Heading into the June 24 primary for mayor, New Yorkers say their city is in trouble. In four recent surveys, majorities said that the quality of life was fair or poor, that they were afraid to ride the subway at night, that housing and child care were unaffordable, and that city government and the public schools were dysfunctional.
Yet on a muggy evening in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, that pessimism was nowhere to be found. A skateboard ramp the size of a dollar van had been erected on the cobblestone street outside an art gallery, and skateboarders showed off tricks as onlookers with tattoos, baggy pants and stylish scarves shouted encouragement.
Inside the exhibition space, a very “if you know, you know” collection of New Yorkers — graffiti artists, skaters, photographers, musicians — mingled, hugged and laughed in front of huge photographs of a deceased actor slash skateboard legend who was being honored. As the D.J. played a mix of old-school hip-hop and Brazilian lounge music, two bartenders mixed bespoke cocktails made from a small batch spirit splashed with a lime-and-yuzu soda. It certainly didn’t feel like a scene from a city in crisis.
New York, which was hit hard as the country’s epicenter of the Covid pandemic, remains a beacon for people across the country and the world, a destination for immigrants, artists, entrepreneurs and business scions. Watchful outsiders and New Yorkers themselves anxiously question whether the city is “back” from the troubles of recent years. And every New Yorker could have a different answer about what a comeback looks like — what the city should be, and what it is right now.
“From where I’m sitting, it looks pretty good,” said Lloyd Blankfein, who grew up in public housing in Brooklyn and went on to run Goldman Sachs until his retirement in 2018. He compared the city today with the one of the late 1970s, when the Son of Sam serial killer terrorized locals and the city was on the verge of default.
“If you had no perspective for the long view, you’d think we were in the depths of crisis,” Mr. Blankfein said. “If you take the long view of New York, it’s a straight line going up.”
The data paint a mixed picture. Subway crime is down, but the number of people in homeless shelters remains way above what it was just a few years ago. Broadway revenues smashed records this season, but one in four New Yorkers lived in poverty as of 2023, nearly double the national average.
In one survey, by the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, 80 percent said the city was heading in the wrong direction, and 58 percent said they seriously considered moving out.
Unemployment is down from its pandemic peak, but only one in three workers in New York has a “good job” — one offering a living wage, health insurance and safe working conditions. Housing costs are astronomical — but for some people, no problem.
“People are buying,” said Penny Toepfer, a broker with more than 25 years of experience in luxury real estate. She pointed to the new Armani Residences building that opened on Madison Avenue in the fall of 2024, where apartments range from $8 million to $32 million. “It sold out,” she said.
It’s a very good time to be a broker, she said. “We’re making money. We are making money! I’m talking about big, big money.”
How the city looks, and what you want from the next mayor, depend in part on your place in the food chain, said John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research. Though many parts of the city look fully recovered from the pandemic, the rebound has been uneven.
“One reason it is hard for those of us in upper-middle-class occupations and neighborhoods to understand this is that conditions are objectively much better in our places but that working class and poor neighborhoods are still feeling quite a bit of stress,” Mr. Mollenkopf said.
When New Yorkers emerged from their homes after the worst of Covid, Mr. Mollenkopf said, they saw a city that seemed to have slipped its reins: bicyclists flouting all traffic laws, commuters jumping turnstiles, public drinking and pot smoking, emotionally disturbed people ranting at passers-by. “There was this feeling that the city was out of control,” he said.
Valerie Iovino runs the Facebook group Moms of the Upper East Side, where 35,000 members discuss all aspects of raising children in New York. She grew up in the neighborhood and is now raising her 10-year-old daughter there.
She said she doesn’t consider the city to be in crisis currently. But if you’d asked her a year or two ago, she might have said it was. Restaurants were closing early, everyone was stressed, there were constant protests and, she said, “a very bad rat problem.”
But lately, she has felt a shift, with new businesses opening, a reduction in rats, and restaurant trash in bins, instead of on the street. She was out at 10 p.m. one night and restaurants were packed. “The city, it’s starting to be fun again,” she said. “I mean, it’s not fun like it was in the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s. But it’s fun.”
Still, affordability, especially where families are concerned, is often top of mind for her and her fellow mothers.
“Child care is prohibitively expensive for a lot of families,” Ms. Iovino said. “And that’s why a lot of people move out of the city.”
She also pointed to some basic quality-of-life issues that she described as “lingering”: “The mental health crisis on the street, with the unhoused,” she said. “There have to be services for people who need them.” Meanwhile, her daughter’s chief complaint is “the obstacle course of dog poop.”
A few miles north of Ms. Iovino, in the South Bronx neighborhood where Pablo Muriel works as a high school dean, there are also signs of fresh development, including new high-rises. But they only add to his students’ and their parents’ feeling that they’ve been cheated. “They were promised law and order,” Mr. Muriel said. What they got was families having to double up in public housing, working two or three jobs, and a view of new buildings that are near them but not for them.
“They don’t feel that they count,” Mr. Muriel said. “A lot of them feel that society has given up on them.”
Many students have not caught up developmentally from the Covid lockdown, when schools were closed fully or partially for 18 months, Mr. Muriel said. “I have 14-year-old kids that catch tantrums as an 8-year-old, something that I never experienced before,” he said.
The city’s stresses — economic, emotional, political — come together in the subway, where a fraying infrastructure meets a surging mental health crisis. “You can’t ride the subway without at least one homeless person in your car, acting disturbing,” said Stan Lawson, a train operator for 11 years. In a survey by the Citizens Budget Commission, only 22 percent of New Yorkers said they felt safe on the subway at night.
Lately, Mr. Lawson’s work has been made even more stressful by young people surfing the trains or pulling the emergency brake. “When a conductor goes to investigate, they’ll break into the conductor’s cab and steal the bag, take the keys,” he said.
He is now contemplating the previously unthinkable: moving out of New York. “It feels like staying here is not going to be something I want to do later on,” he said.
Ting Ting, 30, a content creator and native New Yorker who lives in Flushing, Queens, also has a problem with the subway: The 7 train always seems to be under construction, and it’s way too hard to get from Queens to Brooklyn. “It’s like that empty chunk on the subway map that no one cares about,” she said.
But she said that cellphone videos of negative incidents on streets and subway create an exaggerated feeling of chaos, whereas positive aspects of living in the city don’t blow up on social media. “There are more good things in New York than bad things,” she said. And even if the subway doesn’t improve, she’s not leaving. “I have traveled to other places,” she said. “I just don’t think I can live anywhere but New York.”
Gregory Purnell, who cuts hair at the confluence of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and East New York, in Brooklyn, knows where to take the city’s pulse. “Black barber shops are the internet of the ’hood,” he said, shaving a palm leaf into the back of a client’s head. “You go there and find out what’s going on, who’s who, this and that.”
At his shop, an unmarked door beneath two clattering elevated train lines, customers pay what they can — sometimes nothing. Mr. Purnell, 50, gives free haircuts at homeless shelters and said he sees people’s struggles but also a recent movement to create small-scale, affordable outlets — basement house parties, sober bars, vegan kitchens.
“So, little things are popping up around the city where it feels a little more underground or not as promoted,” he said. “It’s becoming more and more D.I.Y.”
Often the city’s vibrancy and its struggles live on the same blocks. Think the downtown arts boom of the ’70s, when artists and galleries reclaimed abandoned buildings of SoHo, or hip-hop, which bloomed in a devastated South Bronx. Fast-forward to South Richmond Hill, Queens, near Kennedy Airport, where Sikh men in colorful turbans stroll through Little Guyana and new arrivals from Trinidad add a calypso beat to Little Punjab.
This churn of immigration and diversity has long been New York’s secret sauce, said Ric Burns, now filming a follow-up to his documentary series “New York.” As these values have come under fire in Washington, Mr. Burns said he sees New Yorkers defending them more ardently, in the same way that many embraced the city during the economic collapse of the ’70s.
“The forces of history are on the side of urban places,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be incredible conflict, and that’s deeply upsetting to consider, and we’re right in the middle of that. But I don’t know historians who see a bleak future for New York, even in the middle of the crises that have been going on.”
Today, entrepreneurs like Alex Kwan and Mahmoud Aldeen embody this overlay of hustle and anxiety. Both 37 and friends from Pennsylvania, they run a pair of halal Asian food trucks in Queens and Manhattan called Terry and Yaki.
“The mood I see is hesitant, shaky,” Mr. Kwan said. Their employees are worried about their immigration status, and customers are sometimes sharing a $12 plate of food. “If I had a family, I would move out,” he said. “But for business, there’s no better place than New York City.”
Yet he lamented a change in the city’s mood, from the community spirit and mutual aid that arose out of Covid to a harder edge today. “It’s a little less caring about your neighbor and a little bit more caring about myself,” he said.
For all the hand-wringing about artists being priced out of New York, applications for the fine arts program at Pratt Institute are up, said Jane South, chairwoman of the department.
She has noticed pop-up art shows in apartments, or students forming collectives after graduation. “They generate opportunities for themselves, for others,” Ms. South said. “There’s a tremendous amount of that going on.”
Which is not to say everything is perfect. There’s the lack of affordable housing and affordable art studio space. “But in times of crisis,” Ms. South said, “art helps us make meaning when meaning feels unstable. We bear witness, we record the moment.”
And, of course, Ms. South has heard “New York is dead” before. “When I came here in 1989, that’s what people were saying: ‘Oh, you should have been here in the ’70s.’”
Ada Calhoun, author of the book “St. Marks Is Dead,” about the often declared demise of her East Village neighborhood, has spent much of her life debunking such reports. St. Marks Place, like the rest of the city, isn’t what it once was, but it never is.
“People in 1811 said the grid ruined the city, and it’s never going to be good again,” she said. “And they’ve always been wrong.”
She’s glad that her son’s East Village is safer than the one she grew up in. The musicians and struggling artists may be gone, priced out to Bushwick or Ridgewood, but there’s a new very indie bookstore and gallery on St. Marks where people hang out until 1 a.m.
“When people are like, ‘New York’s not that good’ — compared to what?” she said. “Oh, other places can be more livable, if you really care about the school district, or you care about comfort. But nothing is the same as New York.”
Bianca Pallaro contributed reporting.
John Leland is a reporter covering life in New York City for The Times.
Dodai Stewart is a Times reporter who writes about living in New York City, with a focus on how, and where, we gather.
Todd Heisler is a Times photographer based in New York. He has been a photojournalist for more than 25 years.
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