Coronavirus Briefing: N.Y.C.s Lopsided Recovery – The New York Times

New Yorks unequal recovery

In New York City, the Omicron wave is making the citys already lopsided recovery even more so.

Office workers were sent home again, reversing steady increases in subway ridership and hurting small businesses in central business districts. After border restrictions were lifted in November, overseas travelers were expected to give a boost to the hospitality industry, but hotel occupancy rates plummeted.

Even as the Omicron surge is subsiding, its effects linger. Service-sector employees worked fewer hours per week in December 2021, on average, than in December 2020. Working hours dropped even more in the first two weeks of January.

For a look at the recovery, I spoke to my colleague Nicole Hong, who covers New Yorks economy.

What does the recovery look like now?

Its been very uneven, and some of the metrics can feel contradictory.

For people who had jobs where they could work from home, and for people who had investments in the stock market, 2021 was a year when overall personal income in New York City actually went up. The real estate market is red hot right now. Rents and home sale prices are soaring from the lows that they hit earlier on in the pandemic. So for part of the city, people feel like things are back to normal and thriving and booming.

But New York City relies disproportionately on tourism and on office buildings, and we have hundreds of thousands of jobs in that ecosystem: everything from the shoeshine guy in Midtown, to the tour bus driver, to all the different restaurants and cafes and bars that serve tourists and office workers and commuters. As a result, at the start of the pandemic, New York had a bigger loss of jobs than pretty much any major American city, and it has taken longer to come back.

How is Covid affecting those workers?

With each new variant, and each new wave that causes things to slow down or shut down again, its disproportionately affecting people who have to show up in person to get paid. If white-collar workers are unable to go to the office because of a new variant, they can still work from home and get a paycheck. But for the restaurant that has to temporarily shut down because theres an Omicron outbreak, those waiters and dishwashers are typically not getting paid during that period.

The leisure and hospitality industries, which employ large numbers of lower-wage workers, have been especially slow to come back. I recently spoke to a tour guide who made a lot of money in 2019 because it was the best year for tourism in New York Citys history. Now, hes booking only a couple private tours a week.

What does the future look like?

The Independent Budget Office reported that New York City is not expected to recoup all the jobs it lost during the pandemic until late 2025, while the national economy is projected to surpass prepandemic employment this year. But its really hard to make an economic prediction this year for New York because we dont know yet the full impact of Omicron.

The future of our central business district is a huge uncertainty. So much of the citys economy is tied up in these office buildings from their underlying value, which feeds the citys property tax base, to pulling in commuters, which is essential to ridership on the commuter rails and subways. That unknown is huge, and well have to wait until the spring to see what the return-to-office situation is.

What are the ramifications of an inequitable recovery?

Its bad for economic growth when so many New Yorkers are unable to find a good-paying job, afford rent or access the kinds of opportunities that can pull them out of poverty. Its destabilizing, and it feeds into the broader conversation that city officials are having right now around how to deal with the overlapping crises of homelessness, mental health and substance abuse.

Italy has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world more than 80 percent of the population, including children, has had two doses.

The countrys high uptake holds the potential for a near future where the schism in society is no longer between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, but between those who are comfortable taking risks in their daily lives and those who are not.

An increasing number of boosted people are entering a bring-it-on phase of the pandemic. Some are trying to time their resulting quarantines to a social and school calendar, or to have infections coincide with those of friends. Others are still coming to terms with a seemingly omnipresent virus, and forcing themselves to adjust their comfort levels and to be more social even to dine inside a restaurant.

Mariagiovanna Togna, for example, is willing to accompany her children to outdoor play dates. Her husband is still wearing rubber gloves and wiping down groceries. One of her sisters in Rome goes to yoga class and work. Her brother finally agreed to get vaccinated, she said, to keep going to bars, and he recently vacationed along the Amalfi Coast. But during Christmas vacation, their parents, in their 70s, asked him to stay in a bed-and-breakfast.

We are all vaccinated, many with the third dose already. We all have a civic sense about being careful for ourselves and for others, Togna said. But we have different styles of life.

I'm in my 70s, triple vaxed and done! I live alone and am more worried about my mental health than virus. Yesterday I took a Zumba class, no mask, and tonight Im meeting friends indoors for drinks. We are exhausted seniors and cant isolate and worry anymore.

Laurie, New York City

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Coronavirus Briefing: N.Y.C.s Lopsided Recovery - The New York Times