What happens to New York when a huge chunk of the global economy is under quarantine? For all the hullabaloo over Team Trump’s travel restrictions on some majority-Muslim countries, the biggest experiment in closing the border is right now, over a public-health scare. Because of coronavirus, America is effectively off limits to Chinese people. The coronavirus thus imperils one of Gotham’s biggest industries: tourism.
Coronavirus emerged from Wuhan province less than two months ago and has since killed 1,400 people. It’s also upended world trade.
With much of the Chinese manufacturing workforce sidelined, the US auto industry can’t get the imported parts it needs to make its cars here; Chinese factories that make iPhones have been mostly shuttered for weeks.
New York doesn’t make cars, and we already have enough phones, but our biggest “trade” is in people. New York is now cut off from one of its most lucrative sources of outside revenue to the local economy: big-spending Chinese tourists.
“Cut off” isn’t an exaggeration. “Foreign nationals who have visited China in the past 14 days may not enter the United States,” the White House has said, which means nearly all Chinese people. Airlines have canceled nearly all their flights, indefinitely. (This isn’t President Trump being Trump; other countries have laid down similar restrictions.)
New York likes to make fun of its tourists — and Chinese visitors, because of their sheer numbers, tendency to travel in groups and spending power, have become the new version of the “ugly Americans” who started tramping all over Europe after World War II.
But tourism is important. Last year, New York welcomed close to 67 million travelers, nearly 14 million of them from abroad.
Tourism supports close to 400,000 Gotham jobs. For comparison, the financial industry, New York’s traditional base, supports 500,000. Tourism also pours $5 billion a year into the city’s annual coffers.
Even though global tourists account for only 21 percent of tourists, they account for nearly half of the nearly $50 billion tourists spend in the Big Apple every year. Next to Britain, China sends us the most visitors.
“Chinese remain the top spenders on a per-person, per-trip basis,” NYC & Co., the city’s tourism arm, reported last year. Chinese people spend $6,500 per person on US visits, says research firm Tourism Economics.
For now, New York as a whole isn’t seeing a major impact, because January and February are the worst months for tourism, anyway; hotel occupancy and room rates are roughly flat from last year, according to hotel-data firm STR.
But if the virus continues to spread, New York will feel it.
If coronavirus impacts travel the way the SARS virus did 17 years ago, the United States could see a nearly 30 percent drop in visits from the country, according to Tourism Economics, with LA and New York most impacted.
Already, Broadway may be feeling the pain. For the first week in February, 239,713 people attended a show, compared to 249,720 the previous year. Nearly 20 percent of Broadway visitors came from abroad last year, the “highest number of attendances by tourists from outside the US in history,” the Broadway League notes. MoMA, the Met, Hudson Yards’ luxury stores — all rely on Chinese tourism dollars.
And the city’s Chinese-American communities are suffering, too, with business off as much as 40 percent in Flushing. “Chinese visitors like to buy stuff,” says local Councilman Peter Koo. “Besides, the tourists, all the students cannot come … They come here to eat, to congregate, to go to karaoke.”
It isn’t only Chinese visitors staying away; New Yorkers, too, may be fearful, and irrationally so, as New York has no reported coronavirus cases. Koo heartily invites New Yorkers to come to Flushing and take advantage of the smaller crowds. “Buy stuff, eat out,” he counsels.
This piece originally appeaerd at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post