They also have a clear misunderstanding that the things they take with them are the (jobs, wealth, tax money, etc...) when rich people with businesses in NYC leave NYC
They really don't seem to understand that the thing that makes NYC so rich is a self-feeding cycle of already having the rich people there, so the services for the rich come there, so the rich want to be there because all the things for rich people are there, and they bring whatever made them rich with them, and the cycle just feeds around. Once you make being in NYC suck for the rich, it just takes a few of them moving to make it viable for some of the services for rich people to move with them. Then the other rich people see they can get 'most' of what they got in NYC somewhere else, without dealing with the increasing bullshit of NYC, and fuck off. A similar thing happens for financial services labor, all the finservices people are there, so all the finservice jobs go there, so all the wannabe finservices people go there.
The self feeding cycle very easily flips over into reverse. Your rich friends are all leaving and the services for the rich you use are all relocating too, so you follow them. The brokers and financial institutes begin relocating operations, so the current and potential workers move. Once it starts, its very hard to stop, because you aren't just competing moment to moment, you're competing reputationally. Its not enough to be 1% better than the other guys right now
after making yourself 10% worse previously. You need to convince people that you won't just immediately backtrack again, which is difficult when you've already gone full retard once, and usually involves signing politically painful deals guaranteeing years of favorable treatment, and often requiring them to be renewed in perpetuity - lookit the entertainment industry, who've basically made structural indefinite tax breaks into an art form.
That's the downside of being a services economy rather than a goods economy. Outside of some port operations, there's fuck and all that
needs to be in NYC. Its not like having mining barons or industrial conglomerates who can't just pick up their ops and move them easily. Bankers can make investment plans for anywhere in the world, from anywhere in the world. Traders these days are either executing large, months long plans that don't need millisecond latency to a hub, or pushing out algorithmic bots that live on a server somewhere close to a finance hub, but can be run by anyone anywhere in the world without issue. The slowest service to relocate is luxury housing, shit takes time to build and shit takes decades to 'age out' of the market. But that only buys you time, not permanence.
NYC basically has, or had, a golden goose of inertia. They're so fixated on what they think they can squeeze from this stone that they don't seem to recognize that they can genuinely kill it.
