ReportageToday, the first city in the United States, hit hard by the pandemic, offers a defeated face. The one that never sleeps is about to die, announce the Cassandra. However, in certain districts, the crisis stimulates creativity, awakens conviviality and finally makes rents accessible.
She had planned to return home on June 3, the twenty-fifth anniversary of her arrival in New York, her longest love affair, as she says. Confined for two and a half months in her native Kentucky, Deborah Lancaster (name has been changed) was eager to find her friends and her routine. And then, in splendid weather, in the last hours of May, riots like Manhattan had not known since the great blackout of 1977 broke out in his neighborhood. A friend, “Who is not an alarmist”, a newspaper man, a resident of SoHo like her, sent her a video of the looting of a sneaker store located a stone’s throw from their home. Gunshots were distinctly heard on the soundtrack. He told him : “Stay where you are. “
SoHo is unrecognizable when this advertiser decides to go home at the start of the summer. Unreal landscape: we walk in the street between plywood walls. The atmosphere reminds him of the New York of his younger years, more bohemian, less civilized. “Graffiti is back, boomboxes, people urinating in the streets, windshield washers, garbage can fires, all of those phenomena that had practically disappeared. The sleeve is back like never before, you can’t dine outside without being accosted. ” The most astonishing, she continues, are these homeless people who live on the sidewalk, under scaffolding, in the East Village, with mattresses, tables, armchairs, rugs sometimes, but without walls or roof: she had seen nothing. the same for ages. Usual in Los Angeles or San Francisco, these wild camps had not been used in Manhattan since the end of the last century.
How is New York, the American city most affected by the pandemic – soon 25,000 dead – and the catastrophic recession that followed? Six months of rushing to his bedside, taking his pulse, monitoring his vital signs, and still no consensus on the prognosis. According to the index of economic recovery of the local television channel NY1, calculated from real estate prices, restaurant reservations, metro use and employment figures, it would have recovered 50% by compared to February. But, the 1er October, Moody’s analysts downgraded its rating for the first time in thirty years, promising a further downgrade if the city continues to take on debt.
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