Failed: New York City is a Collective Slum

October 4, 2023

Now that New York City is, as a result of its own decision to become a sanctuary city for illegal migrants, suffering a widespread housing shortage, its slumlord-in-chief (Mayor Eric Adams) proposes to address the problem with single room occupancy (SRO) accommodations.

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Adams is proposing rules that allow for new single-room occupancy (SRO) housing, a type of dorm-style apartment complex where tenants have their own private studios but typically share kitchens and bathrooms.

This article in Nextcity.org elaborates,

Today, SROs are often referred to as modern-day tenements: Substandard, overcrowded, dark firetraps that represent the worst housing the city has to offer.

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There is a direct connection between these tenements and illegal migrants, emphasis is mine.

Largely concentrated in the far-flung reaches of Queens, the Bronx, and eastern Brooklyn, many of the residents of these illegal spaces are immigrants–often undocumented… Essentially, unless you’re living in a multi-million dollar penthouse, all of New York City is a slum.

What, meanwhile, is the difference between a slumlord and New York’s City Council? Slumlords accept only tenants who pay the rent, while NYC squanders $300 a day on hotel rooms for illegal migrants who pay nothing. New York City is an outhouse, and I am using the family-friendly version of the word Donald Trump was accused of using to describe certain countries, that forced a 95 year-old veteran of the Korean War out of his nursing home to make room for illegal migrants while it seeks to reintroduce tenement housing for working Americans. In fairness to landlords, some try to keep their places clean and safe but others do not.

Also, in fairness to millions of people who have the misfortune to work and pay taxes in New York City, “outhouse” refers to its irresponsible governance rather than its legal inhabitants. If you wait tables, work a factory job, or practice a useful trade in New York, you may have to pay hundreds of dollars a month for a substandard, overcrowded, dark firetrap. If you’re an illegal migrant who is unwilling to follow our country’s rules to apply for asylum because you know you are not eligible for asylum, New York’s City Council will put you up in a $300 hotel room with its own toilet and bathing facilities. In fact, if you’re a citizen or legal immigrant who is working one or more jobs to make ends meet, you might do better to identify as an illegal migrant to get the free hotel room. As New York is a sanctuary city, you will not be questioned further and Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) will not be notified.

It is telling, meanwhile, that even New York’s Democrat Governor, Kathy Hochul, has had enough. “The governor said [the right to shelter law] was never meant to ensure ‘an unlimited, universal right or obligation on the city to have to house literally the entire world.'”

Who Wants to Live, Work, or Do Business in a Giant Slum?

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Suppose you’ve just finished high school or college, and you want to go work somewhere. Why should you work in a giant tenement where you have to pay a third or even more of your income to live in a SRO, and also pay New York’s inflated prices for food and every other necessity?

Suppose you’re an employer, and New York City’s diversion of money from its police department to $300 hotel rooms for illegal migrants means looters feel free to trash your workplace like swarms of locusts devastating a farmer’s field. When arrests were made, NYC usually dropped the charges or downgraded them to minor misdemeanors that carry no jail time. Even if your insurance covers the losses, the insurance companies will raise premiums throughout the entire area due to the obviously higher risk. Insurance may or may not cover losses due to business interruptions such as having to clean up the broken glass and smashed display cases, and replace the merchandise the looters and vandals have ruined only to have the looters come back to clean you out again.

Target has in fact closed numerous stores in failed Democrat-run cities whose names are closely associated with Black Lives Matter-related riots. “The stores set to close include one in Harlem, N.Y; two in Seattle, Wash.; three near San Francisco and Oakland, Calif.; and three in Portland, Ore.” The reasons cited include organized retail theft, but it’s to be noted that the perpetrators are far less likely to try this in a small town which is where employers ought to move their facilities and their workers.  

Move It to a Small Town

It is also to be noted that the median rent in San Francisco is $2,200 a month or $26,400 a year which is unaffordable by anybody who works an entry level job. San Francisco’s high living costs have resulted in an $18.07 an hour minimum wage, which buys about what $10.10 an hour  ($18.07 divided by 1.79) buys in flyover country where supposed bitter, small town people cling to guns and religion. Now, if you’re an employer, you have to squander an additional $8 an hour plus employment taxes, and add that waste to the cost of whatever goods or services you create, but it doesn’t buy your workers more actual value. If you move the jobs to flyover country or a small town, and pay your entry level people $12 an hour, that’s a de facto 20 percent pay increase because it buys $12 of goods and services as opposed to the $10 or so that $18 an hour buys in San Francisco. The same principle applies, of course, to New York where $20 an hour buys what $8.77 an hour buys in a small town.

To put this in perspective, $71,924 a year buys in NYC what $30,000 a year buys in Columbia, Tennessee, the small town in Jason Aldean’s video. If you’re the employer, your $30,000 job costs almost $72,000 if you move it to NYC, and your employee doesn’t get a better standard of living for his or her money. You’re also paying more to own or rent real estate in NYC, and you also have New York State’s and NYC’s inflated income taxes. Intelligent customers will realize, meanwhile, that the cost of this waste is built into the price of anything they buy from New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other pay-more-get-less outhouse cities.

This should put to rest any further questions as to whether the Democrat party is still the party of the working American and the senior citizen. New York’s slumlords, and I mean its Mayor and City Council, propose to house working people in “Substandard, overcrowded, dark firetraps that represent the worst housing the city has to offer” while they squander $300 a day on hotel rooms for illegal migrants, and divert money from senior citizen meal programs for this purpose as well. When working Americans wake up to this fact, and more and more are doing so every day, we can look forward to a Red tidal wave in 2024 that will put the House, Senate, and presidency in responsible hands.

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