New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo‘s delusion that the mass exodus from New York City is a short-term problem was quickly dispelled by a report on Big Apple moving companies that continue to see unprecedented demand.
Oz Moving, for instance, said it has seen an uptick in requests for quotes to the tune of 30 percent over last year, Fox Business reported.
And Roadway Moving said it was the busiest summer they’d ever had.
“Insanely busy and for the last three months we couldn’t keep up with the demand,” said Roadway President Ross Sapir.
Storage companies also signaled a “drastic” spike, said the article.
The city was the initial epicenter of the US coronavirus outbreak and continues to eclipse most other regions in the ratio of infections and deaths.
Many of the problems were due to Cuomo’s policy of forcing healthy nursing home residents to intermingle with infected ones, initially failing to maintain proper sterilization in the city’s public transportation, and allowing mass gatherings from Chinese New Year festivals to Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
Compounding the problem, though are the city’s already troubled finances due to fiscal mismanagement by Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
The Democrats dominating state and local politics chose to priorities promises such as green-light laws and free health care for illegal immigrants.
De Blasio last year refused $1.3 million in federal funds for hospitals because it came with the stipulation that the recipients could not promote abortion.
As the state—which already faced a significant budget shortfall—sees an even greater exodus of its top revenue-generators to more business-friendly pastures, Cuomo has become desperate.
He revealed recently that he was begging Manhattan’s wealthy elites to return, so much that he was offering to cook for them.
“We’ll go to dinner—I’ll buy you a drink. Come over—I’ll cook,” he said in a press conference this week of his conversations with the city’s ultra-rich refugees.
Cuomo also seemed to think that many of them had simply fled the city for their summer homes to ride out the virus.
“I literally talk to people all day long who are now in their Hamptons house who also lived here, or in their Hudson Valley house or in their Connecticut weekend house, and I say, ‘You gotta come back, when are you coming back?’”
But all indications seem to be that New York City residents have sought more permanent solutions.
In fact, many companies’ decisions to allow remote work indefinitely will likely take an even greater toll on expensive cities as their high-income earners seek to leverage a lower cost-of-living while making the same exorbitant salaries.
But a few local real-estate experts backed Cuomo by downplaying the potential disaster.
“The reality is that there are always people in New York selling their homes and leaving,” Lindsay Barton Barrett, a real estate broker with Douglas Elliman, told FOX Business.
“There are certain sectors of the market that are still active and other sectors of the market that are on hold,” she said.
