Dead or Alive. Or both?

NYC has "died" or "fallen" many times.

Jane Jacobs wrote about the "death" of NYC in the 1960s, Annie Hall declared that it was "a dying city" in the 1970s, and Robert Caro blamed NYC master builder/planner Robert Moses as contributing to its "fall" in The Power Broker. NYC keeps dying and falling and then revivifying and getting back up all the time.

Today, it seems to be doing both, depending on who you ask -- or, more importantly, read.

I turned your attention to two MASSIVE articles that examine this "dead or alive" debate. One is called The Death of a Once Great City and the other is New York City is alive and well.

Once interesting is that these two articles agree on a lot about the current malaise that afflicts NYC. Namely, the city is hostage to market forces, jacking up rents and the cost of living, and changing the face and character of the city for the worse i.e. rich and boring as opposed to working class and fun -- and that the state and city government needs to do more to stop this. But the "death" article seems a tad myopic since it seems to confuse Manhattan with NYC while the "alive" article rightly states that most of NYC is NOT Manhattan and is actually thriving. 

While I understand the feelings in the "death" article, I think the "alive" article is more correct: NYC is still a hot bed of excitement but its been moving out of Manhattan for a long, long time. The city has, in fact, been changing forever (another things both articles agree on) so declaring that the city is "dead or alive" is a pointless argument: it's changing, in some ways better, some ways worse, now and forever. And the government can and always should do more to help its citizens.