Nolte: Riots, Lockdowns Implode Rental Markets in Democrat-Run Cities

Portland Riots
Getty Images/Nathan Howard

“Renters have never had so many options in Manhattan,” reports Bloomberg. “The number of apartment listings in New York’s most expensive borough has tripled from last year, the highest figure for vacancies in recent history. Asking rents in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens have imploded.”

“Yet the renters are staying away,” Bloomberg continues. “Since the beginning of the pandemic, cities on both coasts have seen sharp declines in average rents, even double-digit dips for some.”

I encourage you to read the full story. For those of us who live in the real world, who have not had our perspectives violated and cracked by the national media’s surreal and skewed bubble, none of this is anything other than what intelligent people expected. So while the numbers are not surprising, it is still quite an experience to read them.

Let me summarize the best I can…

In 30 core cities, the average rental price has plummeted by an average of more than five percent, while rents in the suburban areas around those cities are up a half-point. This is not due to some big swing in a riot-prone Chicago, Seattle, or Portland skewing everyone else. In 27 of these 30 cities, “suburban rents are outpacing city rents.”

This collapse is also not due to stagnation. People are not staying put. In fact, Rob Warnock, a research associate at Apartment List, says, “We do see people moving effectively at the rate they would be moving right now if there were no pandemic.”

In Charlotte, rents are down two percent while the suburbs are up five. In Dallas, rents are also down two percent. Seattle crashed seven percent. In Silicon Valley, there’s been an 11 percent drop. Boston is down eight percent, New York down 13 percent, and San Francisco down 18 percent.

Come on, y’all…

It’s not the coronavirus… It’s these stupid and unnecessary lockdowns and restrictions. I’ve lived in a couple big cities. It can be great to live in a city, but not if you’re trapped in a small apartment or home for months and months and months… Especially when you’re locked down by your Democrat leaders for no valid reason other than to hurt Donald Trump’s re-election chances.

Out in the suburbs and rural America, even if your shitty, fascist Democrat governor *cough*RoyCooper*cough* locks you down for no reason, you can at least go outside. You have a porch,  a deck, a yard, a field… And in my case, all four.

I can’t imagine being stuck in a 600 square foot apartment for weeks, much less months, especially with no access to the outdoors other than a window you probably aren’t allowed to open.

Hilariously, what Bloomberg conspicuously omits entirely from this analysis is months and months and months of left-wing rioting in almost all of these Democrat-run cities. And it is not just the rioting itself. It is that if you live in a Democrat-run city, even a nice and quaint place like Kenosha, Wisconsin, you are living under the constant threat of riots.

As we’ve seen, Black Lives Matter and Antifa are looking for any reason to burn your city down.  And Democrat mayors and governors are looking for any reason to allow them to burn your city down because they believe this helps them politically.

As I write this, in one Democrat-run city after another, stores and municipal buildings are being boarded up in anticipation of election night rioting. If Biden wins, there won’t be any rioting. Trump supporters are not barbarians. But if Trump wins, what we’ve witnessed over the past months will be nothing compared to what’s coming. Democrats will be determined to burn it all down, while their elected official and media cheerlead every act of arson, looting, and murder.

This is supposed to be the United States, not Fallujah.

Another major problem is cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles that are so incompetently governed by Democrats, and have been for decades, are literally turning into dystopias with massive wealth gaps that create a small and powerful left-wing elite untouched by their own policies, and everyone else, who are left to simmer and fester in communities teeming with homelessness, crime, bad roads, illegal immigrants, and lousy government services. They’re choking on smoke from forest fires caused by environmental insanity; dealing with over-priced housing and too little housing, caused by that same environmental insanity; their wages and job opportunities undercut by illegal immigrants; their schools failing and over-funded. It’s pure madness.

We’re not supposed to have to live like this, and out here in the hinterlands, we don’t.

But these idiots keep voting for Democrats, and you get what you vote for, and what you get when you vote for Democrats is high taxes, unnecessary lockdowns, and violence.

And if Biden does win the presidential election, the lockdowns are going to get worse. Much worse.

So of course sane people are fleeing this insanity. Let’s just hope they don’t behave like the locusts in infested Red States like Colorado and Virginia and turn them Blue. Then we’ll never be able to escape the feckless, incompetent, and fascist Democrat rule.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.

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