We’re in the midst of a vast migration and reshaping of the United States. Young professionals and families are fleeing blue areas’ proliferating crime, mandates & myriad restrictions on personal freedom. Some are finding (temporary?) solace in Governor Ron DeSantis’s Florida.

Andrew Gutmann, is one of them. The New York City his family left for Florida is currently on the line with the 2022 gubernatorial election. Incumbent Governor Kathy Hochul has expressed no remorse for unvaccinated city workers who have lost their jobs. She has also indicated that she will mandate the Covid vaccine for schoolchildren next fall. If this happens, we expect to see a further exodus.

For over a year, Dana, in Erie County, and I, in NYC, have been watching friends and members of our school communities leaving New York for Florida, South Carolina and other “Red” states. While it has been difficult to see them go, we are watching with interest as these new migration patterns continue to reshape our country.

The post below originally appeared last month on Andrew’s Substack here. We found his story especially compelling as we approach the middterm elections on November 8.

If you’ve recently moved from NYC or another urban area or are considering doing so, please share your story by emailing restorechildhood@gmail.com or DM’ing us at @Rstorechildhood.

-Natalya & Dana

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Today, a mostly personal update.

After two years of hemming and hawing, we decided, like many thousands of others, to relocate from the New York City area to what is now formally referred to as the Free State of Florida. I’d like to share with you why.

For nearly 25 years, my wife and I (and our daughter - now 13) lived in Manhattan. Prior to 2020, we never thought we’d leave. Ever. We loved the restaurants. We loved the culture. We loved trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and concerts at the New York Philharmonic. We loved walks in Central Park and explorations of the city’s vibrant and diverse neighborhoods. Perhaps more than anything else, we loved that New York City felt alive, endlessly stimulating, with infinite possibilities for us and for our daughter.

In 25 years, we never felt unsafe. Streets and sidewalks were always full. The homeless were present, but rarely threatening. We were comfortable letting our then-11-year-old daughter take public buses home from school, by herself. We never felt the need to look over our shoulders venturing out at night. We never thought twice about taking the subway in the wee hours of the morning.

And we never felt unwelcome. Sure, New York City leaned decidedly left. But in a city of eight million, all were welcome. Free speech was championed, diverse opinions were valued, and intellectualism was celebrated. We lived in what— we thought— was the greatest city in the world.

Then came 2020. I’d like to say the city changed, which in many ways it did. But I think it is more accurate to say the rot was exposed.

First, came Covid.

By the time Covid hit the area in March (or at least when it was reported to have become prevalent - since it was almost certainly circulating prior to March 2020) we had enough data from Northern Italy to know with what we were dealing. Covid was a nasty and virulent, yes. But it was a virus that almost exclusively impacted the very old and the infirm - not the young and healthy - unlike the Spanish Flu of 1918, with which it was wrongly compared. By then, there were already solid estimates of the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR), being not more than 1 to 2 times as deadly as seasonal flu, not 10 or 100 times as deadly, as the mainstream media was reporting. Moreover, we could infer from death counts (which lag infection by 3-4 weeks) that cases had already peaked by mid-March, BEFORE any restrictions were imposed.

There was absolutely no reason to panic and no reason to shut down our beloved city. But panic and shut down the city we did. We lived through lockdowns, distancing, mask mandates, school closures, none of which had any scientific justification prior to 2020.

It should have been obvious at that time that our government’s response to the virus - and not the virus - was going to do irreparable damage to New York City. School closures would cause enormous learning loss and long-term mental health damage from which kids would never recover. Conditioning humans to see each other as no more than disease carriers would shatter all sense of community and humanity, and decimate a dense, vertical city that depends on elevators and mass transit. Encouraging— even forcing— online shopping and food delivery would destroy countless retail businesses and restaurants, leaving rows of empty storefronts to be used as nothing more than homeless shelters. Conditioning people to work from home would do long-term damage to work ethics and ravage Manhattan’s business districts.

Finally, we were told by our governor that all our sacrifices were justified if they saved only one life. This naïve and childish attitude ignored something worse than the direct collateral damage of those sacrifices. By destroying the very fabric and culture of New York City in a matter of a few short months, we desecrated the life’s work of the many tens of millions of New Yorkers who made the city so special over decades and centuries.

In the early days of the pandemic, these were all points I tried to make in countless online comments to the endless fearmongering articles in the New York Times. Those comments fell on deaf ears.

I finally gave up.

I wondered, where were all the thinking people? Where were all the tough and cynical New Yorkers who were supposed to be better than anyone else in the world at calling bullshit?

As it turns out, a few were reprehensibly silenced, but most were easily duped and brainwashed. The constant panic inducing media onslaught proved too much. As fear overcame them, most New Yorkers gave up their minds and handed over their souls to the likes of Cuomo and Fauci, two of the most narcissistic and power hungry men to ever grace the airwaves of CNN.

We stayed through the riots and curfews of the summer. My wife was even slapped in the head and knocked off her Citi bike while riding in Central Park. Shaken up but not hurt, she was one of many that afternoon. The police said she was welcome to press charges, but also that there was no point in doing so.

We held out hope that New Yorkers would finally come to their senses. But by the fall of 2020, life in the big city was no longer viable for us. We were being harassed and fined ($500 per occurrence!) for our refusal to wear useless cloth masks in the empty lobby of our condominium building. With sadness, we left our apartment of 12 years, the only home our daughter ever knew.

By comparison to New York City, suburban New Jersey felt relatively free. We could leave our home without the Gestapo writing down our names. We could go for walks without being mask-shamed. We even found a handful of restaurants that refused to enforce the absurd charade of the 30 second masked march to your table followed by the two-hour maskless meal. New Jersey was no paradise (duh!) but it was far less stifling than life in New York City. But for us, it was always a temporary stop.

After we left Brearley, we put our daughter in a small private school in New Jersey for the 2021-22 school year. It was the only non-woke secular school we could find in the New York City area. The school, still run by its headstrong founder, valued real education: math and history, literature and Latin. No politics. No ideology. Just a school.

Unfortunately, the school only went through 8th grade (our daughter was in 7th). If we were to stay in the New York City area, we’d have to make a plan for high school. The only viable plan seemed to be the one I fantasized about since my Brearley letter went viral: a brand new school. The highest possible academics and a strong focus on history, civics and the liberal arts. In a nutshell, a classical secular school, a model completely absent from the school landscape of New York City.

I started down that path. I met with school founders from all across the country. I spoke to prospective parents and prospective teachers. I looked at Manhattan real estate. I pitched potential philanthropists. There was enthusiasm from many, even with the $100+ million price tag for a moderately sized K-12 school. I made progress, but I couldn’t fully commit to this project until I fully committed to returning to the city.

For the next year, nearly every night brought the same debate. Do we return to Manhattan or do we pack up and head down to Florida? We yearned for the old, pre-2020 New York. But would that city ever come back? Was New York City savable?

I held out just a bit of hope. Perhaps new mayor, Eric Adams, would prove the white knight the city desperately needed. Almost immediately, that hope vanished. While not the avowed Marxist of his predecessor, Adams quickly showed himself as thin-skinned and vain, surrounding himself with corrupt yes-men. He belittled the pleas of parents to remove senseless and abusive covid measures such as masking toddlers. He displayed little backbone in standing up to teachers unions and equity-obsessed health officials. And while he sometimes said the right things on crime, he proved no match for district attorneys who won’t prosecute and the progressive legislatures that support them.

My final hope was that we could rally enough parents to turn the tide, much as Virginia did in electing Glenn Youngkin governor last November. I joined a number of parent groups fighting both to save education and to restore normalcy for kids. I made many new friends in these groups of courageous and tireless moms and dads. But alas, we just didn’t have anywhere near the numbers necessary. And every week seemed to bring the sad news of another core member fleeing New York for brighter, and saner pastures.

By this past summer, the answer I had been avoiding was unavoidable. New York City is not savable. Not for a generation at least. Possibly not forever.

The city is not yet unlivable like the west coast progressive bastions of San Francisco and Portland, though it is headed that way. Residential neighborhoods are dead after 8pm and on weekends. 24-hour drug stores which now close at 9pm have most of their merchandise under lock and key. The homeless are menacing. Shoplifting is rampant. The cops are nowhere. Pot smoke is everywhere. A sense of lawlessness pervades.

New York is also a place whose political leaders and many of its residents simply cannot or will not move beyond the fear of Covid. This formerly resilient city, once united and resolute in the aftermath of 9/11, has become the city of wallowing and victimhood, of the perpetually scared and lazy, and of the selfish, self-absorbed, and self-diagnosed immunocompromised.

Finally, and worst of all, New York City is hostile to children, and by natural extension, to families. For close to three years now, we have abhorrently treated children as human shields, ignoring common sense, irrefutable data and any semblance of morality. We have closed their schools, canceled their sports, made them eat lunch outside in the cold and rain, masked them for hours on end with no breaks, and forced vaccinations on them that cannot be justified by any reasonable cost benefit analysis. Even today, we exclude many of their parents from school functions and meetings (unvaccinated parents are not allowed in school buildings).

The lifeblood of any vibrant city is not tourists or foodies, commuters or clubbers. The lifeblood of any vibrant city is families. New York City is no longer a place to raise a family.

So now we’re in South Florida. My parents’ generation always said Florida is where you go to die. Perhaps that used to be true. But with New York City dying, it seems fair to say that Florida is now the place you go to live.

If you’re in the neighborhood, reach out.

Andrew Gutmann joined the nationwide movement fighting for classical liberal values and against critical race theory in schools when the letter he wrote to the parents of his daughter’s New York City private school, The Brearley School, went viral. Since then, he has become an activist in this movement, writing about the issue and speaking to parents and parent groups. He also hosts the podcast Take Back Our Schools on the Ricochet Audio Network and his writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, the New York Post and Bari Weiss’s Common Sense. Andrew is also a former investment banker, software engineer, entrepreneur and author of the book, How To Be an Investment Banker. Follow Andrew at @andrewgutmann

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