There appears to be a "great reassessment," happening to those that live in what is being dubbed the "vanishing" city of New York and surrounding areas.
A city that bustled with activity, where everyone was scurrying like rats get where they were going, where rents could reach $4,000-plus on average (a month!!!), where neighbors very rarely even knew each others' name and where many residents have learned during the COVID-19 pandemic that perhaps, just maybe, city life isn't exactly what they want anymore.
Apparently rural living or at least being away from the hustle and bustle of large cities is becoming much more popular!
Who would have thunk it?
THE EXODUS HAS BEGUN
Granted, there have been cases of COVID-19 that have made their way into the suburbs and rural areas, but as has been reported previously the very nature of smaller cities, towns, villages and counties, where less person-to-person contact buffers the spread, means smaller towns and cities have fared far better than large cities.
We, along with others in the Independent Media, like Steve Quayle, have often said, the place you do not want to be during a crisis is where everyone else is.
Triple that sentiment when the crisis is a deadly pandemic where the very nature of big, busy cities increases the risk of exposure exponentially.
Apparently many living in New York, and other larger jam-packed cities, have discovered this mindset. Mostly because they are being inconvenienced and somehow when a lot of people go unemployed, they finally start realizing that tremendous rents, for small, tiny apartments and spaces, along with everything being more expensive, isn't really a sustainable lifestyle in a crisis situation.
Some direct quotes caught my eye, which is rare for a Washington Post piece.
The first one is the person Wapo begins the piece with, which shows a sense of entitlement by someone that frankly small towns probably wouldn't want, because life is much simpler in rural areas.
Setting the scene: The woman described had just lost her roommate because she lost her job.
• Shell was so financially strapped that she began inquiring about various night-life gigs, only to see covid-19 close all the bars and clubs. ("So that's another job you can't do in a pandemic.") Still, her situation might have been bearable if the nearest laundromat wasn't four blocks away.
Stopping here for a moment because I have to wonder, did her roomamte's leaving or the COVID-19 pandemic somehow move the laundromat further from her apartment than when she first moved in?
Why is she blaming her current circumstances for the inconvenience of it's location when she knew where it was before moving in? At least she should have.
• "I just want to be able to do laundry without having to drag it up and down a four-story walk-up or pay someone $40 or $50 to do it for me....."
Once again.... did she just realize her apartment was four stories up?
What really got caught my eye about this example is how very differently city slickers think than those that live in rural areas.
• "Everyone deserves space and basic amenities," she said, lamenting how, in New York, many landlords deem a washing machine a "luxury" item. "It's just insulting to come at us and be like, 'We're going to charge you an extra thousand dollars a month for this standard appliance that's been in American households since the 1970s.' "
"It's enough to make her contemplate leaving, for good."
Not being handed a washing machine for free is enough to make her leave? I am old enough to remember that my Grandmother certainly considered a washing machine, dryer and dishwasher to be "luxuries" and not a "basic amenities."
You get what you pay for.
Moving along..........
Even with all the chaos, filth and struggle, nostalgics have long mourned every change in what they called the "vanishing" city. But calls to the city's mental health hotlines have surged. Whether they have left, or whether they have no option to leave, New Yorkers are having to ask themselves whether the city they love is really still livable.
Who in their right minds mourns the loss of "chaos, filth and struggle?"
I will tell you who.... people like the next guy quoted who says "I'm a born-and-raised, do-or-die New Yorker because it was always a party, but the party is over."
He's heading to an unincorporated mountain town in Nevada. "I'm not getting my city back," he said. "So I'm leaving before it gets to the point that I can't get my mind back."
Does he think he is going to find his "party" in the unincorporated mountain town in Nevada?
Another woman longs for a place where "I can see the horizon there and it's just quiet, the earth smells different," like where she grew up.
Another new mother and her husband has suddenly started "looking at houses in small towns along the Hudson River in Upstate New York, which real estate agents say are selling hours after they go on the market."
Parenting message boards across gentrified Brooklyn are filled with questions about where to shop for groceries safely, or what to do if you took your kids to school via public transportation. There's a closed Facebook group with more than 3,000 members called Into the Unknown, "for those of us who have decided or are considering - willingly or otherwise - to join the exodus from NYC to greener pastures, as it were," the description reads. Faced with a June 30 deadline to renew the lease on their two-bedroom duplex in Brooklyn, Naomi Mersky, 44, and her husband decided to bail. "We know we're lucky that we have options," she said, but they also couldn't keep paying rent indefinitely if their kids, ages 5 and 9, didn't feel safe. They've bought chickens and are looking into starting the next school year in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, where they're living in a summer cabin they own.
The rest can be found at TheHour.com, but the quotes from the article above gives the flavor of the the entire big city mindset, by people that quite possibly wouldn't even be able to survive a crisis in a rural area, nor the manual labor it takes to care for land, nor the laid back casualness country living.
The woman that thinks a washing machine is a "basic" amenity, should know up front that she would either have to buy one or pay a little more in rent for a washer and/or dryer in "the sticks" just as she is expected to do in the big city.
The point here is that while we heartily believe that during a crisis, you want to be where other people are not, but this exodus out of New York and other large metropolises, because the "party is over," in places like New York City, Manhattan, Brooklyn or any large city across the nation, will only destroy the down home, laid back mindset and behaviors in the smaller towns.
These people are not leaving because they suddenly discovered that small town living is "it" for them, or because they are tired of big city life, they are expressing a distaste for how their own hustling and bustling city has slowed down, is not the lively, open 24/7 party town it was.
Newsflash: neither are rural areas.
Going from this:
(New York City street)
To this:
(ANP Quarantine zone)
Is not only going to be a culture shock, but is likely going to make the people that thrive on hustle and bustle, crazier than they already were.
BOTTOM LINE
Wanting to live a simpler life, be where people are not constantly running from one place to another, and where the lessened person-to-person contact of rural areas helps to buffer the spread of viruses and diseases, is one thing.
Trying to replace the "chaos, filth and struggle," of a place like New York City by running to Hicksville, USA, will ruin the rural areas with the "chaos, filth and struggle" these people crave.
