“It’s a ghost town,” former President Donald J. Trump said of New York City last fall during a presidential debate. “It’s dying, everyone’s leaving New York.”
He was not the only one who saw all the closed storefronts and empty offices, and wrote it off.
“It’s completely dead,” said the self-help author and provocateur James Altucher in a blog essay called “New York Is Dead Forever … Here’s Why” that was endlessly dissected, and mocked, last summer.
“Businesses are remote and they aren’t returning to the office,” he wrote. “And it’s a death spiral.”
The notion that New York and other big cities were becoming obsolete was trending everywhere. The basic argument was that there is little need to put up with crazy rents, overpriced restaurants and packed subways in the era of digital nomads.
+INFO: The New York Times
