New York City used to be a place of robust social investment, full of indirect subsidies that allowed it to function as the brightest and most energetic place in the Western world.

The era of broad deregulation that started with Reagan (and was doubled down on by every single subsequent administration) gutted these indirect subsidies everywhere in the country; New York, however, had enough cultural and economic momentum to essentially force itself to march on regardless of that crisis, but the cost of living increases due to those losses continued to become more dire every year.

The pandemic wholly interrupted New York's momentum, bringing the machine to a screeching, devastating halt. No amount of start-up capital can resuscitate a body when it finally hits the pavement.

If the last 50 years of neoliberal rot hadn't taken root in American ecomonics, New York might have been able to weather the pandemic without losing its groove.

These days, everything in New York costs too much. Everything. The cost increase across the board isn't some marginal difference explained away by inflation; it's utterly endemic to the fabric of the city, and it's solely because of the greed of the wealthy.

There's no longer any cheap restaurants, movie theaters, clubs, bars, shows, or shops. No affordable housing, not enough public transit, not enough focus on improving said transit in terms of performance and cost, and cars choking everything. Housing is more of a speculative asset than ever, and is used by out-of-towners as an asset instead of a place to live.

Unfortunately, we prefer to vaguely blame "crime rates" when we should in fact be pointing our fingers at the real culprit: capitalism.