‘There’s a mad rush to get out of the city. What I’m really doing well with right now is anything that’s turnkey…’
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) New York City residents have had enough of both the coronavirus and attendant stay-at-home orders, and local moving companies report that they are fleeing at an “insane” rate.
Roadway Moving President Ross Sapir said New Yorkers are fleeing the city like he has “never seen before,” Fox News reported.
He said 2020 has been the busiest moving year in the company’s 12-year history.
“It’s insane … I’ve never seen such growth,” Sapir said. “[Business is] double or triple compared to any other season as far as moving out of the city.”
Compared to previous years, Roadway Moving has been receiving twice as many inquiries about New Yorkers who want to leave the city.
Sapir said the people most interested in leaving the city are 25- to 45-year-old professionals who live in wealthy areas of Manhattan.
United Van Lines CEO Marc Rogers said that 61 percent of residents who are leaving the city earn more than $100,000 per year.
“New York City is up very dramatically for May in … these leads for interest in moving,” he said.
Rogers said his company’s customers have been much older. Of those who are leaving the city, 64 percent are 55 or older, with only 25 percent of his customers being 25 to 40.
United Van Lines said that, according to its estimates, requests to move outside the city have increased by 40 percent.
The jump in May moving requests may be the result of a steep decline in moving requests during March and April.
Oz Moving said they lost nearly 50 percent of their overall business in March and April, when the coronavirus panic was at its height. Yet, the company said their moves out of New York City rose 12 percent from March to May.
In other words, New York City residents stopped moving around within the city, but increased their moves out of the city.
New York City has not yet weathered the moving season’s peak. Moving companies said the busiest time of the year for moving is between July and September.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that the California exodus, which began more than a year ago due to the toxic combination of pricey real estate and radical leftist policies, had only been amplified by the health crisis.
Although California’s death count relative to New York was considerably lower per capita, its authoritarian lock-down policies have been no less draconian.
In particular, local real estate agents observed that the rich were fleeing the city of San Francisco for its more bucolic outskirts, including the cross-the-bay suburbs of Marin County and Napa Valley to the north.
“There’s a mad rush to get out of the city,” said Sotheby’s high-end property agent Ginger Martin. “What I’m really doing well with right now is anything that’s turnkey.”
Others are choosing to leave the Golden State altogether for places like Lake Tahoe, Nevada, which is close enough to maintain a base of operations in Silicon Valley.
And some, such as Tesla chief Elon Musk, have even mulled the possibility of taking their businesses with them.
Michael Snyder, a Christian-based author and political activist, blogged that the virus, growing scourge of homelessness, crime and the recent riots in urban areas had left some cities looking and feeling like a wasteland of urban decay.
“At one time, America’s beautiful shining cities were the envy of the entire planet,” he wrote.
“But now thousands of retail outlets have been boarded up, homelessness is absolutely exploding, and it looks like there will be much more rioting, looting and violence in the months ahead.”
Liberty Headlines’ Ben Sellers contributed to this report.