Block after block of empty buildings. and shuttered storefronts, alongside countless redundant stores.
Most of the property is underwater (in terms of market), the landholders refuse to lower rents, so storefronts are retardedly expensive beyond any justification. A tiny fucking storefront in Manhattan proper can run you as much as renting an entire fucking building in Suffolk. This is despite a record-setting number of people fleeing NYC for the last five years - bad enough that it was quietly admitted by the Cuomo administration that they were fucked if enough businesses fled NY, only for DeBlasio and Cuomo to drive them off anyway via COVID restrictions and then blame everyone but themselves. The city is seeing a massive budget shortfall and won't cut the regulatory groups and failed programs that caused those in the first place. General gist is that they expected daddy Biden to bail their asses out, but any hope of that shit just went down in flames with the 3.5 trillion dollar budget.
With mental health services in the shitter and NYC experimenting with just.... Not prosecuting crimes, a-la California, the crime rate has skyrocketed. The people running it have, for all intents and purposes, dragged Manhattan back to the late 70s/Early 80s.
Now for the good news. NYers are fucking *pissed*. Excessively beneficial gerrymandering for districts and outright cheating has mostly prevented the worst offenders from getting thrown out of office like they should have long ago, but pressure is mounting and the ability of the likes of Kochul and DeBlasio to maintain a hold on shit is failing. Only ten citations, period, have been made since the COVID Mandates went into effect - they're not even bothering to enforce at this point, and that's in a die-hard blue stronghold, so you can fucking imagine how hard they're flailing to make it look like they're actually on top of things. At the local level, shit is starting to take place that indicates that while a long way off - and certainly not guaranteed - there is a building movement with a desire to once more fix NYC's litany of problems. Unfortunately only time will tell and it's a virtual guarantee that things will get far worse before they get better.