America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
THE LOOMING BIDEN DEPRESSION - The coming collapse of commercial real estate
In 2008, with the home real estate collapse, the American economy still had some resilience. This time around, it does not, and the damage done to the financial system, when it starts radiating out to the employment sector, could be devastating. I have no advice whatsoever for how to weather the coming storm. It’s like watching a massive tornado heading your way and knowing that your storm cellar has already flooded. There’s no way out.
I’ve telecommuted for over 30 years, which was a choice I made once home computers and the internet enabled me to establish a virtual law office. However, there’s a huge difference between individuals and small offices making lifestyle and economic choices and the lockdown’s brute force transition from an office-place economy to a telecommuting economy. The former is an organic workplace diversification; the latter is the breakdown of the commercial real estate marketplace with unfathomable consequences for the American economy.
The climate changistas have long dreamed of a virtual business environment, one in which people in white-collar professions work from home. For them, the lockdowns were the perfect catalyst. At the macro level, telecommuting ends traffic jams and stops the need for vast building complexes that despoil possibly more attractive natural environments. It theoretically lowers the cost of doing business because companies no longer need to pay mortgages or rents on office facilities, as well as attendant costs (e.g., insurance, janitorial maintenance, etc.).
For white-collar workers, there are upsides, too. Not having to commute to work can save them hours per day, as well as cutting back on the costs of bus fare, fuel, and car wear and tear. Latchkey kids are no longer an issue because one or both parents are home when the kids come home. You also don’t need to spend money on a work wardrobe or expensive lunches downtown.
There are very real downsides, though. For individuals, there’s the absence of workplace camaraderie and structure. Loneliness is a real risk. The office can also be a dynamic place in which ideas bloom. When you’re sitting before your screen with only the dog or cat for company, it’s hard to focus. Also, as I can attest, while it’s nice to be home for your kids, it can be a nightmare to get any work done when they’re around.
At the larger level, while office-based businesses may save money, turning downtowns into ghost towns can destroy the entire human infrastructure supporting all the offices and their workers. Janitorial services, security guards, lunch venues, office supply stores, dry cleaners, and any other business built around a bustling downtown suddenly find themselves without customers.
When you create a vacuum, what fills it isn’t always good. With workers leaving downtowns, criminals and homeless people are moving in. That creates a vicious cycle because those people still struggling to maintain the downtown environment find that, for their own safety, they cannot share space with muggers and junkies, so they flee too.
The result of all this is that commercial real estate is empty. Small businesses don’t renew their leases, and large businesses simply forfeit them. Building owners are walking away from mortgages, leaving their empty office towers to the banks, which cannot possibly find tenants for them. The result is that we are looking at a coming commercial real estate collapse that could make 2008’s home real estate recession look like a cheery block party:
Commercial real estate has become a debt timebomb, experts have warned, as office towers remain empty in once-bustling cities.
The new era of remote work means ‘zombie’ workspaces remain vacant - while higher interest rates make it more expensive to buy or refinance buildings.
Meanwhile in New York, building owners are being forced to negotiate extensions on millions of dollars of debt after failing to secure financing.
[snip]
According to building security company Kastle Systems, only about half of office workers in the Big Apple are back at their desks.
And a joint study from researchers at New York University and Columbia University found that offices in the city will lose 44 percent of their pre-pandemic value by 2029 because of the impact of remote work.
Across the country, values for offices have decreased by 27 percent since March 2022, according to data analytics company Green Street.
In 2008, with the home real estate collapse, the American economy still had some resilience. This time around, it does not, and the damage done to the financial system, when it starts radiating out to the employment sector, could be devastating. I have no advice whatsoever for how to weather the coming storm. It’s like watching a massive tornado heading your way and knowing that your storm cellar has already flooded. There’s no way out.
Still, there’s always hope, but not under this administration or with business as usual. What’s happening was probably an inevitable marketplace change that would have created a slow bleed that could be addressed in real-time rather than the current hemorrhage. Human ingenuity and grit may save the day, as they so often do, and we’ll all come out ahead. And here’s a really happy thought: With cities becoming less dense, perhaps their grip on Democrat power will be destroyed.
NYC Milestone: Migrants Outnumber New Yorkers in Homeless Shelters
Sam Costanza/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) has brought the city to a new milestone with border crossers and illegal aliens now outnumbering New Yorkers in homeless shelters.
According to NBC New York, the city’s homeless shelters are filled more with newly arrived border crossers and illegal aliens than New Yorkers, the latest figures reveal.
“The tipping point took place Sunday, when 50,000 migrants were in the City’s care, outnumbering the 49,700 local shelter residents,” NBC New York reports:
Among the takeaways: the NYC shelter system has essentially doubled in size, due to the influx, mostly from Latin American countries including Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia. [Emphasis added]
As Breitbart News reported, more than 6-in-10 of border crossers and illegal aliens who have arrived in New York City since the spring of last year are living off local taxpayers in subsidized housing and shelters — including luxury hotels like the Roosevelt Hotel.
The sheer volume of border crossers and illegal aliens staying in shelters has increased the system’s population by more than 110 percent since Adams took office. To afford subsidizing new arrivals, Adams has said New Yorkers will see public services like meals for senior citizens and library hours cut.
In addition to housing border crossers and illegal aliens in hotels across New York City, Adams has announced that he will begin putting new arrivals up in an old college dorm in the swanky Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan.
Illegal immigration is costing New York City taxpayers, already some of the most tax-burdened Americans in the nation, about $5 million every single day. Over the next two years, Adams predicts that illegal immigration will cost New Yorkers more than $4.2 billion.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Nolte: Wall Street Bets Against Democrat-Run Downtowns
Democrat-run New York City is ready to hit residents and visitors alike with a “congestion charge” after federal approval was granted Monday for its first-in-the-nation plan to impose big tolls to drive into the most visited parts of Manhattan.
The program could begin as soon as the spring of 2024, bringing New York City into line with places like London, Singapore, and Stockholm that have implemented similar tax impositions on drivers simply going about their everyday business.
The news was announced within hours of NYC officials ordering pizzerias that use coal or wood-burning ovens to slice their carbon emissions by 75 percent or else face hefty fines, all in the name of protecting the environment.
Up to 100 restaurants could be affected by the new rule, as Breitbart News reported.
AP reports under one of several traffic tolling impositions under consideration, drivers could be hit with as much as $23 a day to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street as part of the plan to get people out of their cars and onto public transport or even just start walking rather than driving.
The exact amount is still to be decided by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is overseeing the long-stalled plan, as Breitbart News reported.
Protesters hold a news conference outside the Lincoln Tunnel urging the immediate implementation of New York’s Central Business District (CBD) Tolling Program, on April 21, 2023 in New York City. The congestion pricing plan, which has been signed into law, will hit travelers a variable fee for driving into Manhattan’s CBD, defined as any area south of 61st Street. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The congestion pricing plan cleared its final federal hurdle after getting approved by the Federal Highway Administration, a spokesperson for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Monday.
“With the green light from the federal government, we look forward to moving ahead with the implementation of this program,” Hochul, a Democrat, said in a statement.
The Biden administration has already publicly backed the plan as CNN reported:
President Joe Biden’s administration is set to allow New York City to move forward with a landmark program that will toll vehicles entering Lower Manhattan, after a public review period ends Monday.
…
In practice it works like any other toll, but because it specifically charges people to drive in the traffic-choked area below 60th street in Manhattan, it would be the first program of its kind in the United States.
…
The plan had been delayed for years, but it cleared a milestone last month when the Federal Highway Administration signed off on the release of an environmental assessment.
The levy has been sharply opposed by officials in New Jersey, where people bound for Manhattan by car could see costs of commuting skyrocket.
Those complaints have been echoed in other cities like Los Angeles where residents simply see a new tax being foisted on drivers.
Taxi and car service drivers who have to access Manhattan as part of their daily work have also objected, saying it would make fares unaffordable.
Some MTA proposals have included caps on tolls for taxis and other for-hire vehicles, although it looks like at this early stage no cap is forthcoming, leaving room to increase the levy in future years.
Mark Levin: The Democrat Party must be 'obliterated'
New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) can save the city if he focuses almost solely on cutting crime, welfare, and homelessness, documentary filmmaker Matthew Taylor, whose film Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York is out now, told Breitbart News on Saturday.
Taylor spoke exclusively with Breitbart News’ Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle on SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Saturday, detailing how Adams can save New York City before the quality of life dips to lows not seen since the 1990s.
In particular, Taylor said it is crime, welfare, and homelessness that Adams ought to be determined to bring down with crime-fighting measures such as cleaning up the subway system and getting New Yorkers off of welfare and into jobs.
“New York City is nowhere near the level of the ’90s but the problem is that we don’t want it to get to the point of the ’90s before people make that decision,” Taylor said, noting that he believes Adams’ election was a rebuke of former Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) who sharply departed from the tough-on-crime policies imposed by former Mayors Rudy Giuliani (R) and Michael Bloomberg (R,I).
Watch “Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York” trailer here:
Adams, a former New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer, campaigned on resurrecting the stop-and-frisk policy to get criminals off the city’s streets before they commit violent crimes.
Most recently, he has defended the policy amid criticism from the federal government and establishment media such as the New York Times.
“I do think that the election of Eric Adams … New Yorkers really were making that decision to unwind what had happened,” Taylor continued. “And, of course, everyone at first thought it was COVID but it’s not just COVID — it’s the bad policies under [Bill] de Blasio for eight years and now bad policies under the city council.”
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NYPD
In addition to crime, Taylor said Adams should take a similar approach to the city’s welfare rolls as well as homelessness — both of which can be crime contributors.
“He is making efforts and crime has gone down slightly across the board, it’s gone down in the subways where he’s had the authority to implement these things but still, they’ve got to focus on the welfare numbers, they’ve got to focus on these housing numbers … and he’s going to have to push back against the city council which has defied the mayor,” Taylor said.
Without a dramatic cut in crime, Adams faces a tough reelection bid, Taylor said.
“Eric Adams is halfway through the term. He’s got to get it together because New Yorkers will throw him out … and again, New York is bad but it’s not the ’90s,” Taylor said. ” They’ve rolled back a number of these policies that helped save the city.”
Taylor said the success story of the Giuliani and Bloomberg years of New York City, where crime, welfare, and homelessness reached all-time lows following decades of dangerous streets as a result of soft-on-crime policies from the likes of former Mayor John Lindsay (R,D) and others, is what drove him to make his film.
“That’s why we made this movie, to say, ‘Hey, it can be done. It was the hardest to do before, we can do it again,'” Taylor said.
RELATED: Migrants REFUSE to Leave NYC Hotel, Demand Taxpayers Give Them “Permanent Homes”:
@datainput via Storyful
“I set out to make a film that commemorated the achievements of the ’90s and find the people that changed New York City — what I think is the greatest American turnaround story,” he continued. “It was the most difficult, destroyed city in America, and turned around to be the best and saved the city.”
Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York follows city life from 1966 to 2013, chronicling how Lindsay’s time as mayor plunged New York City into a freefall of crime, drugs, homelessness, welfare abuse, blight, and overall despair.
“John Lindsay came in during a period when the American economy was raging and roaring, doing great,” Taylor described. “And he had a lot of money. He comes in and he puts it toward massive amounts of social programs, welfare explodes to over a million people. And crime shoots through the roof because he doesn’t want to arrest anybody for crime.”
“When you take these things — welfare and law enforcement — what you got was people leaving the city … there were 600,000 people lost their jobs,” Taylor said. “The crime rate went from 600 to 1,700 murders per year. And this number would not dissipate until literally the ’90s.”
“The city, essentially, was ungovernable after Lindsay. I would say Lindsay is probably one of the worst mayors the city has ever had. A lot of people think it’s [Democrat David] Dinkins but it’s actually Lindsay that sets the table for this entire collapse that people had to live through for almost 30 years.”
It was not until Giuliani became mayor in 1994 that the city began its comeback.
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C-SPAN
“When he came into office, he implemented a lot of things like ‘broken windows’ … he went after welfare numbers, and he added accountability to the system,” Taylor said. “So under Giuliani, welfare numbers went from 1.2 million people down to 425,000 people. Crime dropped by nearly 70 to 80 percent.”
“They just went after little things, you know, no more graffiti, no more using the restroom in the middle of a public park, just little things, cleaning up Times Square,” he continued. “And when you cross that over with the welfare numbers, people going back to work, people had more things to do. Public spaces were returned to the people of New York City.”
Perhaps most consequential was the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton and negotiated by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R). Guliani, Taylor said, championed the crime bill and used it to New York City’s advantage.
“Giuliani actually went on the road to help pass the crime bill which then gave more police to the city, gave them more money, and he judiciously used them to fight crime and bring down welfare numbers,” Taylor said.
As Giuliani did, Taylor said Adams should monitor all aspects of the city the same way crime is monitored, through the highly effective CompStat tracking system used to target and reduce crime on a precinct-by-precinct basis.
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“What Giuliani would do is he would take this Comstat system that he used for police, and he started applying it to everything,” Taylor said. “He applied it to garbage, he applied it to welfare … he started applying analytical thinking to all aspects of the city, and for the most part it was successful.”
In 2022, Adams’ first year as mayor, his record on crime and homelessness has been a bit of a mixed bag. While murders decreased more than 11 percent compared to 2021, overall crime rose more than 22 percent due to a spike in robberies and burglaries.
Likewise, those in shelters across the city went from about 46,500 at the beginning of January 2022 to more than 83,000 by the end of May of this year — an increase of almost 80 percent. A large portion of that increase, though, is spurred by waves of illegal immigration to the city.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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