New York-based journalists love to write about how New York taxpayers shouldn’t flee to Florida and skip paying 14.8 percent state/city income tax, 8.9 percent sales tax, and 16 percent estate tax (vs. 6-7 percent sales tax in FL and 0 percent income/estate). Here’s a recent example, “The Worst Housing Market in America Is Now Florida’s Cape Coral”:
The median home price soared nearly 75% to $419,000 in three years, transforming the character of this middle-income community that for decades has catered to retirees and small investors. … Home prices for Cape Coral-Fort Myers have tumbled 11% in the two years through May
So the prices went up about 56 percent, over a five-year period. That’s before adjusting for Bidenflation. What happened in the U.S. overall? Prices went from 218 to 331 (source), a rise in nominal dollars of 52 percent:
In other words, for people who bought a house five years ago (the average tenure in a house for an American is about 12 years), what the WSJ calls “the worst housing market in America” outperformed the U.S. residential real estate market overall.
What Zillow shows is that the Cape Coral market was more volatile than the national average:
So Cape Coral actually has been a bad market for home-flippers who had the misfortune to buy in at the peak, but for the typical Cape Coral homeowner it has been a better market (albeit, not by much) than the average U.S. real estate market. What about for the elites who put the Wall Street Journal together? How has their Manhattan real estate done by comparison? Zillow:
(“New York County”=Manhattan)
So Cape Coral is objectively speaking the worst housing market in the U.S. (reported as fact/news by the Wall Street Journal rather than as opinion). At the same time, people who owned property in Manhattan fared far worse over the past 6 years or almost any time window within those 6 years.
“Naples Estate Sells for $225 Million in One of the Country’s Priciest Home Sales” (Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2025): A waterfront estate in Naples, Fla., has sold for $225 million, the second-highest home-sale price in U.S. history and a record for the state of Florida. … The DeGroote sale comes amid a rapid-fire spate of major transactions for Florida, where real-estate values have skyrocketed.
New York has been substantially enriched by migrants in recent decades, especially from 2021-2024. After careful analysis, however, it seems that “New York Needs More Millionaires” (New York Times, August 28, 2025):
The rate at which New York State has been adding millionaires to its population in recent years has fallen below that of other large states, potentially costing the state billions in unrealized tax revenue, according to a new report from a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group.
At the same time, California, Florida and Texas had large increases in the number of people with annual incomes of at least $1 million residing in their states, all adding them at a faster rate than New York did from 2010 to 2022. The millionaire population in New York nearly doubled over that same time period, but it more than tripled in those other states.
Note that “millionaire” is not a peasant who owns a $1 million house outright, but rather someone who earns at least $1 million every year. The word has been updated for inflation, apparently!
There were about 70,000 people earning $1 million in New York State in 2022, with half of them living in New York City, according to the report.
Also, Ms. Eisner said the latest migration trends showed that millionaires were not leaving New York City and that, according to her research, they do not move in response to tax increases. Middle- and upper-middle class families — those in the $200,000 to $300,000 income range — are departing at the fastest rate, she said.
New York State added millionaire earners at a consistent rate from 2010 to 2022, when it had 69,780 tax filers with incomes greater than $1 million and about half lived in New York City. There were 35,802 millionaire filers in 2010 in New York State.
California stayed the top home for millionaires every year over that period, with an acceleration of top earners in recent years. It had 42,090 such earners in 2010 and 128,900 in 2022.
New York State had more top earners than Florida and Texas over that period until 2022, when those states jumped ahead. Florida had 19,450 people with $1 million incomes in 2010 and 77,670 in 2022. Texas had 23,859 in 2010 and 73,930 in 2022.
Considering that Florida has no Wall Street and is famous as a retirement destination (people tend not to earn as much in retirement as when they were working full time), it’s a remarkable failure that New York State now has fewer people who earn more than $1 million/year than Florida does. Does that mean California is the most successful? The New York Times seems to be unable to adjust numbers for population. Florida had a population of approximately 22 million in 2022 while California boasted 39 million humans (plus or minus 5 million depending on how the undocumented are counted?). Florida thus had a higher prevalence of earners over the $1 million threshold (1 in 283 for FL vs. 1 in 303 for CA).
A photo from my Lower East Side-through Chinatown-to Wall St walk, August 19, 2025:
On the Upper East Side, on the other hand, a diverse crowd in a rainbow of skin colors waits in line to get into the renovated Frick:
Except for a handful of Deplorables, New Yorkers whom I met recently were 100 percent aligned with Hamas in terms of what they’d like Israel and the Israel Defense Forces to do. At the same time they say that they are “anti-Hamas”. How does it work? Note that most of these folks are non-observant Jews whose principal current religion is expressing hatred for Donald Trump and contempt for Americans in “Red States” (they’re stupid and unproductive and survive only as parasites on the hard workers and heavy taxpayers in Blue States).
The New York Righteous say that, yes, Israel has the right to try to arrest or even kill Hamas fighters, but only if there is no possibility of injuring a civilian or a child. In other words, a Hamas fighter who keeps a child strapped to his chest would be permanently off limits. They accept at face value assertions that Israel is starving the Gazans, not noticing that the moms of the purportedly starved children have double chins. Here’s the most persuasive photo that CNN could find, for example:
One New York Jew in his 60s, despite being a 100 percent loyal Democrat and frequent spontaneous expresser of Trump hatred, seems to have found an area of agreement with Marjorie Taylor Greene of Jewish Space Lasers fame. He believes that Israel knows exactly where each Hamas fighter is located and has weapon systems capable of killing those fighters without harming anyone else. For reasons that aren’t clearly specified, Israel has chosen not to push the buttons in a control room somewhere that would result in the deaths of 100 percent of Hamas-affiliated Gazans. Israel is instead bombing and shelling Gaza for no reason other than Israelis enjoy killing civilians and making the noble Gazans suffer. So… he says that he is “anti-Hamas” but also that he is “pro innocent children” and that the IDF is free to fight Hamas so long as it does so in a way that no other military in the history of the world has managed to fight or win.
I visited the South Street Seaport for the first time in years and discovered that it has kept up with the times. The sacred Rainbow Flag is worshipped at a height of 4X the height of the American flag (Rainbow Flag at the very top of the mast of the museum ship while the American Flag is about one quarter of the way up).
The worshippers can’t seem to decide on which sect of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ religion they are following. A Biden-style trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag is flown from the front of the ship while a classic non-trans Rainbow Flag is flown from the mast near the stern. Views from the top of the building are superb:
The Tin Building includes a hidden-behind-curtains-at-the-back-of-a-tea-shop restaurant:
More employees now work in New York City offices than in July of 2019, according to the Placer.ai Office Index.
That’s right: The research platform, which uses cellphone data to track comings and goings at commercial buildings nationwide, found 1.3% more staffers at Manhattan desks last month than were there before the pandemic.
What does the lying stock market say? Here’s a 20-year chart for Vornado, a well-managed REIT whose portfolio is primarily office buildings and retail in New York City:
It’s gone from about $100 (sixty 2005 dollars adjusted for Bidenflation) to $37 today.
What about what one can see with one’s lying eyes? I visited a reader who lives near Wall Street and we surveyed some impressive towers from his 45th floor windows. We looked into the former Chase Manhattan building, fronted by an impressive Dubuffet sculpture, and found just a handful of workers at their desks at 2 pm. A nearby former Deutsche Bank tower remains vacant years after a renovation project started. In between is what used to be a name-brand hotel, now home to migrants for whom taxpayers foot the bill (their bicycles are chained up across the street):
The apparent lack of office workers means that there is more room for tourists, e.g., Fearless Tourist backs up Fearless Girl (“commissioned by State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), a large asset management company, to promote gender diversity initiatives and an index fund focused on gender-diverse companies with a relatively high percentage of women in senior leadership”):
The National Parks Service is there with 100 percent of exhibits in the “National Memorial” devoted to Americans who identify as “women”:
These exhibits that focus on a single gender ID (out of 74 recognized by Science) have apparently been up since 2021 (“Women’s Work, Never Praised, Never Done by Deb Willis, retrieving the stories of Black women in the struggle for the vote.”).
Consistent with the lack of observed office workers we found quite a few vacant storefronts, e.g.,
Maybe the retail space can be turned into mosques (masjids)? Here’s one a short walk north:
The current vacancy rate is a little high, but it doesn’t seem high enough to account for the observed emptiness of the Wall St. area or the terrible performance of Vornado. Covidcrats forced all Americans to learn how to work and collaborate remotely. It seems difficult to believe that a big enterprise would need to pay its support staff to work and live in Manhattan. Perhaps the Masters of the Universe still need to be in a Manhattan office building, but the trend toward moving support functions out to other boroughs, New Jersey, and other states must have been accelerated by everyone becoming proficient with videoconferencing. One would think that a typical company could get by with only half the Manhattan square footage per employee that it had in 2019 because so many people in 2025 would be either working from home or working from an office in Parsippany, NJ.
Polls should just be closing in New York City for the mayoral election (this is the Democrat primary, but no Republican could possibly win).
It seems that elites don’t like the idea of Zohran Mamdani leading his promised peasant uprising.
Here’s a typical elite:
Increasing worker power must be a central and urgent priority for policymakers concerned with inequality, low pay and poor work conditions. If we do not shift the distribution of power toward workers, any other policy changes are likely to be short-term and insufficient. https://t.co/h8akK99GbB
We need more worker power and less inequality. What happens when there is a candidate who promises to empower workers and reduce inequality (maybe by driving some rich people to lower-tax parts of the U.S., but isn’t that good if you truly hate inequality?)? “[Mamdani and] the Democratic Socialist program would be profound and dangerous for NYC, for the Democratic Party, and for the USA.”
Every American is a citizen of New York City. It's so much a cultural and financial hub of our country that what happens in NYC is consequential for all of us. And I'm not an expert on the exigencies of the details of NYC economic policy, but I do think the Democratic Socialist…
We are all New Yorkers, it seems, and we all need New York City to stay unequal with disempowered peasants. Maybe Prof. Summers is channeling Lincoln in his Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves everywhere except in all of the states that Lincoln controlled. Elite Democrats want workers empowered and inequality reduced in every city and state that isn’t currently run by elite Democrats?
Loosely related (to “every American is a citizen of New York City”), Michael Moore’s assertion that “We are all Muslim”:
It would be fantastic for Palm Beach County if Mamdani wins. On the grounds that a Mamdani victory would be too good to be true, my prediction is that Florida Realtor of the Year 2020 and 2021 Andrew Cuomo wins.
How many New Yorkers would actually move if subjected to a combination of sharia law and higher taxes? My prediction: very few. Hardly any of them moved when Covidcrats locked them down, closed their kids’ schools, forced them to wear masks, forced healthy young people to accept an injection of an experimental vaccine against a disease that mostly kills those aged 80 and over, etc. If New Yorkers cared about personal freedom and lower tax rates they would already have moved. Americans in general lack the gumption to move, according to the NYT (some of this may simply be because a record high percentage of us are on means-tested public assistance programs; it is tough to get established on what was formerly called “welfare” in a new state):
That said, if only a handful of billionaires set up shop in Palm Beach it will result in lower property tax bills for us here in the peasant neighborhoods of Jupiter (we’re part of the same county, if not part of the same world). Just how much can the tax base grow when one rich douche moves to Florida? “The Secret to Building a $100 Million Megamansion” (Wall Street Journal):
It used to be that 20,000 square feet was big. We are currently in development on single-family houses that are over 50,000 square feet. That’s because they’re adding all these amenities. … We did a shark aquarium for a Grammy Award-winning artist. There was a glass elevator and it landed on a nurse shark pond. That was over $1 million to do. We’re currently doing a $20 million remodel for a house owned by rapper Rick Ross. We’re doing a 2,000-gallon Japanese koi fish pond—that’s also about $1 million. It will go through the entire foyer. … BURRAGE: I had a client who would say, “What’s the question? The answer is money.” … GLASER: Even in my house—it’s 17,000-square-feet—our chef does a group text to tell us that dinner will be ready in 20 minutes. … KARP: It’s like, “What if, God forbid, I can’t get to my plane fast enough and go someplace else? I have to have a safe room.” They are standard in every home, both for violence and natural events. They have to have everything—a place to eat, a place to drink, a place to poop. They also can’t be disconnected from communication; you need to continue to work. These houses have backup generators that are connected to solar panels and glass designed to sustain Category 5 winds. The idea is that after a direct hit by a hurricane you come out of the safe room and your house is still air-conditioned, the art is untouched on the walls and everything is protected. … Kobi Karp’s firm recently designed a home for a New York developer in Miami. ‘The home is designed like a luxury resort where the family never crosses paths with the staff. These clients want an environment where people bring them their shoes and their newspaper and take care of their dry cleaning but they never have to see them,’ Karp said
The article shows $150 million in new tax base that is a 30-minute drive from our house:
(Florida has something similar to California’s Proposition 13, but only for a primary residence (“homestead”). A homestead can’t be reassessed at market value unless it is sold or is transformed via renovation. It’s not as crazy as California in that commercial property isn’t included, but a regular result is that a new arrival may pay 2-3X what his/her/zir/their long-term-resident neighbor pays for an identical house.)
“Experts” are upset that the next New York City mayor might drive out the rich (New York Post):
The candidate himself seems to accept the idea that rich people moving away is bad:
Responding to the criticism of his costly plans, Mamdani campaign spokesman Andrew Epstein said, “I know the wealthy have a lot of big feelings about paying a bit more in taxes but here are the facts: working and middle class families are already fleeing because they can’t afford the cost of living.
“The rich leave less than any other income group and when they do, it’s often to other high tax states. The 4.25% corporate tax increase Zohran proposes is still far less than Donald Trump’s 14% cut. So too is the additional 2% tax on millionaires.”
I’m confused. Why is a “mass exodus” of the rich a bad thing? Most New Yorkers agree that inequality is bad. If the richest New Yorkers leave then there will be less inequality among those who remain.
According to the Queers for Palestine (Harvard), inequality is “one of America’s most vexing problems”. Wouldn’t a smaller tax base and a lower standard of living be reasonable prices to pay in order to move a community toward a solution to a “vexing problem”?
Friends have been asking for an explanation of the horrific recent NYC tour helicopter crash, in which the machine was seen falling without its empennage (i.e., the tail had been chopped off by the main rotor system). Here are the passengers just before departure:
The weather seems to have been pretty good. The crash was at 3:15 pm, 15:15 Eastern or 19:15Z. Here’s the nearby (LaGuardia and Newark) weather at 1851Z:
LGA had winds gusting 22 knots, which can generate some turbulence near buildings. Newark had steady winds of 11 knots with light rain and a low ceiling of 1000′ (not a problem for a helicopter that will operate at 500′). If turbulence leads to a low-G condition and the pilot doesn’t react properly, the result can be mast bumping (inner portion of the blades hit the shaft holding up the rotor system), but that common initial speculation seems unlikely in this particular case because the winds weren’t that heavy and a tourist flight isn’t usually the time for intentional rollercoaster-style maneuvers.
“The pilot of the doomed aircraft reportedly radioed about needing to refuel minutes before the helicopter crashed into the chilly waters, according to New York Helicopter Tour CEO Michael Roth, whose company operated the helicopter.”
This points to a more likely scenario (albeit still complete speculation until further data are available): engine stoppage due to running out of fuel followed by a failure to initiate an autorotation. The Robinson R44 has a similar two-blade rotor system to the Bell 206L4 (N216MH) that crashed. Here are some excerpts from the pilot’s operating handbook for the R44 that lay out the accident sequence:
fuel exhaustion causes the engine to quit
the engine quitting causes the rotor system to slow down
the pilot, startled by the engine quitting, does not immediately (within 2-4 seconds) enter an autorotation, a lowering of the collective pitch control that flattens the blades and allows them to maintain speed while windmilling
the retreating blade stalls, partly due to the high angle of attack caused by the relative wind beginning to come from below the helicopter as the helicopter falls, and the rotor system “blows back” due to the lost of lift (explaining this in full requires some understanding of the physics of gyroscopic precession)
the severely tilted rotor contacts and chops off the tailboom
If this is indeed what happened, what can we learn? First, it is a lot easier to do the right thing in a training environment when simulated emergencies (e.g., an instructor rolling the throttle to idle) are expected. Second, being 100 percent vigilant 100 percent of the time is a perfect job for a computer whose job can be to shove the collective down and enter the autorotation even if the human pilot is still startled and frozen. A system like this has been designed, but is not widely available. See “HeliTrak launches R22/R44 Collective Pull Down” (2018), for example.
You might ask how it is possible for an experienced pilot to run an aircraft out of fuel. I was providing some recurrent training to two Brazilian helicopter pilots. Brazil is a huge market for helicopter taxi service due to horrific traffic and high levels of crime (they could use an El Salvador-style clean-up!). We were in the R44 at a quiet uncontrolled airport (6B6) in Maskachusetts doing some pattern work (take off, fly around in a circle, land). I stressed the importance of checking fuel levels and temperatures/pressures on downwind (flying at 500′ above the ground parallel to the runway) and before lifting up or taking off. I did the standard Robinson flight instructor trick of pulling the “gages” circuit breaker (aeronautical engineers can’t spell?). This causes the analog gauges to show 0 fuel, 0 oil pressure, and 0 oil temperature. The pilot flew 3 or 4 patterns without noticing anything amiss (i.e., missed at least checks of the gauges). His pilot friend in the back seat also didn’t notice anything. I asked them what they thought the most common cause of aircraft engine stoppage was. “Cylinder heat temperature too high?” was the answer (supposedly it is fuel exhaustion). I reminded them to make sure to do the pre-take-off and downwind checks. We fly at least 4 additional patterns without anyone noticing a problem. I asked the flying pilot to set the helicopter down on the runway and explicitly asked “How do the gauges look?” He responded, “fine”. His friend in the back seat agreed that nothing was amiss. Nervous myself about the fuel situation, I pushed the breaker back in, but not before noting that 0 fuel wasn’t a great way to fly. (In retrospect, I didn’t have to be nervous because Robinson’s orthographically-challenged engineers wisely put the low fuel light (10 minutes) on a separate circuit.)
Update: I’ve now seen some video, thanks to reader comments, in which the rotor system, still attached to part of the transmission, is also separated from both the tail and the fuselage. That casts some doubt on the above theory, but I will leave it in place as a reminder of how wrong I usually am.
Fewer people leaving the city and more foreign newcomers have helped erase pandemic losses, new census data shows.
In the depths of the coronavirus pandemic, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers packed up and fled, raising the possibility that the ravaged city had entered a long-term slide.
New York’s population has yet to fully recover, but new census data released on Thursday reveals that it is finally growing again after a steep drop. It reached 8.48 million in July 2024, up from 8.39 million in July 2023.
The city grew by about 1 percent, gaining 87,184 residents between 2023 and 2024 — largely because of a steady increase in newcomers from other countries — while at the same time fewer residents left for elsewhere, according to the census data.
Native-born Americans on net are continuing to leave New York City. Via a non-replacement process (since Replacement Theory has been proven false), their places have been taken by migrants.
Separately, trust the government’s numbers, unless you prefer some other numbers:
City officials had challenged [official U.S. Census Bureau] figures, saying the number of migrants and other people living in group settings like shelters had been underestimated. More than 200,000 migrants have passed though the city’s shelters since the spring of 2022.
As of last month, the New York City Department of Health wants the peasants back into masks:
COVID-19, flu and RSV are all currently spreading in NYC. Wearing a mask in crowded indoor settings can help protect you and protect others if you’re sick.
Compliance with this advice doesn’t seem to be high. Non-elite New Yorkers are always in crowded settings and few wear masks (though some wear masks over beards, which is a delightful example of human behavior).
Instead of repeatedly tweeting “Mask Up!” maybe the NYC Covidcrats could hire Luigi Mangione as a spokesperson. Mangione could talk about the critical importance of wearing one’s mask 100 percent of the time rather than 99.9 percent of the time (he might well be free today if he hadn’t dropped his mask a couple of times).
