“It’s all a chicken-and-egg problem. Until the people come back, the streets aren’t safe. If the streets aren’t safe, the people don’t come back,” said Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, which sent the letter. “So somebody’s got to break the egg.”

To some extent, both the mayor and the business leaders are grappling more with perceptions than reality.

The pandemic has killed more than 23,000 people in New York City and clearly presents unique threats to the city’s future. But New York City has rebounded before, notably after the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and the attacks of Sept. 11. And the city has, for the moment, defied predictions and largely contained its outbreak, successfully ramping up testing and contact tracing while maintaining some of the lowest rates of positive test results in the country.

Moreover, the disorder described in the letter is not prevalent on most streets, where New Yorkers dine comfortably outside at night.

Shootings have increased to a worrisome degree in some neighborhoods, but in general, crime is nowhere near as bad as it was in the early 1990s. (Roughly the same number of people have been shot so far this year as at this point in 2010, during the middle of the Bloomberg administration.)

Some business leaders privately expressed concern that the public nature of the letter, and its suggestion of rampant disorder, could be counterproductive because it suggested that conditions were far worse than they actually are.

Source: New York Times

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