COVID-19 Shuts Down New York

City Journal Audio

Manhattan Institute

Politics, News Commentary, News

4.8 • 615 Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2020

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Seth Barron and Nicole Gelinas discuss the coronavirus outbreak in New York City, the drastic measures being taken to control its spread, and the consequences of an economic slowdown for the city and state budget, the MTA, and New York residents.

New York—particularly New York City—is moving toward a full shutdown. Over the past week, schools have cancelled classes for an extended period and restaurants, bars, and many other businesses have closed. The historic losses in revenue to the city's public-transit system alone will require a multibillion-dollar bailout, Gelinas believes. Read more of City Journal’s COVID-19 coverage on our website.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to 10 blocks, the podcast of City Journal. This is Seth Barron, your host for today. I'm an associate editor at
0:22.4	City Journal. My guest today is Nicole Jelineus, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute,
0:28.6	and a contributing editor to City Journal. Nicole, thanks for joining us today. Good afternoon, Seth.
0:34.8	I hope you're doing well under semi-lockdown.
0:38.6	I'm holding up. I'm holding up as best as I can. Let me just advise our listeners that we are doing this remotely.
0:47.5	Nicole and I are each in separate locations. Yes, so Nicole, here we are in the first week of New York City under some, basically under a kind of
0:57.9	lockdown or quarantine. Bars and restaurants are closed. People are advised to work from home.
1:05.6	Many businesses are closed. What is the impact of all of this, and this is happening nationwide now and globally,
1:13.7	what is going to be the impact of all of this on key New York City institutions and, you know,
1:21.8	fiscally? What are we looking at? Well, I don't mean to sound too negative, but I want people to be aware of the reality, of the magnitude of this, which I'm sure many people are already aware.
1:35.5	But New York City has in Paris, San Francisco, the rest of the world, really, have never really experienced a total shutdown of huge parts of the economy.
1:48.5	I mean, if you think back to 9-11, people wanted to go out to bars and restaurants.
1:53.9	They wanted to see plays.
1:56.0	So nothing except for lower Manhattan, and they expanded the opening zone every week or so.
2:05.6	The city was open and business continued as usual.
2:08.9	Same thing after 2008.
2:10.5	I mean, we actually recovered quite well from 2008 because we had some things in our favor.
2:16.7	We were the center of finance. The financial industry
2:19.3	recovered very quickly because of federal stimulus that was pushed through the financial system.
2:24.9	And in the rest of the country, when a lot of people stopped going to restaurants, stopped,
2:29.1	you know, getting their hair done, and all kinds of service industries suffered a big decline
2:35.2	because people were worried about not being able to pay their mortgage.
	...

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