NYC hasn’t ‘failed’ yet like San Francisco–but it’s at risk

Relax, for now, my fellow New Yorkers: our city won’t turn into what’s left of San Francisco any time soon.

Nor will it likely replicate Chicago’s murder-crazed lawlessness or Los Angeles’ widespread and intractable homeless squalor.

But don’t relax too much – or for too long. Although the Big Apple is in much better shape than those places, this is no time for us to be complacent, not even a bit.

As the Wall Street Journal painfully reported, once-magnificent San Francisco, home of cable cars and digital-world wizardry, is on the ropes from rampant lawlessness, the mass exodus of tech-industry employees, and squalid homeless camps much more numerous and widespread than any here.

A prominent office building there is on sale for one fifth of its 2019 value. 

New York City would seem immune to a San Francisco-scale catastrophe – but only to a degree.

Our industry base is far more diverse with great companies in finance, media, and every creative field.

Our cultural resources remain unparalleled.

The great wave of gentrification and civic improvement under former mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, which lifted neighborhoods from the north Bronx to the Coney Island boardwalk, is in no imminent peril of disappearing.

Work-from-home doesn’t yet condemn our modern office towers to a money-hemorrhaging future that can only be arrested by miraculous mass conversion into “affordable” apartments.

The obsolescence of older, less efficient buildings has some owners in a pickle, but it doesn’t spell the total market collapse for which left-wing, landlord-hating pundits fervently root.

The city has shown stirring resilience since the worst of the pandemic.

New funding for the MTA, announced this week, ended at a stroke three years of dooming and glooming over the supposed inevitability of fewer subway trains and service cuts. (In fact, the MTA just announced increased subway service).

Murders through this year’s first four months totaled 125.

At that pace, 2023 would end with 375 murders, down from 433 in 2022.

Ah, but there were only 318 in 2019!

Yes, but a more telling perspective is that we had 649 homicides in 2001 — the eighth year of Giuliani’s famously tough-on-crime mayoralty.

Phenomena as unrelated as the openings of the American Museum of Natural History’s spectacular Richard Gilder Center, new apartment buildings and a hotel rising along Coney Island’s Surf Avenue, and record-low unemployment in the Bronx testify to the city’s unparalleled capacity to regenerate itself after an unspeakable catastrophe.

Even so, heed “to a degree.”  Whether or not New York can sustain its march back from the brink depends on an enormous “if” — namely, whether our leaders have the courage to tame our ever-increasing sense that our streets and sidewalks are out of control.

“Sense” falls between perception and reality — but closer to reality.

The sense, for instance, that omnipresent “minor” crimes, toxic nuisances, and aggressive intrusion on personal space disrupt our security – and sanity.

This is something new in our urban experience: a critical density of incidents, sights, and smells that may fall short of true danger but are nonetheless alarming.

They make for wine-lubricated, I-can-top-that dinner-party banter  – “the naked guy in my bodega had a machete” —  but they ruin our days, make us fear for our children, and inspire notions of moving to Florida.

Start with our streets. Speeding and drunk motorists, wrong-way cyclists and illegal dirt bikes, and ATVS have free rein to wreak havoc despite repeated “crackdown” claims from City Hall.

The city has the largest police force on earth but you wouldn’t know it when cops decline to get involved.  

Last year’s 255 traffic-related fatalities were terrible enough.

But no data tracks the near-misses that pedestrians experience en masse on a daily basis when cyclists, e-bike-riders, and motorcyclists come within inches of crippling them – and give a reason not to step outside.

Psychotic vagrants scare the daylights out of everyone whether they mean harm or not.

The city’s and state’s vast mental-health facilities and resources aren’t worth a dime without a commitment to take the maniacs off the street and lock them up as humanely as possible.

Unlicensed (i.e., illegal) marijuana merchants make entire blocks reek like the Woodstock Music Festival. 

The mayor and governor say they’re outraged, but also say they’re powerless to shut them down.

Like Johnny Fontaine in “The Godfather,” they throw their hands up in defeat and whine, “What can I do?”

Despite it all, we’ve fortunately suffered no mass exodus of businesses – so far.

Apartments are selling for record prices – so far.

Despite having too many Elmos and fast-food joints, Times Square has not reverted to its scary “bad old days” – so far.

But the breakdown in civic discipline can’t go on forever before it turns to the tipping point of outright anarchy.

Mayor Adams, Governor Hochul, and business-world cheerleaders who say “We’re back!” should pay attention to San Francisco and Chicago – and tremble.    

scuozzo@nypost.com