Why Are People Leaving This City We’ve Made Impossible to Live In?
As city leaders, we’re stunned we’re losing thousands and thousands of residents who say they can’t build a life here. We don’t understand why they’re leaving, even after we’ve spent all our time in office making this city absolutely inhospitable to working people.
The building block of a comfortable life is housing, so we’re surprised to hear people struggle to find affordable homes. Maybe they’re not considering all of their options. Perhaps they could move to a cheaper, outer borough like the Bronx or Queens, or an outer-outer borough like Long Island, or an outer-space borough like our new colony on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede (six months’ rent required at signing).
Don’t limit yourself to movement on our three-dimensional plane. How about time-traveling back to 1987 to buy a dilapidated brownstone and then waiting forty years to cash out at the expense of the suckers who made the bad decision to be born after you? After all, that’s what every elected official did.
The families that can afford to stay here still whine, especially about our transit system. We thought parents loved it; they can spend all day hauling double strollers down rain-flooded stairs to the open kiln we call a subway station in August. It’s hours of free, heatstroke-inducing fun for the whole family, unless anyone in that family needs an elevator. In that case, may I refer you to our new outpost on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede? There are no elevators there either, but in space, no one can hear you complain.
Also, we don’t know how people flee this city so quickly; they’re certainly not doing it on our crumbling public transit.
Even the people who ride bicycles have problems. I don’t understand why they can’t find secure bike parking. All of our city employees manage to park their two-ton SUVs on sidewalks and in bike lanes. Surely, you can squeeze your little pedal-toy thing between them.
Don’t even get us started on the walkers. Constant boohooing about reckless drivers blowing through crosswalks. Is it a bad thing we offer impromptu mobile parkour options for our residents? In other cities, you’d pay top dollars to try and barrel-roll over a Chevy Tahoe, but here, you can do it for free whenever you need a gallon of milk.
Everyone who leaves should think of the opportunities they’re denying their children, whom they can’t afford to raise in our incredibly expensive city. We’re home to the best education in the world, teaching millions of kids it’s not about where you’re born or who your parents are but who your parents know on an admissions committee (mine knew the guy whose great-great-grandfather invented hats).
And they’re leaving even though we announced free preschool for all kids. We didn’t follow through in any way, but it was a heck of an announcement. Balloons, streamers, an FBI raid in the middle of the press conference: It had it all (except an actual plan).
Like we said, it’s expensive to live in this city. You may have to get financially creative and cut back on some essentials, like Netflix subscriptions or paying any of your taxes. It works great for our rich friends; they have plenty of cash left over to donate to our campaigns.
These fleeing families talk a lot about “quality of life,” but not enough people talk about shutting up and white-knuckling your way through an arbitrarily more difficult existence in this playground for the uber wealthy we’ve created. Could things be better? Shut up. Wait, where are you going, and what exactly is a “Philadelphia”?
Progress is often slow and difficult to come by, especially when we’re working so hard to stall it. The only thing left to do is keep moving forward in our official government SUV, past the noise, past this pedestrian-filled crosswalk, and past whatever is under our front bumper, pleading, “Help me.”