Nolte: Retail and Restaurants Flee Democrat-Run New York Forever

Crime, taxes, disease, and an anti-science approach to social distancing have chased a number of big retailers and restaurateurs out of New York forever, reports the far-left New York Times.

“In the heart of Manhattan, national chains including J.C. Penney, Kate Spade, Subway and Le Pain Quotidien have shuttered branches for good,” per the Times, which adds other big box retailers, like Victoria’s Secret and the Gap, have chosen to reopen in other states while their Manhattan locations remain shuttered.

On top of that, Victoria’s Secret, which had been paying $937,000 a month in rent, is no longer paying that rent. The Gap is not paying its own $264,000 monthly rent to Rockefeller Center.

“There’s no reason to do business in New York,” the chief executive of Ark Restaurants explains. He has five restaurants in Manhattan but only reopened two.

In Florida, though, he’s thriving.

“I can do the same volume in Florida in the same square feet as I would have in New York, with my expenses being much less,” he explained. “The idea was that branding and locations were important, but the expense of being in this city has overtaken the marketing group that says you have to be there.”

Subway represents a few dozen permanent closures; Le Pain Quotidien 27.

Iconic outlets like Shake Shack are teetering, and Neiman Marcus, an anchor store at the new Hudson Yards, just filed for bankruptcy.

On top of the obnoxious price of doing business in Manhattan — add taxes and fees to those sky-high rents — there are no customers. The fake news Times doesn’t mention the riots that hit Manhattan’s business district just a few weeks back, or the continued threat of more rioting, or the hair-raising rise in violent crime which is only going to get worse… The Times does, at least, mention the failing city’s “stringent lockdown and methodical reopening” that  is “wreaking havoc on businesses with so few people going to work, virtually no visitors and many residents” who are terrified to leave their homes.

Meanwhile, sane states like Florida, Georgia, and Texas, those states that offer a much lower cost of doing business, and despite enormous pressure from the fake media, did not go to New York’s absurd lockdown extremes, are returning to normal. Red States with Republican governors approached the China virus with a respect for science that avoided the out-of-control plague that turned Manhattan into something resembling a ghost town.

The White House

For example, the New York subway, a vital transportation (and revenue-producing) system in a city that aggressively makes it difficult to own your own vehicle, is running at about 20 to 30 percent capacity.

The truth is New York needs tourists to survive, it needs local and international tourists spending money in its over-priced restaurants and its centerpiece stores. But who wants to visit a city that so mishandled the coronavirus it is its own Italy. If New York was its own country, by almost every metric, it would be one of the worst-hit countries in the world.

Add New York’s rising crime, the tension of knowing the terrorists in Antifa and Black Lives Matter could return at any time, the insane taxes, and an incompetent Democrat mayor (Bill de Blasio) and an even more incompetent Democrat governor (Andrew Cuomo), and what that tells tourists, and by extension, business owners, is that things are not going to get better — they are going to get worse.

Another problem is New York’s voters. These people are nuts. You must be nuts to vote to elect and then re-elect a de Blasio. These people are such ideologues, nothing will change their voting habits. There will probably never be a another Rudy Giuliani, a Republican reformer who saved the city from decades of blight.

If Baltimore and Detroit are any indicator, New Yorkers will never wake up. Those who can will flee. Those who can’t will keep voting for the very same Democrats who drove the city into the dirt.

You see, retailers are not the only ones fleeing Manhattan. So too are smart residents. The city was bleeding residents before the crime surge and unnecessary lockdowns. Look at them now.

Out in the real world, things are slower, but life is moving right along. The everyday metrics everyday people use to measure activity are close to normal in my small town. The stores are busy, traffic is back to normal, homes are selling, the Things To Do  section of the paper is filling back up… We just got back from a two week vacation. The campsites were full on the weekend, the highways were crowded…

Democrats eventually destroy everything.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.