NYC Struggles With Post-COVID Recovery As Foot Traffic Falls 33%

Sidewalks lined with office workers, especially in lower Manhattan’s financial hub around Wall Street and the Midtown area, home to Times Square, was a pre-Covid phenomenon as remote work trends hamper New York City’s economic recovery. 

First reported by the New York Post, the University of Toronto has published new recovery metrics showing foot traffic in crime-ridden NYC is down 33% compared with 2019, before the pandemic, indicating a souring economic recovery. 

Researchers used location-based mobility data derived from smartphones to reveal foot traffic trends in metro areas. They explain that a recovery metric greater than 100% means the city’s downtown foot traffic has recovered from pre-Covid levels and vice versa. 

NYC’s recovery rate of 66% is ranked 54th out of 66 cities – this is embarrassing for the imploding metro area controlled by radical leftists. 

While researchers did not explain the cause for the decline, we have outlined remote and hybrid work trends are partially responsible for the fall of office workers in the metro area. 

Kastle Systems, the gold-standard measure of office occupancy trends via card-swipe data, shows NYC stands at 48.94% but is still far from the nearly 100% occupancy level before the pandemic.

Without office workers spending their disposable incomes, the local economy will suffer, resulting in a slow and painful recovery. 

Besides remote work trends, office workers have fled the progressive hellhole because of high taxes and out-of-control violent crime. Now, the migrant crisis has made things even worse. 

NYC’s dismal recovery bodes well for bustling city streets in Miami – also known as the ‘Wall Street of the South.’