DD is seriously considering ED to Barnard. She visited last year - preCovid - and it was her first choice for many reasons (small, LAC, women’s college, science + arts, location, etc.). We have since heard NYC is not as safe, with businesses closed and many people moving out of the city. We are concerned about safety. (We lived in Hoboken / NYC many years ago, so we know about city life and safety. However, we have lived in the south for the past 10 years and are not in touch with what is happening now.) Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
I’m here in NYC and I haven’t noticed a real safety difference in my day-to-day. With the caveat that I also lived here in the 90s, when the crime rate was noticeably much higher.
My office is partially open, although I’m mostly still working from home. My husband goes in to midtown and while it’s quieter, more and more people seem to be on the street (especially after school started, which was just recently.) There is more talk of people heading back to the office, and when they should call their employees back. Of my friends, almost everyone came back or are coming back but some of their elderly parents are not. My kids’ (private) school did not have a noticeable decline in enrollment, at least not that I’m aware of. I really don’t know the stats for NYC publics.
Definitely businesses are having trouble but two on my block just re-opened today (yay.) I really hope the rents for commercial real estate go down at least somewhat since it was already the case that small businesses were being priced out. Restaurants are very very busy (outside), Central Park is chock full of people. There are panhandlers in my neighborhood but they are literally the same people as before (how did they survive? It’s a mystery to me.) Broadway is closed for a long while so that’s tough on tourism. I mention the slow-but-steady comeback because when people are out of work, the crime rate goes up. It’s going to take a while and, well, without getting political, a lot depends on this election and federal aid.
I’m sure you know the area around Barnard has good blocks and bad. I know some students living up there now and I haven’t heard of any real trouble. They are NYCers, however.
Crime in the US is down greatly since the peak of the crime wave in the early 1990s. NYC crime declined to an even greater extent, going from when NYC was synonymous with crime (remember the movie Escape from New York?) to NYC being one of the lower crime large cities in the US.
However, NYC was one of the earlier hot spots of COVID-19 this year.
I went to Columbia for graduate school and lived in New York for 7 years (including 3 years in Morningside Heights, the neighborhood where Barnard is), from 2008-2015. I still have friends living there now.
To be honest, most of the stories about people moving out of NYC en masse are about two groups, primarily: 1) wealthy people who already owned second (or third) homes in other locations who are moving, temporarily or long-term, to those homes; or 2) students and young professionals who were willing to live in a shoebox in exchange for the amazing amenities of New York, but are moving back in with their parents either because New York’s amazing amenities are now closed and/or because they are struggling financially (or their parents are) and they’re consolidating income.
The lifelong New Yorkers, the ones who frankly make the city what it is and have raised generations of children there, are largely not moving away. Primarily because…they have nowhere else to go. New York is their home.
New York is actually one of the safer large cities in the U.S., and Morningside Heights in particular is a pretty safe neighborhood. I used to work for student services at Columbia, and most of the crime in the area is property theft - and even then, it was usually because the students were letting someone tailgate behind them into the building, not violent break-ins. South Harlem is also gentrifying, for better or worse, so the neighborhood looks quite different from even when I was a student there just 5 years ago.
My parents both grew up in New York (my father drove city buses for an MTA predecessor for 17 years) and I grew up in New York (although I moved to the South when I was a preteen). New York being “over” is a persistent narrative that writers and artists have espoused when they left New York, a la Joan Didion. As a woman of color raised working-class in New York, I have lots of thoughts and feelings about that that are a little off-topic for this thread, but the tl;dr is that people have been declaring that everyone is leaving and New York is “over” for literal decades, and perhaps longer than that. It still hasn’t ended.
@PetraMC thank you!
My daughter was meeting her friends in the city last week, who had already rented apartments before the Columbia ended up shutting down completely. She parked in Morningside Heights, but they ended up walking around, between Hamilton Heights all the way back to and through Morningside Park. Her reaction to me was that it the streets and Neighborhoods all seemed quite normal (other than everyone wearing masks).
I suppose there is a big difference between the Upper West Side vs. per example, Midtown, the Financial District, Time Square… Those areas of Manhattan will feel quite different from what you remember, because they effected by the absence of commuters working in the offices AND the lack of tourism - which in turn drives the small business in those areas.
I am an NYC Native and I’m attending a CUNY here. I’ve lived here for the majority of my life as I grew up here. NYC is safe just like any place… and just like any place, there are sketchy areas. Barnard/ Columbia is in a gentrified neighborhood but the outer areas around are urban areas. So ofc there may be bad areas…but it’s literally up to one’s awareness and gut at this point.
Individual impressions will vary depending on experience, but, in general, New York residents appear to be expressing uncertainty regarding the city’s near-term future with respect to crime and quality of life.
https://nypost.com/2020/11/14/new-stats-reveal-massive-nyc-exodus-amid-coronavirus-crime/