FEELS DIRTY, ABANDONED. WHOLE
BLOCKS HAVE “FOR SALE” SIGNS UP’