People in New York City with any money and property are unhappy about the prospect of a communist mayor. They apparently see the potential of the government taking much more of their money less a politician’s promise and more a revolutionary threat.
While Zohran Mamdani might lose, it’s not looking that way. (Note the standing of his chief competitor.) Therefore, many homeowners are fleeing, without waiting for Election Day.
One destination is next-door Connecticut, site of a failed revolt in 1991 against the enactment of a state income tax. New Yorkers reasonably suppose that the taxes imposed by a Mayor Mamdani would prove worse than that — and worse than New Yorkers’ already-heavy tax burden.
Escapees are also worried about crime.
Mamdani could do much unilaterally but would need the cooperation of the state legislature and governor or the city council to impose the tax hikes he’s dreaming about. Still, these entities hardly serve as bulwarks of limited government.
We know that New Yorkers are lurching to Connecticut because, as the New York Post reports, a “bidding war frenzy and soaring prices” have hit the state’s housing market.
According to real-estate agents there, the frenzy resembles that of early pandemic times. Properties are being scooped up within days. Deals are cash on the barrelhead, even for multi-million-dollar homes. Sale prices are much higher than expected.
And the bidders are coming “out of New York City,” the agents say. Prospective buyers have been “mentioning concerns about the mayoral election. . . .”
Good news, for a while, for Connecticut home sellers and their real-estate agents. Bad news for everybody else, soon enough.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Escape from New York”
Mamdani has a message for anti-Westerners: “This is how you do it. This is how you destroy their centers of finance and of industry. Not by flying airplanes into buildings; not by bombing gathering places; but by harnessing the ignorance and petulant madness of this bloc of voters.”
I’d love to offer a strategy to defeat that project; but, regardless of whether Mamdani wins, New York City is far from any point at which it plausibly might turn around its terrible decline. We have no means of sufficiently reforming those voters. At best, we can hope that they do not generally discern the need to flee until they have lost the means to do so.
Setting aside those who can make money by aiding emigrants, and perhaps those providing irreplaceable, vital services to those who cannot evavuate, anyone in New York City who can afford to leave should do so, as the losses of remaining will only mount. Any firm that can relocate but has not at least begun to do so should be regarded as grossly inconsiderate of its employees.
Former New Yorkers will have much of value to offer, but those who move elsewhere should understand that they cannot improve their new communities by changing the local laws to be a bit more like those of New York City, just as those who fled California did not improve anything by analogous action.
How many of those who have been fleeing NYC supported the likes of De Blasio and Dinkins? They reveled in their political correctness and told themselves how righteous they were. They attended fund raisers and hobnobbed with the likes of Obama and Biden. Many have second homes in Florida, making it much easier to just pack up and leave. We’ll have to see what the Wall Street bigwigs do in the wake of a Mamdani victory. Then there are the overpaid professors in elite universities who have been training today’s leftists. Will they move somewhere else and teach via zoom? The NYC election returns will be must-see tv.
The problem for the place they land is that they are bringing all of their crap ideas with them. Sooner, not much later, the new place will resemble the old place.
You can’t fix stupid.