Thought All My Great Reasons for Leaving, Now I Can't Think of Any

I had written a rather long post about the long-term effect of the coronavirus on New York City. But in light of the absolutely horrific present reality, I decided now is not the time for that kind of speculation, so I'll just link to this thoughtful piece by Amanda Mull in the Atlantic and this classic blog post about the demographics of New York City, and quote Mull:

The middle- and high-income people who could leave the city this year can be divided into two basic groups. First, there are the panic-movers, who hadn’t previously considered leaving before the pandemic hit. In one private Facebook group for panic-movers that I snooped around in for several weeks, the few thousand members looked for advice on how to persuade their New York–loving spouses to leave or asked for recommendations of small towns that are, somehow, very similar to the country’s biggest, densest city.

The second group of movers makes for less exciting trend stories: people who are taking part in normal attrition, of which New York City has plenty—tens of thousands of its residents move away every year. The city is expensive and cramped, and lots of people plan their exit to coincide with the predictable needs of their family or career, or just because they want something different. The pandemic may have accelerated these movers’ timelines by a few months or a year, but the decision to leave was already made.

Like Mull, I suspect the second group is significantly larger than the first.