A few years ago my smoke detector starting chirping to signal that its battery was out. It turned out that I didn’t have a spare, so I had to run out to a 24-hour pharmacy to get one—and it was 3:00 a.m., because of course it was.
And the experience was…fine. There were people out and about, and I didn’t feel at all unsafe. Many Amer-icans imagine that New York is a crime-ridden hellscape, but the reality is that by the numbers it’s the safest it’s been since the 1950s, indeed one of the safest places in America, and it feels that way too. Public safety, in turn, makes it possible for those of us who live here to enjoy all the things the city offers.
This essay isn’t going to be my usual fare of economic analysis. Instead, I want to talk a bit about my personal experience of living in what I still think of as “the city.”
Do people still remember the old cliché about New York, that it was a great place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there? These days that’s exactly wrong. Heavily touristed areas of New York, like heavily touristed areas everywhere in the world, are overrun. I take the subway to my office, getting off at Times Square, but make sure to exit at 40th Street to bypass the mimes and people in Elmo costumes. The famous museums have long lines. And so on.
Daily life, by contrast, is astonishingly pleasant, thanks to a combination of high density and affluent consumers. My Upper West Side neighborhood has a population density of around 70,000 per square mile, which you might think means teeming crowds. In fact, the side streets are surprisingly quiet. What it does mean is that there’s an amazing range of shopping and dining options within a few minutes’ walk.
As it happens, given my research interests I often find myself at conferences with Carlos Moreno, whose book The 15-Minute City has become a bible for urban reformers. Well, I basically live in a 15-minute city. And that, by the way, makes city life remarkably healthy. New Yorkers, myself included, walk far more in an ordinary day than the vast majority of other Americans.
Furthermore, the subway—which isn’t pretty but is far safer than driving and benefits immensely from New York’s almost unique system of express trains—puts a huge number of interesting destinations within easy reach.
It’s a really nice life—if you can afford a place to live. Because that is, of course, the problem. Recently the West Side Rag ran an article titled “The Upper West Side: A Haven for Independent Minds.” I couldn’t help immediately thinking, “Yeah, independent minds who can afford to pay $1700 a square foot.” There are other great neighborhoods that are a bit cheaper; if we didn’t already have the place we bought in 2009, we might be looking at Jackson Heights. (New York definitely isn’t for you if ethnic diversity bothers you, but I’m fine with it.) But housing in New York is just too expensive for all but an affluent minority.
The way I sometimes think about it is that New York right now is a wonderful playground for the 5 percent, but too expensive for everyone else.
Notice that I said the 5 percent, not the 1 percent—although when people say that, the kind of people they have in mind are more like the 0.1 percent or even the 0.01 percent. Anyway, my sense is that New York is wasted on the extremely rich. This is a city to be enjoyed strolling around, not driven around in a car with tinted windows; a city to be explored with at most a few friends, not an entourage. If you’re going to be insulated from the life of the streets, have other people do your shopping, and dine only in see-and-be-seen restaurants, you might as well be living in Dubai.
What would I like to see change about New York? We need to build lots more housing—sorry, but that’s the only way to make living here affordable. Other than that, the city needs to become more like itself. Less traffic: the congestion charge has been a stunning success but should be just the beginning. Better transit: new subways will take many years, but a lot can be done to improve bus service. And we still fall far short of European standards when it comes to making the city pedestrian-friendly.
But overall, life in New York right now is the best it has been in my adult life. I won’t call it a golden age, because housing is too damn expensive. But it is, at least, a silver age.
Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, wrote for the New York Times for many years; he now has his own widely read Substack column.